Oral History in the Digital Age

What is the future of digital storytelling?

Every month, Heritage Toronto produces new digital content, including Map Tours and Digital Stories. They not only allow you to access engaging stories about Toronto’s heritage but also provide exciting opportunities in community engagement and collaboration for researchers and heritage professionals.

I invite you to take a peek behind the curtain at the process of developing my digital oral history archive, North York Recipes for Healing, and its related programming. By reflecting on its advantages and limitations, and through discussion with fellow Emerging Historians, we will embark on a journey to imagine the future of digital storytelling. 

As a programs coordinator, I proposed a digital-first project on the culinary heritage of the East Asian community in North York.

In January 2023, I was hired as a programs coordinator at Heritage Toronto as part of the agency’s Equity Heritage Initiative. Through this initiative, emerging heritage professionals have the opportunity to develop fundamental skills and experiences while helping Heritage Toronto deepen its connection with city-wide communities, ensuring our city’s heritage is accessible, relevant, and engaging to all Torontonians.

As part of my role, I proposed a project that focused on the culinary heritage of East Asian community members in North York to highlight the connection among food, memories, interpersonal connections, and community building. During my research, I heard newcomers describe their experience searching for substitutes when ingredients were not available in mainstream Canadian grocery stores. Those who were born and raised here talked about growing up in the diverse cultural landscape in Toronto, and pulling different flavours from various cuisines they tasted growing up. Business owners shared their innovative ideas to cater to a wider audience and how to stand out in competition.

These stories not only show the adaptability and resilience of the community, but also identity formation and empowerment through culinary innovation.

Digital formats can offer direct accounts or reflections from community members.

In reaching out to community members to learn more about their lived experience, I relied on the techniques and structure of oral history. Many of the recorded interviews I conducted during the project were featured on the publicly available digital archive.

Oral history, which originated in the field of anthropology, is now a common method employed by many heritage researchers and institutions to highlight the lived experiences of individuals. It follows the oral tradition of knowledge transmission between generations, often considered essential to many cultures around the world, and has been formalized as a method of historical documentation since the 1980s.

In recent years, more technology to record, edit, and store audio and video data became available publicly, which reduced the difficulty of conducting oral history research. The internet also provides accessible platforms to communicate and disseminate the results.

Oral history has become a common research tool among museums and heritage institutions.

Oral history can provide individual perspectives that were often overlooked in many traditional historical narratives. As part of Tkaronto Voices, a map tour developed by programs coordinators Selma Elkhazin and Nadia Sule in connection with the 2023 National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) student Alan Jamieson provided an audio interview reflecting on the name change of the university. His reflection, particularly as both a member of the Indigenous community and a TMU student, is a good example of community voices on decolonial approach to heritage documentation.

Research in museums and their communities pointed out that stakeholders (community members or external collaborators) identify the need to access physical space as a barrier in museum co-creation, yet in this case, the collaboration was made possible without the need for in-person engagement. Digital oral history allows the researcher to develop an interactive experience that diversifies the contents at a heritage institution while respecting and honouring the knowledge of the community members who supplied them.

Heritage professionals are exploring the use of digital programming, such as virtual tours and online exhibitions, to help make the museum experience more accessible.

The most recent definition of museums adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2022 is an institution that “researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage.” It also pointed out that museums should operate “with the participation of communities,” and that knowledge sharing is an important part of the museum experience.

In the context of COVID-19, the accessibility of digital content also addressed the health and safety concerns of in-person gatherings in public spaces. At the same time, museums, heritage institutions, and non-profit organizations started to make more efforts to directly involve community members in their programming and operations.

The Living History of Little Jamaica provides another example of the benefit of oral histories. The interactive digital tour was developed by programs coordinator Victoria Atteh in 2022 under the Equity Heritage Initiative. The tour page features the map of Eglinton West Avenue between Allen Road and Keele Street, which has been known as “Little Jamaica” in Toronto since the 1970s for the Caribbean diaspora population living in the area. The use of oral histories within this experience compensates for the lack of direct interaction, allowing audiences to hear directly from community members without the mediation of a researcher or tour leader.

Despite its many advantages, digital storytelling isn’t without its shortcomings.

One of the biggest challenges during my research for North York Recipes for Healing was that many interviewees had learned to cook by observing others or through trial and error. They often had no written recipes, and the making of a dish could vary every time depending on the ingredients at hand, who they were cooking for, or simply how they were feeling. 

Some of the interviewees for my project requested me to edit their recipes. Perhaps they were also intimidated by the cooking channels and recipes online, and worried that being unable to provide a specific number or clearly describe the technique made them unqualified for knowledge-sharing. However, the purpose of the community cookbook and oral history is inherently different from commercial cookbooks or recipes on social media. The different ways individuals would describe their cooking process, for example, using different sensory cues (smell, touch, or visual) to tell if something is cooked, showed the significance of community interviews.

Terms used by professional culinary practices can undermine the value of informal or community knowledge, leading to doubts in home cooks.

All the oral history interviewees for North York Recipes for Healing, even food business owners, frequently referred to cooking as their “skill” and “practice” but never “knowledge.” After my initial project concluded in early 2024, I wanted to find alternative ways for sharing practical knowledge, such as preparing food.

Later that year, I proposed the idea of a collage workshop called “Leftover Ingredients” to combine storytelling and artmaking. Connecting with the concerns over household waste generated in everyday life, the workshop asked participants to use recycled material, including discarded books, cardboard boxes, textiles, and plastic bags to create collage pieces reflecting their own connection and experiences of food. The first presentation of the workshop took place at the North York Central Library February 1, 2025 to align with the Lunar New Year celebrations.

The alternative title for the workshop included a reference to the Chinese character “Yu”, which has a double meaning in connection to the Lunar New Year celebrations: a nod to the tradition of eating fish (鱼, Yu) during the Lunar New Year celebration to wish for a year of abundance (surplus, 余, Yu). Set within a modern context of food insecurity and environmental issues caused by excessive waste, the workshop participants reinterpreted their own food traditions and shared their knowledge in food preservation, recycling, and reuse.

Using colours, shapes, and textures as a representation of sensory memory can be helpful when telling stories about food.

The participants were encouraged to describe emotions without worrying about their vocabulary. The workshop includes a knowledge-sharing session with community members and artist Zhu Dandan, who narrated a short prose in Mandarin about making preserved vegetables in traditional practices. While Dandan’s words might not be directly understood by most of the audience, they were invited to pay attention to her expressions, body language, and the tone and speed of her narration.

In the collage workshop that followed, participants were encouraged to come up with creative ways to share their stories. These methods included manipulating “professional” images of food from cookbooks or magazines; for example, deliberately cutting off an image’s corners to represent anger towards food waste. Or, in another participant’s case, using colour to describe effective practices for recycling and reusing food and minimizing wasteful behaviour. In many ways, this hands-on process complemented my focus on digital oral storytelling in North York Recipes for Healing, emphasizing community-based methods for sharing stories about food.

In the context of the digital age, new tools and platforms bring potential for community engagement and heritage programming. I will continue to explore alternative methods of heritage documentation, and I invite emerging professionals and community members to join me on this journey.