ICH Update for September 2009

In this month's edition of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Update, we focus on an oral history project in Ferryland, Newfoundland, look at mummering folklife festival planned for December 2009, learn how 16 hours of audio material from Fogo Island have been archived online, introduce you to one of our folklore interns, Jedediah Baker, and discover what is meant by the word "friar" in a geographic context. Plus, Clary Croft, folklore researcher, is set to visit Newfoundland.

Download the pdf here:
http://www.archive.org/download/IntangibleCulturalHeritageUpdateSeptember2009/ichupdate009small.pdf

Job Posting - Events Coordinator

The Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives (ANLA) is seeking to hire a co-coordinator for a series of public awareness events celebrating the 25th anniversary of ANLA. The co-coordinator position will include the following duties/responsibilities:

. Create exhibit templates, brochures and posters
. Coordinate province-wide archival events
. Compile a special edition of the ANLA Bulletin and relevant articles
. Organize a workshop about photograph interpretation
. Organize a symposium and archives fair
. Creation of material for the web as required
. Liaise with member institutions
. Other duties as required

All aspects of the project are to be completed by March 31, 2010.

Qualifications: The successful candidate will have an undergraduate degree with an interest in heritage, strong writing skills, public relations abilities, experience in event co-ordination, graphic design and website maintenance, and a knowledge of the provincial archival community.

Salary: To be discussed.

Closing date for this competition: September 15, 2009
Interested applicants should forward a resume and letter of interest to:

President
Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives
P.O. Box 23155
St. John's, NL A1b 4J9

Origin of strange cautionary tale?

I'm hoping some of you might have heard something similar to this story before.

I was speaking with a woman whose grandmother had told her a cautionary tale as a child, to keep her from slipping out of her sheets in the bed at night. The grandmother told her a story about how every night at midnight, there was an old man and an old woman who would visit the room. The woman would carry a bucket and the man would carry an axe. If they found a child whose feet poked out of the bottom of the bed, the old man would cut off the feet, and then would use the feet to make shoes for poor children.

The woman who told me the story said that her grandmother was from Louisiana originally, and had later lived in Oklahoma, and thought she was of mixed Scottish and Dutch extraction.

I'm curious if anyone recognizes any motifs in this, or has heard a version of this story. It reminds me a little of some of the Der Struwwelpeter stories by Heinrich Hoffmann (1845), and the feet getting cut off sounds a little like H.C. Andersen's Red Shoes (also 1845), but again, isn't a perfect match.

If you have any thoughts, let me know! Is this a folk belief, a literary tale, or a grandmother with a wicked sense of humour?

Email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca

Billy Crane Moves Away - NFB film from 1967 now online

by Colin Low, 1967, 17 min 48 s

This short documentary features Newfoundland fisherman Billy Crane, who speaks frankly on the state of the inshore fishery and how the lack of government support has contributed to the industry’s downfall. He is being forced to leave home to seek employment in Toronto.

Billy Crane Moves Away is one of 27 films made during the legendary Fogo Island Experiment of the Challenge for Change project in the late ’60s. Fogo is heralded as one of the program’s great successes. In the late ’60’s, the government of Newfoundland had unilaterally decided that the small villagers of remote Fogo should leave the island, but the people didn’t want to go. Talks had broken down, and an NFB Challenge for Change filmmaker, Colin Low, along with an academic from Memorial University, came to the island to use film as an experiment. They would film life on the island, show the footage back to the villagers and then to the government. They also filmed the bureaucrats watching and responding to the films, and then showed that back to the community.

By using film as a way to participate in mediation and dialogue between two groups who were no longer talking face-to-face, the Challenge for Change process was credited with helping all sides come up with a viable solution: the creation of a co-op fishing cannery.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/billy_crane_moves_away/

Snubbies and Salting Fish: Conversations from Fogo Island

Over 16 hours of audio interviews with residents of Fogo Island, collected over the past thirty years, is now available on-line through the Intangible Cultural Heritage Collection on Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative.

The Province’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer, Dale Jarvis says “In the 1980s and 90s, Dr. Gerald Pocius and Mark Ferguson visited different communities in Fogo Island and recorded their conversations with residents of Tilting, Joe Batt's Arm, Little Fogo Island, Barr'd Island, Shoal Bay, Seldom-Come-By, Deep Bay, Island Harbour and the Town of Fogo. They feature topics like the placement of stages, the methods for catching and cleaning fish, the community aspects of fishing, and personal anecdotes.”

“Even by the 1990s, no one had started to document the Newfoundland fish stage--the most important architectural form of our culture. I knew Fogo Island had the largest number of surviving examples, and was the logical choice to begin such a study.” says Dr. Gerald Pocius, University Research Professor, Department of Folklore

These audio interviews are available in full on the Digital Archives Initiative and provide a clear picture of the old and current ways of fisherman on Fogo Island. The materials collected vary across the wide spectrum of intangible cultural heritage. Included in the inventory is fishing premises and practices, berry picking, wedding customs, fiddling, vernacular architecture, cultural landscapes, food preparation, textile traditions, and furniture.

Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative can be found at
http://collections.mun.ca/

Interview with Bill Godwin, Barr'd Island - Part 1
http://tinyurl.com/BillGodwin

Bill Godwin describes a "choice fish"
http://tinyurl.com/choicefish

Top 6 Sites With Sample Oral History Interview Questions

A little while ago, I posted my Top 6 Online Guides for Folklife and Oral History Documentation. In preparing for a couple interviews I'm going to be doing, I was looking up some sample questions for basic oral history and folklore interviews, and so I thought I would post my top picks here for people who were looking for similar resources.

1. The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide
http://www.folklife.si.edu/education_exhibits/resources/guide/introduction.aspx
This is sort of cheating, because I included it in my earlier post, but it still remains an excellent resource, complete with sample questions.

2. Fifty Questions for Family History Interviews
http://genealogy.about.com/cs/oralhistory/a/interview.htm
Subtitled "What to Ask the Relative" this is a good starting list for anyone doing research on family stories, genealogy, or family traditions.

3. Oral History Questions
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson805/questions.pdf
Also a good list for people doing family oral histories, this collection of questions was compiled specifically for youth researchers.

4. Sample Interview Questions For Veterans
http://www.loc.gov/vets/questions.html
Prepared by the Library of Congress for its Veterans History Project, this is a good list of questions for people doing interviews with members and former members of the armed forces during World War I, World War II, and the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars.

5. Family History Sample Outline and Questions
http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/familyHistory.html
This outline can be used to structure a family oral history interview and contains examples of specific questions.

6. Oral History Interview, Questions and Topics
http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/Quest.html
A list of questions that may be used when interviewing an older member of the family, prepared by the Museum of Jewish Heritage


UPDATE 19 Oct 2016 - I've added a new #6, as the Draft Oral History Interview Questions for the Fairfax County Asian American Historical Project seem to have vanished. But you can still check out their project here.

Oral History Association Launches Online Resource on Digital Technologies

The Oral History Association's website is hosting a new resource, "Oral History and Digital Technologies," http://www.oralhistory.org/technology, which provides useful information on technologies associated with the practice and preservation of oral history interviews. The resource includes detailed information and user friendly tutorials on rapidly changing technologies. Over the next few months it will grow to include information on preservation and video-recording, in addition to the digital audio information currently online.

Suggestions for specific topics and resources should be sent to Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries: doug.boyd@uky.edu.

Dale Jarvis on the Voices of the Past Podcast

According to its website, "The purpose of the Voices of the Past netcast, podcast and accompanying website is to help inspire the advancement of heritage values in our society using the new form of communication called social media."

Director Jeff Guin writes: "With Voices of the Past, you will find a new type of journalism using the heritage preservation community as its focus. It retains the news gathering techniques and production values of traditional media as familiarized by six o’clock television news programs across the country. But it also integrates social media tools to help viewers understand how to communicate heritage values in the new Web 2.0 world."

This week, your friendly neighbourhood folklorist, Dale Jarvis, is the featured guest on the podcast, talking about how he uses social media for intangible culture heritage work and for storytelling.

Read the transcript at:
http://www.preservationtoday.com/2009/08/10/podcast-dale-jarvis-on-the-art-of-storytelling-on-the-world-wide-web/

or go directly to the MP3 at:
http://tinyurl.com/DaleJarvisVOP

Short Summer ICH Update!

The Summer 2009 edition of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Update is now out. It is a short one, and we'll be back in September with a longer edition. In this edition:

HFNL undertakes an survey of folklore and oral history recordings in the province

SmartLabrador continues its oral history research on the Labrador Straits

Remembering Violetta Halpert

Download the pdf version of the newsletter at:
http://www.archive.org/download/IchUpdateSummer2009/ichupdate008small.pdf