Workshop: Sociological Aspects of Oral History in the Digital Age

Speaker: Jakub Mlynář, Malach Center for Visual History, Charles University, Prague

The workshops gives you an opportunity to work with one of the largest digital archives of oral history: the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive https://sfi.usc.edu. The digital database consists of more than 54, 500 audio-visual recordings of oral history interviews. Most of the interviews (nearly 50%) are in English, but nowadays there are also more than 35 other languages. Over 150 interviews from the Archive are related to Luxembourg history.

During our workshop, we are going to combine theory and practice and focus on secondary analysis of archival interviews. We will discuss their roles in contemporary society as well as interpret issues in secondary use of archived oral history. It is important to emphasize that the USC Shoah Foundation’s archive is no longer only a deposit of Shoah testimonies. Nowadays, there is a considerable number of newly recorded testimonies about the genocides around the world. The digital turn leads to growing number of online oral history databases, resulting from “process-oriented” oral history projects (i.e., life story interviews conducted without specific research questions).  Participants will also learn how to use the available data not only for scientific purposes but also for teaching  needs.