Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP)

The Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP) is developing an original methodology for data mining the rich but untapped collections of digitized transcripts of women’s oral histories housed in university libraries and other collections across the United States.

OHTAP has created a database of 2500 transcripts from diverse regions and groups and developed a subcorpus extraction tool called Winnow. The current study asks whether and how the interviewed women named, remembered, and interpreted forms of sexual violence. Our project combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand which women spoke about sexual violence; what language narrators used to describe assault, abuse, and harassment; how responses to violence changed over time and across groups; and what historical contexts enabled resistance and activism concerning sexual violence.