The Dutch Veterans Interview Project: recognition and attention in exchange for valuable information

__Abstract__ Accounts from people who have been actively involved in warfare, which are then told in a peaceful and safe environment, are excellent resources for studying the shifts in norms and values between the military and the civilian realm. It is with this contention that the Netherlands Veterans Institute (VI) decided to engage, in an extensive oral history project consisting of 1.000 collected biographical interviews with a representative number of veterans from all recent conflicts and military missions involving the Netherlands. The oldest interviewees were conscripts in the defence of the Netherlands during the German invasion in May 1940; the youngest are professional military, trained for international operations such as those recently deployed in Afghanistan in the context of the International Stabilisation Force Afghanistan. The project’s aim was to make this oral data accessible to the general public, media, educators, as well as the academic community

Clio’s talkative daughter goes digital

__Abstract__ The introduction of the recording device at the beginning of the twentieth century not only marked a major transition in communication technology, but also paved the way for a revaluation of the oral account in Western historiography. With the rise of early civilizations and the introduction of writing tools it had lost its central role in the transfer of meaning and identity. Centuries later, the spread of literacy and the invention of the printing press stimulated the consolidation and appreciation of historical sources in textual form. Given the weight of this strong focus on text, the invention of a device that could capture and reproduce the human voice directly can be truly regarded as revolutionary. Most important, in the context of historical sources, is that accounts could now be stored and preserved in their original form: as sound. This development laid the ground for the practice that is referred to as ‘oral history’. Another series of transitions, decisive for the accessibility and contextualization of oral narratives, set in with the ‘digital turn’ at the end of the twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of these transitions by showing how the interplay between technology and social-cultural change influenced the creation and appreciation of oral history interviews as sources of knowledge. What can be observed is a shift in appreciation of what is regarded as the most truthful and characteristic representation of the oral account: the original sound recording or the transcribed interview. Although the term ‘oral history’ has various meanings, most scholars agree that its purpose is to create spoken accounts on personal history in an interview setting. A distinction can be made between collecting interviews to answer a specific research question, and documenting the experiences of a person as an archival effort with future listeners in mind.1 The first approach, with strong roots in Europe, bears a strong resemblance to academic practices in the social sciences, and draws on a long tradition of investigative journalism. The second places oral history in the archival realm, and is strongly rooted in a tradition of nation-building, in which the state initiates projects that stimulate public involvement in the creation of shared cultural heritage. Researchers in the United States were the pioneers in using the method of oral history for this purpose.2 The paper starts off with a description of the change in status of oral sources in the late nineteenth century and the parallel technological innovation. The next stage presented is the early evolution of the practice of interviewing in relation to bearing witness to crises and conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. Then the emergence of the postwar social movement is described and its central role in developing a pluralist perspective on history by giving voice to minority groups through collecting life stories and making them public. The following section discusses the impact of the digital turn and the introduction of the Internet on historical culture in general and on oral history in particular. The final section deals with the potential of information and communications technology (ICT) for the accessibility and analysis of digital oral history

"Croatian Memories": eine Interviewsammlung mit personlichen Berichten uber Krieg und Traumata.

This book chapter summarizes the aims and methodology underlying the collection oral history interviews that has been generated in the context of the project Croatian Memories. It includes an overview of facts and figures for the contents of the collection and the interviewees

The VeteranTapes: Research Corpus, Fragment Processing Tool, Enhanced Publications for the e- Humanities

Enhanced Publications are a new way to publish scientific and other results in an electronic article. The advantage of EPs is that the relation between the article and the underlying data facilitate the peer review process and other quality assessment activities. Due to the link between de publication and the research data the publication can be much richer than a paper edition permits. We present an example of EPs in which links are made to interview fragments that include transcripts, audio segments, annotations and metadata. EPs call for a new paradigm of research methodology in which digital persistent access to research data are a central issue. In this contribution we highlight 1. The research data as it is archived and curated, 2. the concept ""enhanced publication"" and its scientific value, 3. the ""fragment fitter tool"", a language processing tool to facilitate the creation of EPs, 4. IPR issues related to the re-use of the interview data

The Perfect Data-Marriage

There is a growing recognition in transitional justice research of the crucial significance of context-appropriate measures of justice practices and needs, which account for the diversity, locality, and complexity of individuals’ experiences of the past. In this perspective, this paper highlights the significance of oral history collections for exploring pluralistic understandings of the personal past and their relation to symbolic justice practices and needs. We argue that their audio-visual dimension and multi-layered nature makes them a unique qualitative data source that can contribute to a more realistic assessment of justice concerns in transitional settings. As tools of social dialogue and inclusive justice, they are also valuable means to promote the mutual acceptance and recognition of suffering and responsibility. We demonstrate how findings based on the analysis of survey data collected in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) can be enriched by the exploration of oral history narratives from a dataset collected in BiH

Just Google It. Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars

The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data is whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average search skills of researchers. To gain insight into this process we conducted a survey among nearly three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium with the aim of finding answers to the following questions: 1) To what extent are digital databases and archives used? 2) What are the preferences in search functionalities 3) Are there differences in search strategies between novices and experts of information retrieval? Our results show that while scholars actively engage in research online they mainly search for text and images. General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana are rarely consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines, and mostly use keywords. Our overall findings indicate that Google is the key player among available search engines. This dominant use illustrates the paradoxical attitude of scholars toward Google: while provenance and context are deemed key academic requirements, the workings of the Google algorithm remain unclear. We conclude that Google introduces a black box into digital scholarly practices, indicating scholars will become increasingly dependent on such black boxed algorithms. This calls for a reconsideration of the academic principles of provenance and context.Abstract The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data is whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average search skills of researchers. To gain insight into this process we conducted a survey among nearly three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium with the aim of finding answers to the following questions: 1) To what extent are digital databases and archives used? 2) What are the preferences in search functionalities 3) Are there differences in search strategies between novices and experts of information retrieval? Our results show that while scholars actively engage in research online they mainly search for text and images. General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana are rarely consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines, and mostly use keywords. Our overall findings indicate that Google is the key player among available search engines. This dominant use illustrates the paradoxical attitude of scholars toward Google: while provenance and context are deemed key academic requirements, the workings of the Google algorithm remain unclear. We conclude that Google introduces a black box into digital scholarly practices, indicating scholars will become increasingly dependent on such black boxed algorithms. This calls for a reconsideration of the academic principles of provenance and context