In our first installment of Project Interviews, we spoke to Project Manager Liz Strong and Communication Designer Chris Pandza from the Obama Presidency Oral History at Incite, Columbia University. For this discussion, and as this is a U.S. presidential election year–perhaps the most important one of our lifetimes–we decided to move beyond the “5 questions” format to interview Liz and Chris on Zoom, and we asked them questions that oral historians will want to hear about, from why they decided to move beyond a traditional “elite” presidential oral history project to interview “ordinary people,” activists, and others (450 interviews in all), to how the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted their in-person process just as they were getting started (and how they managed in spite of the special challenges the pandemic created), to how they developed a website design to ensure that the most famous voices do not drown out the rest.
