![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lupin5thvia https://ift.tt/2sB7KAU
findingfeather:
Only a mass profusion of histories that express approximately the same thing can be said to be strong evidence.
This this this this this this THIS.
All forms of information/knowledge preservation and transmission are fundamentally and potentially equal: what actually makes them more or less valuable, more or less reliable, more or less important is context and THE MORE YOU HAVE the more you can tentatively decide you knew what happened.
Some sources of oral history are as reliable as having been there yourself; some shouldn’t be trusted to tell you the colour of the sky. Same with written sources. Both work best when compared to artifacts and other data (like archaeological finds and even chemical testing of the insides of pots or DNA). All of them require interpretation. And sometimes EVEN BEING THERE YOURSELF doesn’t mean you knew all of what was going on.
You bring all your knowledge sources together and the more you have the better it is. And tbh any half decent historian knows that.
intersex-ionality:
The assumption that writers always write down the exact facts of what happened, right after it happened, but oral traditions make no effort to preseve facts when re-told, suggests a lack of familiarity with the necessarily untrustworthy nature of histories.
No history–oral or written–is confirmation of facts on its own. Only a mass profusion of histories that express approximately the same thing can be said to be strong evidence. The conclusion you’ve drawn, that oral histories are necessarily weaker than written ones, is not well evidenced by the actual fields of study into history and verification.
An oral history (as in, a singular one) is just as factually validating a source as a written history (also singular): not especially so. A single history may be the best record we have of something, but no single history, regardless of its medium, is actually very strong evidence of anything other than, “the person or people who created this account wanted their audience to think of it in this way at the time of its creation, regardless of factuality.”
Like most other attempts before it, this attempt at presenting oral histories as weaker than written histories, really ignores the constraints of the study. Which is that all individual histories are quite weak. Trying to present one or another medium as universally or even generally stronger is almost always rooted in cultural biases of the researcher, which happen to favour the medium presented as stronger. In this case, writing.
transgenderer:
People on here like to sing the praises of oral history but like…the only times that we learned oral history was right are because we figured it out with *actually useful* methods, because there’s no good way to distinguish accurate and inaccurate oral history, so it contains zero information, but because we can compare a bunch of different written sources, that didn’t cross pollute (because they were left alone after creation) we can use that to acquire real information, or at least high-probability inferences. Writing good
findingfeather:
Only a mass profusion of histories that express approximately the same thing can be said to be strong evidence.
This this this this this this THIS.
All forms of information/knowledge preservation and transmission are fundamentally and potentially equal: what actually makes them more or less valuable, more or less reliable, more or less important is context and THE MORE YOU HAVE the more you can tentatively decide you knew what happened.
Some sources of oral history are as reliable as having been there yourself; some shouldn’t be trusted to tell you the colour of the sky. Same with written sources. Both work best when compared to artifacts and other data (like archaeological finds and even chemical testing of the insides of pots or DNA). All of them require interpretation. And sometimes EVEN BEING THERE YOURSELF doesn’t mean you knew all of what was going on.
You bring all your knowledge sources together and the more you have the better it is. And tbh any half decent historian knows that.
intersex-ionality:
The assumption that writers always write down the exact facts of what happened, right after it happened, but oral traditions make no effort to preseve facts when re-told, suggests a lack of familiarity with the necessarily untrustworthy nature of histories.
No history–oral or written–is confirmation of facts on its own. Only a mass profusion of histories that express approximately the same thing can be said to be strong evidence. The conclusion you’ve drawn, that oral histories are necessarily weaker than written ones, is not well evidenced by the actual fields of study into history and verification.
An oral history (as in, a singular one) is just as factually validating a source as a written history (also singular): not especially so. A single history may be the best record we have of something, but no single history, regardless of its medium, is actually very strong evidence of anything other than, “the person or people who created this account wanted their audience to think of it in this way at the time of its creation, regardless of factuality.”
Like most other attempts before it, this attempt at presenting oral histories as weaker than written histories, really ignores the constraints of the study. Which is that all individual histories are quite weak. Trying to present one or another medium as universally or even generally stronger is almost always rooted in cultural biases of the researcher, which happen to favour the medium presented as stronger. In this case, writing.
transgenderer:
People on here like to sing the praises of oral history but like…the only times that we learned oral history was right are because we figured it out with *actually useful* methods, because there’s no good way to distinguish accurate and inaccurate oral history, so it contains zero information, but because we can compare a bunch of different written sources, that didn’t cross pollute (because they were left alone after creation) we can use that to acquire real information, or at least high-probability inferences. Writing good
