Oral History Goes Digital
Time: 2025-09-17 09:00 - 11:00
Location: Conference room at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Leslie McCartney
Events within this Session
Thinking “Oral-History.Digital”. Recent Experiences with a Web-Based Infrastructure for Oral History Interviews
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Oral-History.Digital is an interview portal, a curation platform and a research environ-ment for audio-visual narrative interviews. Research institutions and projects, muse- ums and memorials can make their interview collections available for re-use in research and teaching. Collection holders can upload their audio and video interviews with accompanying materials and edit them with tools for transcription, indexing or annotation. Scholars and teachers can search for interviews in a cross-collection catalogue and, after registration, view the audio or video files online, together with time-coded transcripts as subtitles. Guided by the FAIR principles, Oral-History.Digital makes interviews findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as research data. Oral-History.Digital was developed since 2020 by four German universities in close collaboration with various pilot archives. Just six months after its release in September 2023, more than 3000 interviews from 35 different archives are searchable. The number of collection holders and researching users is growing steadily. Based on a systematic evaluation, a follow-up project is currently consolidating and optimising the infrastructure. The overall aim is to develop Oral-History.Digital into the main access point for oral history interviews in German-speaking countries. In addition, its usability by other disciplines and its multilingual functionalities are improved. After a brief presentation of the infrastructure, Cord Pagenstecher (project manager) and Almut Leh (co-manager) will share their experiences in developing and operating the platform. Their thinking and reflection on oral history digital covers methodologi-cal, ethical, legal and technical aspects. Which specific requirements are to be met if oral interviews are to be made available online? What support do collection owners need when cataloguing and processing their collections? To what extent can FAIR and CARE principles be realised? What can a sustainable operating concept look like? What role can artificial intelligence play in further development?
Speakers
The Curator’s Role in Digital Oral History Projects: A Case Study Based on the Virtual-Kolkata Partition Museum
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The paper discusses the curator’s role in designing an oral history project and making it digitally available for wider public viewership and dissemination. The empirical sources are taken from the oral history project of the Virtual-Kolkata Partition Museum (V-KPM) [https://virtual-kolkata- partition-museum.org/], which was inaugurated in August 2023, marking the 76th anniversary of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. What complicates the matter is that the recorded narratives dwell on politically contentious issues related to riots and mass migration, rape and molestation of women, and institutional treatment of individuals who were rendered homeless. By publicizing these individuated stories, V-KPM serves to reconstruct the Statist historiography of the Partition; however, it simultaneously unearths wounds from the past, which can be detrimental to the communally polarized society of India. Interestingly, theoretical developments around digital intervention in oral history primarily concentrate on the viewer/listener participation. Siobhan McHugh argues that listening to a digitally preserved interview makes one attentive to both the narrated event and the mode of storytelling (2012); it has inspired Alistair Thomson to conceptualize a transition from oral to digital ‘aural’ history (2016). Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrycki further inform us of the ‘slow process’ of listening in the digital space (2017). The paper extends such formulations by studying the part played by the curator who builds the oral history project. It addresses the following questions: How space is offered to interviewers from diverse socio-cultural and religious backgrounds? What are the logistical factors in processing, analyzing, and creating the interview database? Given the sensitive nature of the interviews, how does one ethically consider which stories to make available to the viewers/listeners? In fine, the paper evaluates how such projects conserve oral histories for the present and future generations to enable them to understand the lasting significance of personal narratives in historical re-telling.
Speakers
Re-Thinking Oral History Archives: Considerations for a More Diverse and Inclusive Archival Practice
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Archiving interviews is as old as oral history itself. From the very beginning, interviews were not only conducted but also collected in order to make them available for historical research. Archiving is not a neutral process. Collection strategies, indexing practices, access policies, financial and technical conditions, etc. determine which voices are preserved and made audible for future generations. As the conference considers how oral history can become more democratic and socially relevant (again), rethinking archiving practices is essential. Using the example of Germany’s oldest oral history archive, the “Workshop of Memory” in Hamburg, the paper discusses questions, challenges, and opportunities of the qualitative re-indexing of archived “old” interviews in the digital age. On the one hand, groups of people and topics that are of great importance today (e.g. experiences of racism, women’s voices) are certainly present in many interviews, but were not always included in the original indexes and thus remain invisible. On the other hand, the “old” indexes often contain particularly sensitive data (e.g. mental illness) or derogatory comments, which is a major problem for online accessibility. Today, an online presence is essential to the survival of an archive. But what does this mean for indexing, both ethically and technically? Finally, I will address the question of how qualitative and digital re-indexing can be achieved when time, human and financial resources are limited. One possibility I would like to put up for discussion is the involvement of users or interested laypeople in citizen science projects, who, with their respective biographical backgrounds and expertise, can make archival practice more diverse and inclusive, and thus more relevant to society.
Speakers
Oral History and Public Access: CPDOC's Digital Strategies
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
In this paper, we aim to present the main initiatives undertaken by the Oral History Program (PHO) of the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary Brazilian History at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV CPDOC) in terms of the dissemination of the sound and audiovisual documents that comprise its historical collection of oral history interviews. Founded in 1975, PHO has a long history of collecting testimonies from prominent figures in Brazilian society post-1930s, such as politicians, ambassadors, intellectuals, cultural sector representatives, among others. In its 50 years of existence, PHO has remained as one of the references in terms of oral history methodology in Brazil, but beyond the processes of producing and managing interviews, one of the main focuses of the team in recent years has been the dissemination and access to interviews. Our proposal is to present the initiatives that have been developed at CPDOC in terms of new ways of disseminating oral history interviews, especially in digital form. This includes the creation of digital archives accessible to the public, the online availability of content on video and audio platforms, as well as the possible implications involved in this choice. One of the dissemination fronts that has been explored, for example, is the use of social media as a way to expand access to historical documents. Among the main challenges faced are the language of these medias and the new forms of social interaction that come from social media. CPDOC has also developed podcasts and documentary films that use the historical collection of the PHO as a basis, in a proposal to explore different forms of using oral history interviews. This effort to reinterpret the historical documents of the PHO, but without decontextualizing their historical production context, has been the focus of some activities developed by the team. This is a joint proposal, send along with Gabriel Cardoso, my colleague at FGV CPDOC
Speakers
Locating the History of Emotions: Combining Oral History and Digital Ethnography
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Although emotion is primarily associated with the disciplines of Psychology and Neuroscience, the History of Emotions has become a significant arena of historical research in the contemporary times. The expression and dissemination of lived experiences, sentiments and sensibilities enhance the texture of cultural and community history. An emotion, when studied as a practice, opens the window for understanding the historical past. Thus, the History of Emotions encompasses collective memory, narratives, trauma, reminiscence, and socio-cultural customs against the backdrop of national or international political events. Since individual instances are not officially documented, oral history becomes a significant research methodology for unfolding the same. Digital ethnography is used to locate the socio-cultural dynamics of any particular community through the use of internet or online tools. Oral history and digital ethnography being qualitative research methods, this study seeks to analyse the correlation and comparison between them. While oral history is confined to direct interview for revealing undocumented memories, experiences and narratives associated with specific public events like war or migration, digital ethnography refers to the observance of socio-cultural fluidity and dynamics in the contemporary times. With the global leap in technologies and digital innovations, research methodologies are also subjected to alterations. Since the temporal frame of oral history and digital ethnography is different, combination of both the methods can aid to a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the relation between the past and the present. The challenges and shortcomings of oral history can be substituted with digital ethnography to make historical researches feasible. Besides, the uses, advantages and limitations of both the methodologies will also be examined in this research work. The role played by these two dominant methodologies of qualitative research in unfolding the History of Emotions will be the major thrust of this study.