Aotearoa New Zealand experienced several nationwide lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, Manatū Taonga worked with community oral historians online to encourage oral history recording using the equipment they had to hand, so they could record ‘inside the bubble’. The resulting full oral history interviews are held at Auckland Libraries.
Kei Roto I Te Miru - Inside the Bubble Collection, 2020 (Auckland City Libraries)
These interviews were then used to create the podcast Kei Roto I Te Miru: Inside the Bubble, which aired on RNZ a year after the first lockdown.
Inside the bubble (Radio New Zealand)
The te reo Māori name came from a shorthand used at the time by our audio engineer, Anaru Dalziel, to refer to the project. Strictly speaking, ‘Inside the bubble’ would be ‘Kei Roto I Te Mirumiru’. ‘Mirumiru’ means bubble, and ‘miru’, according to Te Aka Dictionary, is a noun meaning ‘alveolus’, a tiny sac at the end of a bronchiole inside the lungs. We decided to stick with ‘miru’ because it was both a play on the word for bubble and a reference to the lungs, which were affected by COVID-19.
We worked on this project with a very experienced oral historian, archivist and curator Sue Berman, Curator: Oral History and Sound, Auckland Council Libraries | Ngā Pātaka Kōrero o Tāmaki Makaurau. Sue guided us to ensure we were following the best practice possible for online recording. Two years later, we went back and asked some of the oral historians to do a second round of interviews with the same people. These recordings are also held by Auckland Council Libraries.
Although a lot has changed since 2020, the recommendations we made then are still useful for those experimenting with online oral history options. Jacqui Keelan, a Ngāti Porou community historian, weaver and scholar based in Waikato, helped Emma-Jean Kelly experiment with recording together online, and allowed us to share the results:
The UK Oral History Society has now developed full guidelines for online interviews which may be useful.
Interviewiing at a distance (Oral History Society)
General tips for online recordings via video/phone
- Do a pre-interview test with your interviewee. Test the equipment, make sure they’re comfortable using it, listen to the environment they’re in, and help them with suggestions about making it less echoey, etc.
- Try to reduce echo from hard surfaces by covering them with blankets, towels or sheets and closing curtains
- If you and the narrator/interviewee have headsets with microphones, use them to reduce echo.
- Ask the people in each household (yours and theirs, if separate) to stop using the internet during the recording, to ensure sufficient bandwidth.
- At the beginning of the interview, ask the interviewee to state their full name, and their birth date if they wish. The interviewer should say their name, the date, and what recording system they’re using (Zoom, cellphone, etc.).
- If you are recording on a cellphone, set it to airplane mode to stop interference.
- Ask open questions: ‘How do you feel?’, rather than, ‘Do you feel sad?’
- Really listen – ask follow-up questions if you don’t understand, or think there is more to explore.
- Let people know they can refuse to answer a question.
Once you’ve completed your recording, the same rules apply as for face-to-face oral history interviews. You’ll need to complete a recording agreement with your interviewee and an abstract will need to be created as a finding aid:.
NOHANZ recording agreement (55 KB, PDF)
Abstracting guidelines (405 KB, PDF)
Here's our original news release about recording online posted on 5 May 2020:
In the Bubble: Covid-19 Pandemic Oral History – communities sharing stories (Internet Archive)