Multimodal Digital Oral History: The Forward-View Seminar

If the first “digital turn” in oral history was largely a passive affair, concerned with the online dissemination of retro-digitised and born digital oral history recordings, what might the incipient “sound as data” turn herald? What gains and losses might result from data-driven enquiries of oral history interviews as sonic or multimodal artefacts, individually or at scale? Which digital tools, processes and platforms can best be utilized in the data-driven analysis of oral history as sonic and multimodal artefact? What rationale and ethical commitments should guide processes of tool selection and creation for this work? What new research questions and trans-disciplinary collaborations may follow? And what are the implications for oral history of participating in this research, as may be illuminated through the emerging sub-field of digital hermeneutics?

This seminar series takes as its jumping off point, that the time is right to pursue a Multimodal Digital Oral History, or one that engages with oral history artefacts in all their representational modalities: transcript, sound, waveform, metadata and more. Accordingly, it features papers that explore any of the questions posed above, and in doing so contribute to the task of imagining a Multimodal Digital Oral History turn, where the digital is active rather than passive; where digital oral history modalities are positioned as analytical categories of inquiry and also as sites of data-driven analysis; where reflexivity is a core aspect of digitally-mediated research; and as an endeavour that nevertheless remains attuned to oral history as a subjective and intersubjective meaning-making process, situated in space, time, culture and technology.

Convened by: Andrew Flinn (UCL) & Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt/UCL)

A joint virtual seminar co-hosted by the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies UCL; the Chair of Humanities Data Science and Methodology, TU Darmstadt, Germany; the International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research, UCL; and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Co-organised by Hannah Smyth (UCL) & Daniele Metilli (UCL).

Website: https://multimodaldigitaloralhistory.omeka.net

REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/multimodal-digital-oral-history-the-forward-view-seminar-tickets-347865253337

Seminar 1 – 8 June 2022

Douglas Lambert (University at Buffalo, United States) – Audio/video thematic indexing: meaning mapping for oral history access and usage
Alexander Freund (University of Winnipeg, Canada) – Historicizing modalities: a few thoughts on oral history under surveillance capitalism