FAVz019 Oral History - The Practice of Analysis and Interpretation

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2009
Extent and Intensity
0/0/0. 5 credit(s). Recommended Type of Completion: k (colloquium). Other types of completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Professor Daniël Biltereyst (seminar tutor)
Professor Philippe Meers (seminar tutor)
Guaranteed by
doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 25 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/25, only registered: 0/25, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/25
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
At the end of the course students should be able to: understand and explain the methodology of oral history; prepare a structure of a methodologically correct interview; interpret and analyse interviews with narrators.
Syllabus
  • Over the last few years, oral history projects on cinema-going have developed into a vibrant new strand of research within film studies (e.g. the work of Annette Kuhn, Mark Jancovich, etc). In this series of lectures and seminars, we will go into the theoretical framework of oral history, but more importantly we will demonstrate how oral history is done in practice. Drawing from our experiences from ‘The Enlightened City’ project, a 4 year large-scale diachronical analysis of cinema-going in Flanders-Belgium (1920s-1970s), we discuss the merits of using qualitative data analysis software. The use of qualitative data analysis software for this kind of large scale oral history projects can result extremely helpful. It allows for systematic, large-scale analyses, grouping large amounts of qualitative data. At the same time, it cannot replace the interpretative and analytic labour of the researcher, once the qualitative data have been coded and structured. We will report from a database of 155 extended interviews on cinema-going in Antwerp. Structured around a selection of key-themes related to the social experience of cinema-going, we sketch the different meanings and interpretations of cinema within people’s lives and the conditions that structured their movie-going experiences apart from the specific film(s) they were watching. We also pay attention to the changes throughout the period under investigation. In brief, the series combines theoretical and methodological lectures with extended hands on sessions to experience oral history research in practice.
Teaching methods
Group project and class discussion.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
Information on completion of the course: Full time students: 100% presence at the lectures is required. Distance students: two absences are tolerated.
The course is taught only once.
The course is taught: in blocks.
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