Education and Dissemination
Time: 2025-09-18 14:30 - 16:30
Location: Seminar room at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: James Deutsch
Events within this Session
Witnessing Personal History in Public Space: Autobiographical Narratives of Polish Jews on the You Tube Platform – Between Oral History and Visual Ethnography
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
The POLIN Museum’s Oral History Collection, is a unique collection of personal documents related to the individual fate and social history of Polish Jews. At the core of the collection are video recordings of interviews with representatives of three generations of Polish Jews: wartime (individuals born before the outbreak of World War II), post-war and the youngest, raised in the era of Poland’s political transformation (late 1980s and early 1990s). The collection is complemented by interviews with descendants of Polish Jews born abroad and Poles who witnessed Jewish fate. The collection is made available to a wider audience, among others, through the You Tube channel “Oral History/ POLIN Museum Collection” on which full recordings of oral history interviews and various film forms showing witnesses to history are presented. The You Tube channel has a loyal audience - at the same time, the most popular are the recordings of long (reaching 180 minutes) narratives, which reach more than 100 thousand views. In the presentation I will analyze the reasons for the popularity of long oral history materials, as well as the motivations and reactions of history witnesses themselves to make their narratives available to a wide audience. At the same time, I will present activities related to the search for new film forms based on recordings with witnesses of history - which are a form of searching for the fullest documentation of the subjectivity of the witness of history, which, thanks to the visual form, go beyond the classic oral history interview recorded in a studio.
Speakers
The Role of Yiddish in Individual and Communal Identity Formation in Historical, Mythical, and Contemporary Lithuania
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
What is the place of Yiddish in Jewish Lithuania today? How does this align or diverge from the place of Yiddish among Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) who grew up or trace their lineages within the historical borders of Lithuania or the Jewish concept of “Lite (Lithuania)”? What happens when linguistic and geographic identity markers are considered in tandem? Drawing on dozens of oral history interviews conducted as part of my work with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project over the past dozen years, I posit that centering the Yiddish language blurs borders and regional divisions allowing for a wider lens on Jewish history, culture, and experience in Lithuania and the region. Simultaneously, a focus on the language highlights diversity of language use, identity, and Jewish communal life in regions across historic and contemporary Lithuanian borders. The interface of memory and language among those who no longer live within Lithuania’s borders but who remain deeply identified with a Litvak identity reveals other facets of how Jewish Lithuania exists in collective consciousness. In this presentation, I will show highlights of interviews with Yiddish speakers within the present-day borders as well as Yiddish-speaking Litvaks to analyze the place of Yiddish within historical, mythical, and contemporary Lithuania.
Speakers
Seeing the Spoken Word: Curating Oral Histories in a Visual World
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
Curating oral history clips necessitates a basic understanding of visual framing that draws out the key features of the interview. This is a look at some of the visual communication techniques that the Oral History Centre employs when highlighting oral history interviews in a predominantly visual landscape, in the context of multicultural and multilingual Singapore.
● Considerations of design principles in presenting oral history curated clips. ● Work process of creating visual style templates and video clips in a team with varying software proficiencies. ● The nuances of curating with oral history interviews in mother tongue languages. ● The importance of a holistic archival collection in establishing contextual use of oral history interviews.
Speakers
Oral History at FGV CPDOC: Preservation and Dissemination Experiences
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the impact of audiovisuals on oral history interviews in the process of making, recording, preserving and disseminating them. The case study is the experience of the Oral History Program (PHO) and the Audiovisual and Documentary Center (NAD) of the FGV CPDOC located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Created in 1973, in 1975 the FGV CPDOC started its Oral History Program (PHO), a pioneer in the institutionalization of the method in Brazil. Over the course of its 50 years, it has faced many challenges in producing its collection, which today has around 2,510 interviews and 7,800 hours of recorded material, most of which is available to the public and always free of charge. In the mid-2000s, the PHO began filming its interviews, promoting reflections on the role of gestures in the formation of discourses. From this footage, we began producing various documentaries, several of which have been shown at festivals, schools and universities, as well as in places where this collection usually didn’t reach, such as organized soccer fans and social movements. We are therefore analyzing the extent to which the use of audiovisuals enables and favors the dissemination of this collection, bringing other audiences to the CPDOC Archives. n addition to the use of video recording, there have also been other changes: the advent of digital recording and the use of the internet. While these changes have not affected the essence of the method - the interviewer/interviewee interaction, mediated by technology, resulting in a product to be preserved and made available - they have brought major challenges.This paper explores them from the perspective of Public History and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on methodological discussions and the impact of audiovisuals on the public place of Historical Oral History Archives.
Speakers
A Greater Listening – Landscape, Place and Recognition in Community Oral History Practice
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
This paper will discuss the latent potential within both existing collections of community oral history, as well as a greater facilitation and encouragement of locally based collecting projects. The speaker’s work with numerous clients in Ireland and America, as well as his own oral history work over almost twenty-five years, will form the basis for experience-based observations of the status of oral heritage in Ireland and will present an argument that much of the oral heritage resource, remains untapped. The reality of a significant oral history resource on legacy formats, identified by the speaker in regional and countywide audits will be highlighted, indicating a potential 100,000 recordings on various formats, many uncatalogued and inaccessible in Ireland. Examples from the speaker’s collection of over 1,000 recordings will be played to illuminate the value of the human story, including the finding in 1948 by twenty-eight-year-old Paddy O’Malley of a 3,000-year-old gold collar and how this connected to a tale told to him as a boy. The paper will argue that there exists an inherent capacity to understand the landscape around communities, that enables locally based recording initiatives to unlock and culture disclosures of memory, often unique to the local collector.