MeDoraH: A multidisciplinary project introducing a digital turn in oral history research

Dr Andreas Vlachidis (PI) and Dr Andrew Flinn (Co-I) in collaboration with Professor Julianne Nyhan (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany) have been awarded a research grant funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation for the project “Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: Enfolding semantic web technologies and historical- interpretative analysis”. The grant worth £441,798 (UCL) and € 632,736 (TU Darmstadt) will last 34 months, starting on 01 February 2024.  It will involve the recruitment of one PDRA at UCL with expertise in semantic web and information extraction technologies and two PDRAs at TU Darmstadt with expertise in hermeneutics, network analysis and oral history research.  The project is supported by the AHRC-DFG funding programme aimed at developing research collaborations between the UK and Germany and it is one of the eighteen collaborative projects funded in round 5.

Positioning the emerging sub-field of the history of Digital Humanities as an exemplary case, the project seeks to understand the impacts that digital technology is making on the production, organisation and ‘peoplescapes’ of Humanities knowledge. The history of computing and the humanities has attracted much interest and Digital Humanities is understood as an important arena of historical research, with the potential to offer new perspectives on the impacts of electromechanical and digital technologies on dispersed communities of knowledge production, and vice versa.

The project will employ a mixed methods bundle of qualitative and data-driven research to explore the processes of change in the Humanities while devising digital approaches and processes that can be used by oral historians and historians more broadly. In doing so, it will develop and make freely available an interoperable infrastructure of interconnected entities, in the form of a Knowledge Graph, to promote shared understanding, information representation, interrogation and discovery. Using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles the project will advocate data sharing and reuse, ensuring transparency and reliability of research outputs.

Combining oral history as a source and process, semantic web technologies and digital methods, this project will create new knowledge, digital artefacts and hermeneutic critical reflections that have relevance right across the fields of oral history and the history of knowledge, the history of the humanities and science, information studies and computer science including semantic technologies.

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Produced using the text to image AI art generator Imagine
Prompt: "Digital humanities, histories, network "
Model: Imagine V4
Art style: Bauhaus

Contact

Andreas Vlachidis

Tel: +44 20 7679 2396

Email: a.vlachidis [at] ucl.ac.uk