The historians’ access to firsthand information is the most important advantage of oral history. The narrator of the memory is an immediate witness. Books, newspapers and reports do not transfer awareness.
Historiography through methods of oral history is a new style in preserving events and accidents. In recent years, this method has been used and promoted in centers dealing with formulating history. The historians in this method do not deal with tablets, engravings and traces achieved through excavations and conjectures or manuscripts, deeds of endowment, travelers’ reports etc. They deal with names that are live and the result of remembrances which historians are looking for. Oral history includes memories of the individuals who have stood against the events and have seen incidents which passage of time or few eyewitness of that event, have made their memories unique. In oral history before encountering to generalities dominating a historical era, we encounter details of the events and its internal relations. Here the person narrates his/her memories and speaks about what has happened to him/her or his/her relatives. Oral history is the translation of our near past, what we call contemporary history.
In this method of historiography, the historian encounters some advantages and disadvantages. The most important benefit of oral history is its firsthand information to which the historian finds access. The narrator is a direct witness. There are not books, newspapers or reports that represent the consciousness. Sometimes the narrator is beyond a direct witness and plays the role of the creator of that incident. This converts oral history to a source which the historians cannot banish the temptation of obtaining it from themselves. On the other hand, the narrator is the polisher or complement to an event. The incidents talked about in documents and papers are mostly in lack of causation dominating on that incident. Documents are usually the expression of an event in an abstract manner and are incapable in explaining the causes and effects. The memories forming oral history have the power to complete the beginning and end of these documents and polish these events with high details. The other trait of these memories is helping the historian in identifying the authenticity of documents in narrating a specified event. One of the other advantages of oral history is its easy acceptance by the reader of the history. In this case, there is neither the hardship of historical readings, nor the repeated reasoning of the historian to prove the causes of specified events. The reader has a text in front of him/her, reads eagerly and follows its entire vicissitudes.
One of the disadvantages of this method of historiography, on the other hand, is its political odor. For example, all centers which have expressed the events of the revolution inside or outside of Iran, have not been void of political aspects, in the first look. The groups gathering information outside of Iran usually encountered individuals who were among opponents of the revolution or fugitives, had contributed in demolishing the revolutionary regime or were one of the officials of the Shah’s regime, who all had lost their material and spiritual resources because of the revolution. Other ones were the leftists who had left the country after the revolution, without finding a place in the state. Inside the country, centers talking about the revolutionary events in form of oral history, due to their devotion to the revolution were not devoid of political inclinations too. So it is somehow hard to consider the results gained from this method of historiography as neutral. Despite this defect, the historians do not encounter with a great tragedy. Since one of the skills of a real researcher is avoiding from propagandistic traps. He/she can determine the fineness of any memory and distinguish genuineness from fakery and adduce based on correct memories. Another disadvantage which can be enumerated for oral history is the domination of the personal conceptions of the narrator. The main axis of the narrators’ memories, whoever he is, is his own perceptions not others. This may cause some problems in the essence of the memories of those that the pans of the justice scale are not parallel in them. Exaggerating about oneself and degrading others is one of the other defects of oral history. Despite all these, a learned historian can perceive the pureness of a memory using the frequency of the events and other clues. All those endeavors which a historian bears to perceive an old text, is endured in gathering the memories that shape oral history.
 One can add to the advantages and disadvantages of oral history, but it is notable that this method was widely used in expressing Islamic revolution and eight years of war. Most of the works published about these two great phenomena have been created somehow with the help of oral history. Fortunately the abundance of the present resources, have entered the experts of the oral history realm to a new process of theorizing, which will lead to increasing consistency. After a while, you can see the increase in scientificity, preciseness in analyzing the memory up to reaching its truth, and injection of the peripheral researches in these books. On the other hand, the continuous criticism of the experts has converted oral history to a very serious arena for historiography of Islamic Revolution and the imposed eight-year-war of Iraq against Iran. 

Persian Source:
http://oral-history.ir/show.php?page=article&id=645



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