SS65 - Community-Based Research in The Voices of Highland Oral History Archive
SCURS Disciplines
English
Document Type
General Poster
Invited Presentation Choice
Not Applicable
Abstract
The Voices of Highland project is a community based oral history archive that has grown out of the art project Seeing Spartanburg in a New Light. The aim of The Voices of Highland project is to preserve the history of Spartanburg’s Highland neighborhood while documenting its future in collaboration with the community. We wanted to discover how to apply the techniques of oral history to document a community and create a respectful and genuine living resource that authentically and accurately reflects the voices of the community. Project methods have included applying community-based research principles which focus on academic researchers working in partnership with a community to do research in order to ensure that a community has the ability to define the narrative of their experience. In practice, we have followed this framework by carefully captioning video interviews of community partners, reorganizing website design, expanding local history research, and meeting with community leaders and members. The earlier art project only used clips from the interviews, editing the stories to support the artistic message of the project. This project’s goal is to make a more comprehensive archive due to the importance of community members voices and stories in the history of the neighborhood. By making the interviews accessible we are able to more accurately represent the community. Through meetings with community partners, we have been able to apply feedback from the community to how we have structured The Voices of Highland archive. This has helped the archive to be an authentic representation of the neighborhood and its community. The findings of this project have been focused on contextualizing what community members said in their interviews, at the moment in time they said it. We also have a focus on adding interviews to the archive to expand on the oral history of Highland with new voices of the community so that it can be the living archive that the community needs and wants it to be.
Keywords
Oral History, Local History, Community-Based Research
Start Date
10-4-2026 9:30 AM
Location
University Readiness Center Greatroom
End Date
10-4-2026 11:30 AM
SS65 - Community-Based Research in The Voices of Highland Oral History Archive
University Readiness Center Greatroom
The Voices of Highland project is a community based oral history archive that has grown out of the art project Seeing Spartanburg in a New Light. The aim of The Voices of Highland project is to preserve the history of Spartanburg’s Highland neighborhood while documenting its future in collaboration with the community. We wanted to discover how to apply the techniques of oral history to document a community and create a respectful and genuine living resource that authentically and accurately reflects the voices of the community. Project methods have included applying community-based research principles which focus on academic researchers working in partnership with a community to do research in order to ensure that a community has the ability to define the narrative of their experience. In practice, we have followed this framework by carefully captioning video interviews of community partners, reorganizing website design, expanding local history research, and meeting with community leaders and members. The earlier art project only used clips from the interviews, editing the stories to support the artistic message of the project. This project’s goal is to make a more comprehensive archive due to the importance of community members voices and stories in the history of the neighborhood. By making the interviews accessible we are able to more accurately represent the community. Through meetings with community partners, we have been able to apply feedback from the community to how we have structured The Voices of Highland archive. This has helped the archive to be an authentic representation of the neighborhood and its community. The findings of this project have been focused on contextualizing what community members said in their interviews, at the moment in time they said it. We also have a focus on adding interviews to the archive to expand on the oral history of Highland with new voices of the community so that it can be the living archive that the community needs and wants it to be.