Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. – Thomas Gray[1], Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The AMS 2025 New Orleans Annual Meeting – long awaited, and then enjoyed – is now in our rearview mirror.
Like its predecessors, AMS 2025 was a cluster of specialized conferences and symposia. And actually, “Annual Meeting” is a rather tame word when used to describe what’s more like an Annual Celebration of the rapid expansion and progress – and growing utility – of our field. So much is happening! You had to look hard across the acres of the Convention Center, the thousands of participants, the splashy Presidential sessions, the AI-buzz, the review of 2024 weather impacts (there were plenty) and more to uncover this gem: a Monday, January 13th joint session[2] entitled Oral History in the Geosciences: Why it Matters, How It is Done, and What We Can Learn.
“Gem” indeed.
The program was assembled and structured by Patricia Pinto da Silva, the Project Lead for NOAA Fisheries’ VOICES Oral History Archives; Molly Graham, the Project Manager and Oral Historian; and Mona Behl, associate director of NOAA’s Sea Grant Program at the University of Georgia (and also future chair of the AMS Culture and Inclusion Cabinet). Terrence Nathan from UC Davis, and Chair of the AMS History Committee, chaired the session. The focus reflected that of NOAA VOICES itself: firsthand accounts related to the changing environment, climate, oceans, and coasts from around the US and its territories. In addition to a panel discussion, the session provided presentations from across the world (on the Ocean Decade) and on topics ranging from the BP oil spill and its impacts on Gulf communities, to engaging community in climate adaptation efforts, to a look at marine-harvester responses to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, to the Navajo elder experience of culture, environmental, and landscape change, to Gullah Geechee local ecological knowledge… links here and here provide further detail.
The occasion and the talks themselves are now history. More precisely, a bit of oral history. From Wikipedia: Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. And through those same AMS links, you can access these recordings.
Which brings us back to the three questions raised by the Session title. These were touched on, illustrated (versus fully resolved) by case studies comprising the session. Impossible to do more in a few hours, with a handful of speakers, and limited time for Q&A.
But this is the year 2025, not 1925. And we not only have Google- and similar search engines, but AI-enabled search. A matter of a few key clicks and mere seconds to input the three questions, and receive answers like this:
- Why does oral history matter? Oral history is important because it preserves people’s memories and experiences, which can help us understand the past and present. Oral histories can also help to fill in gaps in historical records and give voice to people who are often excluded.
- How is oral history done? Oral history is conducted by interviewing individuals with firsthand experience of a historical event, recording their narrative through audio or video, and then transcribing and analyzing the recordings to capture their personal perspective and add depth to the historical record; essentially, it involves a structured conversation between an interviewer and an interviewee to document personal memories and experiences about the past, often focusing on specific topics or time periods
- What can we learn? Oral history allows us to learn about the personal experiences, emotions, and perspectives of individuals from the past, providing a deeper understanding of historical events beyond just the facts by capturing how people lived through them, often shedding light on marginalized voices and filling gaps in the historical record that might be missing from traditional written sources; essentially, it helps us understand “what it felt like” to live in a particular time and place.
Results may vary. But good enough, you and I might say. However, that is only because we have been anesthetized by our present (largely scientific, for this LOTRW readership) subculture, and frenetic/largely virtual (read secondhand) experience of ways of doing business, not just at work but across the whole of daily life. We’re anxiously dashing through this read because we need to move on to the next one.
Still, far better to bring those words to life, to make them personal. Look at how the NOAA VOICES website does this. It addresses the same three questions, although indirectlyand far more powerfully:
Oral history is a unique example of qualitative data that is co-created by the narrator and interviewer. It is defined by its commitment to a diversity of perspectives, recognizing and valuing individual voices and collective experiences within society. Through deep engagement and active listening, oral history helps us answer, in profoundly intimate and detailed ways, fundamental questions:
- Who are we?
- How are we connected?
- How do we relate to each other and the world around us?
- How do we know what we know?
- How can we recognize and honor embodied knowledge?
Whoa.
So – oral history enlarges our view of the world and the individual importance of every person in it. In so doing, it also remakes us. It reminds us that our science, or technology, or use of that S&T to make a better world is at its heart, a human enterprise (and that it therefore has a heart). Oral history builds our self-awareness, helps us identify/put ourselves in touch with the core meaning and purpose of our lives. Now, if you can make the time, take things a step further and watch an actual oral-history video or two. You will experience all this in the topics covered and the subjects interviewed, and for that matter, the impact of the process on the interviewers themselves. You won’t be just educated. You’ll be inspired and energized[3].
Time to wrap it up! Let’s close with this. A key part of the oral history discipline, repeated above, is the capture of marginalized voices, the observations and experiences and perspectives of individuals and groups who might be overlooked in the big-picture overviews of mainstream history. Poets know this well. One of these who captured it better than most was Thomas Gray. In his 1751 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (read or re-read the whole of the poem to get the full effect) he looked at the tombstones and speculated on the lives and fortunes of the unknowns buried there, comparing them to unseen, spectacular beauty in God’s natural world.
Marginalized voices? Obscurity? Born to blush unseen and waste our sweetness on the desert air? That’s your life! That’s mine! Should we care? Can we do something about it? More in the next post.
[1]From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
[2]bringing together the 23rd History Symposium, the 20th Symposium on Societal Applications, Policy, and Practice, and the 6th Symposium on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
[3] A quote (variously attributed to “ancient sources,” or “Native Americans,” or this or that modern-day figure) captures this so perfectly that it appears on oral-history websites everywhere. It goes this way:
Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.