In the "Old Country": Memories to Pass On

The paper relates the findings of an oral history project on the Italian immigration to Fredonia, a small town in Western New York, carried out by the author, and argues in favor of the use of digital audio-visual technology as opposed to the more traditional audio-recording approach in oral history research. The author sets out to show how in fact the use of digital video enabled the surfacing of a performative element in the interviewees which underlines their determined effort to ennoble the stories of the immigrants’ original departure from the fatherland and their early settlement in the States. The essay also comments on the possibility of digitally archiving the recordings so as to allow for a continuous verification of the accuracy of the original written transcriptions, something that the more traditional analogue techniques did not easily enable.