Multimodal Digital Oral History: The Forward-View Seminar

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?

Multimodal Digital Oral History engages with oral history artefacts in all their representational modalities: transcript, sound, waveform, metadata and more. These seminars will 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.

Seminar #1 — 8 June 2022

Speakers:

• 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

Time: 18:00–19:30 CEST / 17:00–18:30 BST (see your local time)

Platform: Zoom

Seminar #2 — 22 June 2022

Speakers:

• Tanya Clement (University of Texas at Austin, United States) – Dissonant records: close listening to cultural resistance in audio archives

Time: 18:00–19:00 CEST / 17:00–18:00 BST (see your local time)

Platform: Zoom

Seminar #3 — 6 July 2022

Speakers:

• Almila Akdag Salah & Francisca Pessanha (Utrecht University, Netherlands) – What can breathing patterns tell us to analyze Oral History Archives?
• Myriam Fellous-Sigrist (King's College London, United Kingdom) – Between access and protection: applied ethics for curating digital oral history

Time: 18:00–19:30 CEST / 17:00–18:30 BST (see your local time)

Platform: Zoom

Seminar #4 — 13 July 2022

Speakers:

• Machteld Venken (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) – Talking borders, history and digital hermeneutics
• Elspeth Brown (University of Toronto, Canada) – Is there anybody out there? Multimodal research creation and queer oral history

Time: 18:00–19:30 CEST / 17:00–18:30 BST (see your local time)

Platform: Zoom

Seminar #5 — 20 July 2022

Speakers:

• Sharon Webb (University of Sussex, United Kingdom) – Streams of data: methods for distant and close listening for oral histories
• Tara Brabazon (Flinders University, Australia) – The auditory academic: transforming the soundscape of scholarship

Time: 18:00–19:30 CEST / 17:00–18:30 BST (see your local time)

Platform: Zoom

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).

For more information, see our website: https://multimodaldigitaloralhistory.omeka.net