As a graduate student at Indiana University, I studied interview methods at the Oral History Research Center (now the Center for Documentary Research and Practice) and the Labor Studies Institute (now the Department of Labor Studies). My first project with Labor Studies in 1996-1997 was a multi-city study of the impact of industrial change on unions in Indiana.  I traveled around the State interviewing workers, shop stewards, labor council members, and municipal officials.  Back then I used a TASCAM Portable Cassette Recorder.  These days I use a TEAC Digital Linear Field Recorder.  

Oral history and other kinds of ethnographic interview methods can be very powerful research tools, with the potential to illuminate realms of human experience not caputred in archival materials, statistical data, or other sources.  But they do not simply yield unambiguous truths about the past.  Rather, people form and relate memories within a web of influences.  Memory, or at least the telling of memory, is at once idiosyncratic and discursive, personal and social.