Oral History

“Oral history” is now experiencing seventh decade of its life. Every year, tens of conferences and training workshops are held and hundreds of articles are written for this modern form of historiography. Many universities and research centers are allocating a significant part of their research projects into topics of oral history. Tending towards this interdisciplinary topic is increasing in humanities research. Digital archives of oral history have the highest records of visits in cyberspace. Many books, memoirs, histories, monuments and biographies are prepared using oral history method. In a number of valid universities, the course of oral history is established in M.A. level or a number of training units have been allocated to it. Today, some blind nodes documentary and historical studies, anthropology, psychology and oral history are opened by oral history. its purpose is finding meaning and extraction and not giving meaning and forging. It is desirable that the findings and collected data, that mean questions and answers posed by historian/ interviewer and source of narrative/ interviewee with or without attachment of evidences, documents and records, be put and narrated in a suitable format. Thinking about the meaning of development and the engineering role of the developer will raise more serious questions in oral history including why it is not possible to call any dialogue as interviews in oral history? Why it is not possible to consider any writing as a developed and compiled text? How is it possible to find moderation and balance in the middle of reason and emotion, and the necessity of following and free thinking? Considering these points and attitudes is revealing three issues: first, necessity of going a way which is not smooth and not too short in oral history from the perspective of theory to practice; second, importance and necessity of the nature of oral history and historiology; and third, continuous study and training and preparing educational texts, textbooks and manuals.