Erasmus University Rotterdam

Oral History Today

Researchers involved: Franciska de Jong, Max Kemman, Stef Scagliola

Duration:  2012-2014

General information:  http://zoeken.verteldverleden.org/#/about

Under the name of  Oral History Today (OHT) a series of projects has been funded within the programma CLARIAH with the aim to build applications for researchers from the humanities that want to work with Oral History data.

Oral History Today is a collaboration with Beeld en Geluid, and some SMEs. 

CLARIAH clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_XHdYPrqEc

Methodology and results

The development of OHT is based on four research stages:

  • Selection phase: an exploratory phase in which an archive is consulted to arrive at a selection of relevant sources;

  • Analysis Phase: zooming in on the selected sources and answering a research question;

  • Presentation Phase: a phase in which the results of the study are presented, for example through an enhanced publication;

  • Curation phase: a phase in which all data sets and research results are stored permanently.

Oral History Today focuses on the first two phases of the study. Think for the selection phase on mechanisms to get the content of an audiovisual archive, for example by presenting themes, time periods, collection managers, locations and researchers associated with the sources (windows on the data).  This is partly realised through search and exploration tools with filter options (facets) on the basis of the available metadata.  In the second phase the selected sources are researched in more detail, and tools to cluster fragments or to discover meaningful links can be applied. 

The OHT functionality is evaluated in consultation with OH researchers. 

Publications

Kemman, M., Scagliola, S., De Jong, F., & Ordelman, R. (2013)  Talking With Scholars: Developing a Research Environment for Oral History Collections. In: Proceedings TPDL 2013, LNCS 416 proceedings. Valletta, Malta: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.  Preprint paper @ arXiv  -  Slides @ SlideShare