Lessons learnt from building a digital infrastructure for oral history in the Netherlands

Oral historians are increasingly recognizing the benefits of making their interviews available as datasets and ensuring they are 'FAIR' (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This practice encourages reuse by researchers, museums, community archives, and others. However, digitization also brings several key methodological debates in oral history into focus, including the necessity of transcripts, the intersubjective nature of oral history, and ethical concerns about publishing. In addition, digitization has blurred notions of ‘research data’ and ‘heritage data’, and of ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ (or community) oral history. In this talk, I will explore the CLARIAH Media Suite and asses how various methodological issues in oral history have complicated its use, including informed consent, transcription, thesauri and metadata standards. Top of FormThe CLARIAH Media Suite is designed to provide researchers with access to (cultural heritage) data in the Netherlands, including oral history datasets. It allows users to search and visualize large volumes of oral history data, and compile and annotate oral history corpora in a personal digital workspace. The Media Suite also features tools for research such as speech recognition and text mining.

All welcome to join this online seminar. Please register to receive the joining details: https://voices-unbound.eventbrite.co.uk

Voices unbound? Exploring new and/or possible directions in digital and experimental oral history

A lecture series co-organised by TU Darmstadt, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. The series is convened by Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt), Andrew Flinn, Andreas Vlachidis, and Marco Humbel (UCL), Shih-Pei Chen (Max Planck Institute), and Gerben Zaagsma (C²DH), offering an important way of keeping up to date with the methodological and theoretical state of the art in digital oral history. We invited speakers to present work on recent technological developments that may hold promise for digital oral history. In this way, the seminar series appeals to (digital) oral historians, digital humanists and scholars of the history of information, memory and knowledge systems.