I began working with the Pontiac Oral History Collection during my Podcasting course. In collaboration with four other students, I created a 3-episode podcast series, called Evolve: Pontiac, which featured the archival material contextualized by contemporary interviews.

Preserving and sharing these oral history archives with the community is part of an ongoing project directed, in part, by Oakland University’s Center for Public Humanities. For my Capstone experience, I worked as a research assistant on the project.

The majority of the work that I did during this stage of the project was foundational in nature. We had the challenge of determining how to gain posthumous permissions of the original interviewees, and I created a researched report exploring best practices and outlining an implementation strategy.

One we determined our approach as a team, I worked to locate several of the living relatives of the interviewees, who we have contacted to discuss their preferences regarding sharing and using the archived material.

Only a portion of the original interviews have been digitized, and of those, only six had been transcribed. To aid in our goal of sharing these oral histories with the community, the team listened to all of the digitized interviews and created topical catalogs. These catalogs will be hosted on an archival website which will also include links to the recordings and any related artifacts.

My work on the Pontiac Oral History Collection continues as a volunteer with the Center for Public Humanities.