Digital Oral History
Time: 2025-09-18 09:00 - 11:00
Location: Conference room at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Sumallya Mukhopadhyay
Events within this Session
Oral History and New Forms of Digital Public History: Meta-Archives and WWI
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
In the digital world, forms of structuring-communicating historical material are emerging, such as aggregators of digitized archives or meta-archives dedicated to a historical phenomenon or to the biography of a well-known personage. Thanks to the doctoral project I am curating, this formula (the meta-archive) will be applied for the first time also to Italian-language oral sources pertaining to the First World War, with the aim of saving the decades-long work of the community of oral historians. In designing such a space, it is necessary to pay attention both to the pitfalls that the user is likely to encounter in consulting such a digital product and to the past experiences in the digital and for the public that the oral history collections incorporated in the new meta-archive bring with them, past experiences resulting from the activities of a large community of scholars in the Italian territory. Therefore, the paper aims to analyze how the meta-archive being established can differentiate itself from the various practices that have matured over the years that were aimed at enhancing and disseminating, through tools such as blogs, educational activities and digital archives, the heritage of Italian-language interviews related to the Great War. The discussion will take into account not only the factors that incentivize the use of meta-archives, as opposed to previous forms, but also those that hinder it, such as economic and legal constraints. There are to be analyzed the pitfalls posed by the emergence of artificial intelligence, an essential tool for those making meta-archives, especially at the stage of heritage mediation before and within the meta-archive, and the relationship artificial intelligence with the phenomenon of updatism. We will use as direct sources the interviews with the protagonists and subjects who have been involved in the maintenance of these assets up to the present day (conservators and producing subjects, sometimes overlapping), communication emails between users and online products and the same ones, and archival material from the different funds. The main research questions of the paper, in summary, aim to identify how oral sources can be made accessible to a wide audience through the new form of meta-archives and whether it can be a viable evolution of other past activities (such as blogs), considering the challenges coming from both the digital and oral history sides within meta-archives, starting from the writer’s experience.
Speakers
The Evolution of Oral History Pedagogy: Project Design which Prioritizes Access, the Columbia College Chicago Oral History Model.
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The origins of the Columbia College Chicago Oral History Model (COHM) grew out of a collaboration between the college archives and the honors course, Oral History: the Art of the Interview, to launch a multi-semester documentation/preservation project entitled: Chicagoland Anti-Apartheid Movement Collection. In addition to collecting and preserving material culture of the Chicago based anti-apartheid activists, the project focused on conducting oral histories of the activists. As the project progressed across three semesters, a tailored approach to the practice of oral history and oral history project design evolved into the COHM which includes four essential concepts/components: 1.The Foundational Interview: an interview which can stand alone or is used to identify key narrators who need a follow-up interview. 2.Core Questions: these are a limited number of questions asked of every narrator in the project which work as a point of access for preliminary content analysis. 3.Interview Portfolio: biographical data form; consent forms (interviewer and narrator); recording; transcript; images (historical and current); and written abstract with key terms. 4.Digital Access on Digital Commons: site built and maintained by the college’s Archives and Collections. The first half of the presentation focuses on the oral history process and student production of the oral history interviews. The second half concentrates on how the goal of expanding access drives the content and design of the digital collection at the college. The presentation concludes with a brief description of the first comprehensive application of this model: the oral history of photography at Columbia College Chicago.
Speakers
How Did a Seasoned Director Describe the Life of a Vietnam War Deserter Sheltered in Japan 47 Years Ago? In the Case of “A Deserter Who Came to My Home” (2015)
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Television broadcasting began in Japan in 1959. Many social documentaries have been produced, but research on the production process is limited. Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS), based in Osaka, started regular broadcasting of the social documentary series “EIZO” in 1980. It is the oldest documentary program in Japan. Each episode of the program runs for 50 minutes, and more than 520 programs have been aired, at a rate of one per month. There is little information available on how the directors of “EIZO” found themes, gathered information, edited, and produced the program. The difficulties faced in the process and how they were overcome, as well as the thoughts behind creating the work, remain unclear. To address this gap, the applicant is conducting interviews with nine directors of “EIZO” to capture their oral histories. One of the interviewees is Takeo Tsumura, who directed 72 documentaries over 21 years. The applicant interviewed him in detail for a total of six hours. One of Mr. Tsumura’s notable works is “A Deserter Who Came to My Home: 47 Years of Truth in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.” This documentary, broadcast in August 2015, won the top prize from the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan. The documentary tells the story of TV cameraman Koyama, who sheltered a 19-year- old U.S. Navy deserter named Philip during the Vietnam War in Kyoto. Despite being instructed not to take notes, Koyama used 16 mm film to capture Philip enjoying Japanese culture. Philip later fled to the Soviet Union. 47 years later, Koyama found Philip in California, and they had a dramatic reunion. Koyama showed Philip the video of his time in Kyoto, which led Philip to reflect on his hardships after the war. Director Tsumura closely followed their emotional reunion in a 50-minute documentary. In an interview with the applicant, Mr. Tsumura shared behind-the-scenes details of the production and discussed the themes of war, state power, and human destiny. Reflecting on the program, Tsumura emphasized that the soldiers, including Philip, were victims of the war, and their suffering continued for more than 40 years. Tsumura highlighted the disregard for human lives and rights by state powers and large corporations during war or natural disasters and stressed the importance of individuals speaking out.
Speakers
Korean Memories Project: Using Technology to Document Historical Perspectives
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
How can we effectively document, preserve, and share the experiences of South Korea’s aging population while addressing the challenges of scale, linguistic diversity, and global accessibility? The Korean Memories Project tackles this question through an innovative combination of crowdsourcing and AI-assisted technologies. This presentation examines our methodological approach, which empowers individuals and local communities with a standardized toolkit for conducting and recording interviews. We analyze the effectiveness of this crowdsourcing model in democratizing the documentation process and challenging the dominance of Western academia in oral history practices. Our research reveals that AI-assisted transcription and translation significantly enhance the efficiency of processing large volumes of oral histories while maintaining linguistic authenticity. We present findings on how this technological approach addresses the tension between preserving historical narratives and ensuring global accessibility. The project’s significance lies in its potential to bridge generational gaps and foster cross-cultural understanding. We demonstrate how this project’s methodological approach engages diverse audiences with these narratives, promoting a more inclusive historical dialogue. Preliminary results indicate that our approach not only preserves compelling testimonies of elderly Koreans but also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of historical events and cultural transformations. We argue that this model offers a replicable framework for documenting non-Western perspectives in oral history. This presentation concludes by discussing the broader implications of integrating technology in oral history practices and proposes future directions for enhancing community participation in historical documentation.
Speakers
Non-verbal and paralinguistic expressions in an academic community oral history: a multimodal digital oral history analysis
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Non-verbal and paralinguistic communications, like the expression of emotion and indications of hesitation, can represent important sense-making markers in oral history testimonies but they are almost invariably absent from the transcripts that are conventionally employed to analyse interviews by (on oral historian) researchers. Whilst oral historians frequently attest to the importance of orality and close listening when engaging with the interview, other researchers and particularly those who approach these materials online and at scale often do so via the transcript and with little understanding of what it represents and what it omits. In this paper we explore these phenomena as indicators of subjectivity and subtle yet often significant meaning making in a corpus of elite oral histories of knowledge production and disciplinary formation, employing an approach we have described as Multimodal Digital Oral History (MDOH) (Smyth, Nyhan and Flinn 2023). MDOH seeks to recalibrate the historic pre-eminence of the oral history transcript by actively engaging with oral history interview recordings and collection in all their modalities: oral, aural, sonic, metadata and textual. This paper will exemplify this approach, and the steps it entails, from close reading and listening to algorithmic analysis and source criticism. It will analyse the new possibilities for studying the manifestation of memory and the meaning-making process in oral history this approach offers by mobilising those phenomena often excluded from transcripts – hesitations, infelicities of speech, non-verbal indications of emotion, changes in speed of utterance – at the level of the individual interview and at scale. Likewise, this paper will analyse the role of nonstandard language cues in the construction of narratives and of legacy and attainment in normative knowledge production settings as recalled in oral history interviews.