1968: The Whole World Was Watching Website
1968: The Whole World Was Watching is an oral history website developed in collaboration with students at South Kingstown High School.
1968: The Whole World Was Watching is an educational resource for secondary school students and teachers as well as for scholarly research on the period. Members of the sophomore class at South Kingstown High School interviewed Rhode Islanders about their recollections of the year 1968. Their stories, which include the narrators’ experiences of the Vietnam War, the struggle for civil rights, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as well as many more personal memories, are a living chronicle of one of the most tumultuous years in United States history.
STG was involved in several phases of the development of 1968: The Whole World Was Watching. They assisted in procuring grant funding and provided project support for research and oral history interviews at South Kingstown High School. They also designed and produced the website. The site development took place during the summer of 1998. A grant from NetTech supported the work of four students: Sara Grady, James Barnes, Joanna Epstein, and Daniel Perlin. They digitized audio tapes of all the interviews reviewed, corrected, and edited the students’ transcripts and produced additional content, including a timeline, thematic pages, and a glossary linked from terms in the narratives.
1968: The Whole World Was Watching is the second oral history project that STG undertook with the teachers and students of South Kingstown High School. The first one, What did you do in the War Grandma, was turned into a website based on the collection of student essays published in a booklet. One audio file and full transcript were included as an example, to demonstrate potential. The 1968 project was planned as a digital project from the outset; students recorded their interviews, produced transcripts and stories based on transcripts, knowing that these would be presented in an online publication. The result was a rich set of materials that demonstrated how student work could form the basis of a rich and informative digital oral history project.
This project was presented extensively at schools and conferences, and generated a great deal of interest, as it was an early example of community based oral history online.
1968: The Whole World Was Watching Website is a project of STG (Computing and
Information Services)
Contributors to this project include David Reville, Linda Wood (South Kingstown High School), Sharon Schmid (South Kingstown High School)
Funding for this project came from Rhode Island Council for the Humanities
NetTech (Northeast Regional Technology in Education
Consortium)