'Somewhere between the toast and the marmalade': analysing an intuitive approach to memory sources

Historians are often reluctant to talk in detail about their methodological approach to their source material. This paper examines an attempt to apply interpretative methods to oral memory sources. It describes a small 'experiment' with quantitative analysis. The author applied a specific type of data analysis - wordfrequency - to study interviews with four British women who migrated to Australia after the Second World War. This allowed her to explore one aspect of transforming a collection of individual interviews into a coherent historical account. While acknowledging that this sort of data analysis clearly has benefits when using a large body of material, she concludes that it can not replace close reading and listening to the original interviews.