FHYA curation of a selection from the Hamilton Series of the Swaziland Oral History Project

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[Source - Chloe Rushovich for FHYA using Wits materials, 2017: In 1983, a series of interviews on the 'precolonial' history of southern Swaziland was conducted by Carolyn Hamilton. The setting of spatial and temporal limits to this project resulted in the accumulation of a denser body of testimony, with greater detail and more versions of individual traditions than in any of the other series. In addition to recording historical narratives, forms of oral data not found in the other series, such as clan praises, interclan relationship claims, the origins of clan names, and myths of origin, have been collected. In 2014 the Five Hundred Year Archive commissioned Patricia Liebetrau, a metadata librarian who had worked on the Digital Imaging South Africa project, to undertake the digitization of a selection of the transcripts from the recordings made by Hamilton. The transcripts selected were those for which a typed-up summary or typed edited typescript already existed. The rationale for this was that the typed version, unlike the handwritten versions could be subjected to optical character recognition and are thus searchable. The linked typed texts therefore act as a kind of index to the handwritten texts and the recorded audio. This selection of transcripts, as well as the already digitized audio, the rejected experimental edited typescripts, and associated materials such as folders, audio tape cassettes and case labels, and notebooks, formed the FHYA selection from the collection of Hamilton recordings. The Hamilton series is separated into 'files' named after each interlocutor.]