Preliminary Programme

Proposal ‘Oral History and Life Stories Network’ ESSHC-2023

Towards a connected digital oral history collection: Interview collection (ICNV) Dutch Veterans Institute

In 2006 the starting point of the interview collection (ICNV) for the Netherlands Veterans Institute was the gathering of oral historical sources. Since the beginning of this project, we’ve collected over 1500 interviews with veterans - making this collection the largest oral history collection of the Netherland to this date. By making these interviews accesible for the general public, the Dutch Veteran Instiute has the ambition to serve different disciplines and preserving these stories for generations to come.

The reanalysis of the qualitative interview material has proven to be a valuable source for different scientific purposes in the past. At present, we’re taking a digital turn with the collection – this includes implementing a new collections management system according to the latest digital heritage guidelines as provided by the Duch Network Digital Heritage (NDE). By doing so, our organisation will be able to monitor and mantain the digital oral history collection (ICNV) while also adding underlying linked data. This gives us the opportunity to discover new connections and themes between related data from other institutions which might have been otherwise invisible.

Criteria for this collections management system are:

- A searchable database that's intuitive and collections focused.
- A system that improves our workflow working with the oral history
collection.
- Automated allocation of persistent identifiers to our oral history collection.
- Being able to use linked open data and underlying linked data to connect multiple collections.

Seeing the scope of this project and the relevance for the ESSHC network of our findings in the process towards a connected oral history collection, for our paper we will build around the topic 'impacts of the digitalization process on oral history materials and on doing oral history'. Thus, in our paper the following question will be posed: How does implementing a new and collection appropriate collection registration system benefit an insitutions oral history practices and connected data management?
We will attempt to anwer this question by using our own progress in digitalizing the oral history collection and the search for a fitting collections management system as a case study. We’ll consider what choices have been made during this project, and what challenges we’ve come across in the process towards a better linked and accesible collection. Furthermore, we will discuss the impact of connecting with peer organisations and the benefits of joining knowledge sharing networks like the Dutch Network for Digital Heritage (NDE) and Knooppunt Sprekende Geschiedenis – a network that aims to promote oral history in all it's facets.

See www.veteranenvertellen.nl for the oral history collection of the Netherlands Veterans Institute. (Show less)

Conducting digital interviews – possibilities and pit falls

Highly skilled immigrants and refugees are often forgotten in both public discourse and in research. Unfortunately, historians are in no exception to this. My PhD thesis concerns highly skilled immigrants’ experiences and education in Sweden. When interviewing Waed, a teacher and Syrian refugee a plethora of different topics came to the surface – displacement, education, work life, family life – and emotions. In this paper I will discuss and examine one interview conducted through the digital conference tool Zoom. How did the digital format affect the interview? Which topics worked well to discuss? What should be kept in mind when meeting a person through a screen? How well can hard past and current experiences be expressed in a digital environment? Drawing from the advice given by Charlie Morgan, Rob Perks, Mary Stewart, and Camille Johnston through the Oral History Society on interviewing during the COVID-19 pandemic, several questions regarding research methods and ethics are discussed. Interviewing without sharing the same physical space can create both distance and closeness between the participants, which makes preparing for the digital interview very important. It is my opinion that interviewing in the more traditional way with participants in the same physical space differs greatly from doing it through a screen. The digital interview is a good tool for conducting interviews when meeting in person is too dangerous, but it raises many new questions for the researcher to face regarding every step of the interviewing process. (Show less)

“Oral-History.Digital” is an infrastructure project funded for three-year by the German Research Foundation. The project is led by the Free University of Berlin, which has expertise in the web-based provision of such collections with the Archive of Forced Labour (https://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/) and other digital interview collections (https://www.cedis.fu-berlin.de/services/e-research/digitale-interviewsammlungen/index.html). The archive "Deutsches Gedächtnis" (German Memory) (https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/geschichteundbiographie/deutschesgedaechtnis/ ) and the "Werkstatt der Erinnerung" (Workshop of Remembrance) (http://www.werkstatt-der-erinnerung.de/index_desktop.php ) contribute their professional know-how and large interview collections to the project.
The aim of the project is to design and implement a cross-institutional research data repository for narrative interviews that enables the sustainable management of au-diovisual research data and the provision of sensitive personal data according to the FAIR principles - findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable. The working envi-ronment supports collecting institutions and research projects in archiving, indexing and making available their interview collections. Researchers can use “Oral-History.digital” to search across collections using metadata, registers and full text search. In addition, researchers can annotate selected interviews in their own work-ing environment.
This research data repository, which is tailored to oral history interviews, will be pre-sented in its basic features and functionalities in order to address the effects of this digitally supported way of dealing with oral history interviews in the second part of the lecture. Advantages - such as the visibility and accessibility of collections, the ability to find relevant interviews, citability, the extension of interpretation from tran-scripts to audio and video recordings and thus the inclusion of speech, facial ex-pressions and gestures - will be named, but also problematic heuristic, epistemolog-ical and research-ethical aspects will be put up for discussion.

The lecture leads on to the proposal submitted by Dennis Möbus and Lina Franken “Humans and Machines annotating Oral History Interviews. Comparing machine generated topics and human created annotations”. (Show less)