StoryCorps Approach Is Called ‘Arbitrary’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The director of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office, Mary Marshall Clark, told The New York Sun that StoryCorps’ approach to oral history differs from standard practices of the academic discipline.
Ms. Clark’s office has initiated several oral-history endeavors about September 11, including projects focused on the experiences of public-health officials and emergency responders. She said her interviewers are highly trained, specialized professionals who maintain long-term relationships with their “narrators.”
“We’re very interested in the long story,” she said. “We would never limit an account of catastrophe to 40 minutes. We would never have an arbitrary moment when the interview would end.”
Columbia’s interviewers spend up to two hours with narrators and often meet with them weekly over the course of several years at their homes, Ms. Clark said, as opposed to a place “where their loved ones have been killed.”
“It’s about the meaning of the time, about change over time, about what it was like to live through September 11 that day, the 12th, the 13th, and four years later,” Ms. Clark said. “Telling is therapeutic for people if they are not cut off, if it’s not a one-shot kind of deal.”
Ms. Clark said StoryCorps’ founder, David Isay, is “a brilliant radio producer, but he thinks about oral history through the lens of radio, and oral history is just a much bigger field than that.” But she said: “It’s important to recognize that there are limits to oral history being done this way.”
A spokeswoman for StoryCorps, Johanna Flattery, said the organization has seen many “repeat customers” and it is possible to reserve two interview slots in a row. In response to Ms. Clark’s worries about the mental health of StoryCorps participants, Ms. Flattery, who works for Dan Klores Communications, said facilitators plan to direct participants in need of grief counseling to the World Trade Center Healing Center at St. Vincent’s Medical Center.
A history professor at Columbia and the editor in chief of “The Encyclopedia of New York City,” Kenneth Jackson, said StoryCorps nevertheless serves an important function for the city.
“It’s still going to capture a lot of memories that are nowhere else to be had,” he said. “A full interpretive account of 9/11 is going to be difficult. It’s better to have more accounts than too few.”
