ABSTRACT

Conducting oral history interviews or using them as research and educational resources requires the (mostly tacit) background knowledge necessary for understanding an interview or its excerpts. Taking the topic of commemoration and remembrance as a case in point, and analyzing fifteen interviews in the Czech and Slovak languages from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, this article aims to consider the oral history interview as an interactional accomplishment. I argue that in producing oral histories, the interviewer and the interviewee draw on linguistically universal and topically specific knowledge, which are also the resources audiences use to grasp what the interview addresses. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationships between these notions and their connection to different temporalities of oral history interviews and levels of understanding. Finally, I outline future research directions and questions inspired by this framework. By studying the linguistic and interactional constitution of oral history interviews, we can arrive at a better understanding of the very nature of oral history that can inform the use of archived interviews in research and education.

摘要

进行口述历史访谈或将其用作研究和教育资源需要理解访谈或其摘录所必需的（大部分是默认的）背景知识。本文以纪念与追忆为主题，分析了南加州大学浩劫基金会视觉历史档案馆中的十五篇捷克语和斯洛伐克语访谈，旨在将口述历史访谈视为一种互动的成就。我认为，在制作口述历史时，采访者和被采访者利用语言普遍性和主题特定性知识，这也是受众用来掌握采访内容的资源。文章最后讨论了这些概念之间的关系以及它们与口述历史访谈的不同时间和理解水平之间的联系。最后，我概述了受该框架启发的未来研究方向和问题。通过研究口述历史访谈的语言和互动构成，我们可以更好地理解口述历史的本质，这可以为在研究和教育中使用存档访谈提供信息。