Conference article

Curating and Analyzing Oral History Collections

Cord Pagenstecher
University Library, Center for Digital Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

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Published in: Selected papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2018, Pisa, 8-10 October 2018

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 159:15, p. 144-151

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Published: 2019-05-28

ISBN: 978-91-7685-034-3

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

This paper presents the digital interview collections available at Freie Universität Berlin, focus-ing on the online archive Forced Labor 1939-1945, and discusses the digital perspectives of curating and analyzing oral history collections. The digital curation of interview collections fa-ces a number of problems like standards interoperability or privacy protection, but also chances built on progress in automatic speech recognition. Digital archives enhance the possibility of comparative studies. A pilot study based on two interviews from the Berlin collections, high-lights differences in narrative performativity, in dialogical interaction, and in multilingualism. Finally, the paper looks at perspectives of interdisciplinary cooperation with CLARIN projects and at the challenges of cross-collection search and de-contextualization.

Keywords

Audiovisual narrative data, Oral history, Research environment

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