Presentation

The Project and the Collections

The Oral Histories of Economics project releases into the public domain and makes available online in open access oral sources for the history of economics. Sources available include mostly interviews (audio recordings and transcripts) with economists, covering their research practices and the history of their discipline. Interviews are organized in different sets (“collections”), by topic and author(s).

 

How Is Oral History Useful?

Oral history is central to the history and sociology of sciences (see e.g., for the oral history of political science, Baer et al., 1991 ; for the oral history of computing, see here). Among historians of economics, there has been a growing interest in oral histories to address the history of contemporary economics (see e.g. Jullien, 2018). Studying economics as a practice (see e.g. Stapleford, 2017) encouraged historians of economics to conduct interviews. Interviews help documenting economics in its making, which is not always possible by analysing publications or archival documents. For instance, interviews can be used to reveal economists’ use of computers (see Boumans et al., 2023), their modelling strategies (see e.g. Halsmayer, 2014), their interaction with colleagues within seminars (Goutsmedt et al., 2021), their engagement with policymakers (Acosta et al., 2024), ... Moreover, oral history is also often an occasion to uncover the role of “hidden figures” in economics (see e.g. Boumans et al., 2023). In short, oral history is a way to enrich our understanding of the history and philosophy of economics. 

 

The Goals of the Oral Histories of Economics Project

Despite the growing interest by historians of economics for oral history, the actual practices in this domain have been relying, so far, on individuals’ initiatives, without an orderly strategy for collecting, storing, disseminating, and citing oral history sources. The goals of the Oral Histories of Economics project are:

 

Open-Access Data Policy

The Oral Histories of Economics project complies with the current legal EU standards protecting the collection, recording, and dissemination of personal data (such as, in this case, interviews). As a result of our compliance within these rules, the project is registered within the French National Register of Data Management (numéro de traitement 2-23083).

Data collected by the project (audio recordings, transcripts, and other relevant materials) are stored and accessible on the public French repository for research data, “Nakala”, hosted by Huma-Num. Huma-Num is a research structure under the supervision and tutelage of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and of the University of Aix-Marseille.

The files stored in the “Nakala” repository are granted a universal licence (CC0 1.0) provided by the project Science Commons, a project of the not-for-profit organisation Creative Commons. This licence is particularly useful for the practice of open science; it is usually mandatory for research data used by articles published in many scientific journals (including, for instance, Nature). Each source is associated with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that will secure proper citation in scholarly work and, consequently, proper acknowledgment of each interview and of its content.


References

Acosta, Juan, Beatrice Cherrier, François Claveau, Clément Fontan, Aurélien Goutsmedt and Francesco Sergi. 2024. Six Decades of Economic Research at the Bank of England. History of Political Economy, 56(1): 1-40. 

Baer, Michael A., Malcom E. Jewell, and Lee Siegleman. 1991. Political Science in America: Oral Histories of a Discipline. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Boumans, Marcel, Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Pierrick Dechaux and Francesco Sergi. 2023 The Computerization of Economics: Three Lessons for Economics. Œconomia, 13(3): 637-655. https://doi.org/10.4000/oeconomia.15684.

Halsmayer, Verena. 2014. From exploratory modeling to technical expertise: Solow’s growth model as a multipurpose design. History of Political Economy, 46(Suppl.): 229-251. 

Goutsmedt, Aurélien, Matthieu Renault, and Francesco Sergi. 2021. European Economics and the Early Years of the International Seminar on Macroeconomics. Revue d'économie politique, 131(4): 639-722. 

Jullien, Dorian. 2018. Interviews: Some methodological and historiographical issues of oral sources. In Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub (eds), A Contemporary Historiography of Economics. London: Routledge, 37-56.

Stapleford, Thomas. 2017. Historical Epistemology and the History of Economics: Views Through the Lens of Practice. Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 35A: 113-145.