Audiovisual Presentations III
Time: 2025-09-17 12:00 - 14:00
Location: Medium Hall B at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Sumallya Mukhopadhyay
Events within this Session
Redesigning Oral History Archives with Data
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
Over the last five years, Incite Institute at Columbia University has collected over 1,500 hours of interviews through two ambitious history projects that seek to make the American historical record more equitable and complete. The Obama Presidency Oral Oral History captured 450+ interviews covering the Obama years from not only White House officials, but activists, organizers, civil society leaders, and extraordinary people from all walks of life. The Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project sent ten writers across America to capture 200+ interviews with elders whose recollections of the Civil Rights movement, LGBTQ+ movements, and other key moments risk being lost to history. The breadth and depth of these archives are promising—but only insofar as they are made accessible. Full of complex, semi-structured stories, oral history archives can suffer from navigability issues, which only worsen as archives grow. Usage often follows a “long tail” distribution, where a few popular interviews drive the majority of interactions. For our flagship projects, this meant that the lesser-known voices we sought to include risked being silenced. As such, we partnered with Huncwot, an award-winning design studio based in Poland to develop several innovations in presenting oral histories online that drive lateral exploration and promote lesser-known voices in the archive. Working between the United States, Poland, and France, our international team developed new techniques that combine close reading, artificial intelligence, and the best of universal design to make a more accessible and beautiful archive than previously possible. In our proposed audiovisual presentation, our team will screen several interview clips within the digital archives we have produced for each project. Moreover, the team will provide an overview of key innovations and the design and technological considerations undergirding them.
Speakers
Animating Voices
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
The presentation includes three animated films that concern memories of displacements and forced migrations experienced by individuals and communities whose narratives have not been recorded as history. Mukand and Riaz (8mins) is an animated film that presents fragmented memories of the filmmaker’s father. When the partition of India and Pakistan happened in 1947, Riaz helped Mukand and his family to escape safely. Mukand was fourteen when he waved goodbye to his friend. The two friends never met again. The Stitches Speak ( 12mins) presents conversations and memories of voices from a community of embroiderers, affected by displacement and migration. They use their narrative art of appliqué and embroideries to articulate their responses to life, and events as traumatic as the earthquake and forgotten memories of forced migration. Home (11mins) is an animated chronicle based on the lucid memories of the film maker’s 90 years old mother, Sheela Sabnani who remembers and misses her two homes, her two fathers, her sewing machine and the radio that were separated after the partition of India in 1947. For the film maker, these memories and this film is the only precious inheritance from her mother and for Sheela it has been a journey towards making peace with the past and reclaiming her lost childhood.