Croatian Memories : speech, meaning and emotions in a collection of interviews on experiences of war and trauma

Abstract

In this contribution we describe a collection of approximately 400 video interviews recorded in the context of the project Croatian Memories (CroMe) with the objective of documenting personal war-related experiences. The value of this type of sources is threefold: they contain information that is missing in written sources, they can contribute to the process of reconciliation, and they provide a basis for reuse of data in disciplines with an interest in narrative data. The CroMe collection is not primarily designed as a linguistic corpus, but is the result of an archival effort to collect so-called oral history data. For researchers in the fields of natural language processing and speech analysis this type of life-stories may function as an 'objet trouvé' containing real-life language data that can prove to be useful for the purpose of modelling specific aspects of human expression and communication