How we research

“Oral histories are tape recorded and transcribed interviews with individuals that document living memory.”

An oral history is a talk that gets recorded and then typed up.

“Two criteria were applied to all selections: participants must have had a first-hand knowledge of events in Soap Creek Valley and they must have lived or worked in the area for a significant period of time.”

The thesis picked people who saw things with their own eyes and lived or worked there a long time.

“Older participants were given priority and interviewed first whenever possible. This precedence, or bias, was considered worthwhile because the oldest members of potential interviewees held the earliest and most fragile memories of Soap Creek Valley.”

The thesis talked to the oldest people first whenever it could, because their memories went back the farthest.

“Specific artifacts, including maps (Rowley 1994), aerial photographs (Glender 1994), sketches (Rawie 1994), prehistoric tools (Hanish 1994), and even broken glass, old bricks, and nails (Hindes 1996) were used to obtain informant interpretations and stimulate memories regarding specific events, times, and/or places.”

The interviews used things to look at, like maps, old photos and even old nails, to help people remember.

“Subjects were informed of their right to stop interviews at any time, to decline answering uncomfortable questions, and to have their own questions answered regarding interviewer’s motives, qualifications, and/or interests in the study.”

The people interviewed could stop any time, skip a question, and ask questions of their own.

“Copies of transcriptions were read and amended while listening to the recordings (“audited”) by people present during the interview (Baum 1985). The interviewees were often the best people for this step because they were most aware of who and what was talked about, general accuracy, how names were spelled, what they had intended to say, and what had been left unsaid.”

People who were at the interview, often the speaker, read the typed copy while listening to the recording and fixed mistakes.

“Criteria is often established through methods which corroborates the information obtained from the interviewee (primary source) with information derived from alternate or multiple credible sources, such as signed documents, photographs, news reports, and scientific research.”

What people say is often checked against papers, photos and newspapers.

“Aerial photographs are, in effect, highly detailed and time-specific maps of landscape patterns. Before aerial photography came into widespread use in the 1930s, people had to use maps or visit scenic vistas to consider landscape scale patterns of vegetation and human constructs.”

An air photo is like a very detailed map of a single day.

“Aerial photography was first implemented in Oregon in the 1920s by such organizations as the USDA Forest Service, the Oregon State Highway Commission, and the US Soil Conservation Service.”

In Oregon, the first air photos were taken in the 1920s by government offices.

“The University of Oregon has the most complete collection of aerial photographs available in Oregon, but businesses such as W.A.C. (Western Aerial Contractors) in Eugene and organizations such as the Forest Service maintain extensive collections that allow for the purchase and/or use of individual "site-and time-specific" sequences.”

In 2003, a university library in Oregon had the biggest set of these pictures.

“General Land Office (GLO) subdivision and Donation Land Claim (DLC) boundary lines dating to the early 1850s are clearly apparent a century later as the straight courses of roads, fence lines, crop borders, and logging boundaries.”

In an old air photo of one Oregon valley, straight roads and fences still followed lines surveyors drew a hundred years before.

“Fenced and plowed bottomland prairies, grassy meadows, ridgeline trails, hillside scatterings, and other pre-contact landscape patterns can also be easily discerned.”

Old meadows and trails can show up in air photos too.

“[Compare the persistent patterns of trails and vegetation shown on this aerial photograph and on Map D.04, with GLO surveys of the same area, performed from 1856-1897.]”

Under one old air photo, the dissertation asks readers to compare it with the old surveys of the same place.

“GLO land survey records have been long accepted as useful measures of past environmental conditions (Whitney and DeCant 2001: 147). These records have specific advantages over other early historical sources of information in being a definite sampling of vegetation, written on location, and in accordance to a predetermined plan (Bourdo 1956: 755).”

Surveyors wrote things down right where they stood, following one set of rules.

“Before 1851, these lines were absent from the environment. Since that time they have served as an exacting index to specific trees, points, locations and cultural artifacts on specific days in time.”

In western Oregon, the survey lines started in 1851. Since then they help us find the exact trees and spots the surveyors wrote about.

“Surveyors regularly noted specific types and species of plants and whether forest fires had entered the area, or not.”

Surveyors wrote down the plants and whether fire had been there.

“Bearing trees were carefully marked, identified as to species and general condition, measured for diameter, and located by distance and compass bearing from each corner.”

At most corners, the surveyor picked trees, measured them, and wrote down how far away they stood.

“Because DLCs often had six, eight, or more corners, and because they included trees well-within the boundaries of section lines, these surveys provide us with far more exacting information--particularly near the center of the sections in which they are located--than surveys of sections that do not include DLCs (see maps 3.03 and 3.04).”

If an early settler's claim touched your land, there may be extra notes about it.

“Subdivision surveys of unclaimed lands--typically steep, forested, and/or burned tracts that remained in the public domain because they were unsuitable for most agriculture or grazing purposes--were often delayed for a period of twenty to fifty years after initial township boundaries had been established.”

Rough, steep land was often surveyed many years later than the good farmland.

“This project is based on traditional archival research methods, followed by physical transcription of data to maps, and then location and documentation in the field.”

That project read the old papers first, then drew on maps, then went outside to look.

“Fig. 5 shows another type of map used in this research: a geological map from the late 1890s, first printed in 1903 and apparently showing pre-automobile roads and trails to a very accurate degree at that time.”

Even a map made for rocks can show old roads and trails.

“Note the differences in Port Orford between the maps, but also the similarity in road and trail alignments between 1875 and 1941.”

In one township, the town changed a lot between 1875 and 1941, but the roads stayed in much the same place.

“The thin red lines with yellow high-lighter were transcribed as possible foot-trail routes, with solid lines depicting existing road and trail surfaces, and dotted lines showing predicted (but undocumented) or documented (but no longer depicted) trail locations.”

The field maps used solid lines for roads still there, and dotted lines for trails that were only predicted or no longer mapped.

“One of the more helpful conditions during field work on this project was the combination of “clear skies and clearcuts” along the ridgeline roads we drove. These allowed for wonderful perspectives of the surrounding landscape, including likely, possible, and improbable trail locations.”

Clear days and open clearcuts gave the authors long views for judging where old trails could have run.

“Following field work, the “pinkish” highlighter in Fig. 7 was used to show the final editorial decisions made by the authors following much discussion and consideration of the possible alternative routes and the documentation that supported each alternative.”

After the field work, Bob Zybach and Don Ivy talked over the choices and then marked the routes they picked.

“Each time a specific reference was located, it was scanned or photographed and entered into an Excel file database; then printed, annotated with the name of the surveyor and date the observations were written, and filed in a folder labeled with the individual township in which the notes were made.”

Each clue was copied, labeled with who wrote it and when, and filed by township.

“Research for this project was conducted in four basic steps: archival research and literature review, predictive field map construction, “ground-truthing” the predictive map (field research), and synthesis. These are not discrete steps in any sense, and usually two or three were being undertaken at the same time throughout the course of this project.”

Four steps: read, make a guess map, check outside, put it together. They overlapped.

“Research for this project was conducted using the “method of multiple hypotheses,” first described by Chamberlin in 1890 (Chamberlin 1965) as: "the effort is to bring up into view every rational explanation of new phenomena, and to develop every tangible hypothesis respecting their cause and history." This method involves approaching a specific research question with all information available from relevant disciplines; making a reasoned answer to the question based on the weight of the gathered evidence; and then posing more specific questions that can then be asked in order to better consider the original hypothesis (see Chapter VIII).”

In the Tiller study, the method looked at every sensible answer, picked the one most of the evidence pointed to, then asked a sharper question.

“In oral history research, practitioners often use “triangulation” to establish the credibility of informants, and the reliability of their information (Hoffman 1996; Zybach 1999): if three (or more) sources of information can be shown to be in agreement, then the resulting conclusion can generally be assumed a “fact.””

The Tiller report explained a test from oral history: if three or more clues agree, the answer can usually be called a fact.

“Following (but not discontinuing) background investigations accomplished by literature review, discussions with knowledgeable individuals, and archival research, predictive maps were constructed to guide subsequent field work activities.”

Before going outside, the team drew maps of where they expected to find clues.

“The combination of these three elements -- GLO field survey notes (and plats), Osborne panoramic photographs, and aerial photographs – before the post-WW II advent of major road building and logging activities, provides a highly detailed and accurate depiction of forest conditions in transition from precontact time to now.”

In the Tiller study, survey notes, fire-lookout photos and air photos together painted a sharp picture.

“There is an anomaly along the North-South Trail and the ca. 1800 vegetation patterns that are shown, however, which relied on field observations and measurements in order to be better understood.”

When the map layers disagreed along one trail, the study needed field checks to understand it better.

“Brief answers are also supplied for each question, based on the current findings of this study, but with the idea that entirely different answers might be forthcoming with additional data or alternative perspectives.”

The study's answers could change if new clues turn up.