New Dialogues with the Research Community.
About the Collection, Management and
Dissemination of Interview Data
Marion Wittenberg
www.dans.knaw.nl
2008 conference on archiving oral history data
Veteran tapes project Enhanced publication
Collaboration of:• Veteran InstituteStef Scagiola
• KWALONFred Wester
• SPEXHenk van den Heuvel, Eric Sanders
• DANSPaula Witkamp, Rene van Horik
Source Veteran tapes project
• Veteran institute• Dutch Ministry of Defense• Veterans (WOII until recent missions)• Collection of 1000 interviews • Subset of 25 interviews with transcriptions
Research Corpus Veteran tapes project
• 25 interviews • Each between 2 – 2.5 hrs• Recorded at 44 kHz• Stored in 16 kHz, 16 bits wave• Orthographically transcribed and aligned with
audio• Rich body of metadata• Stored at DANS with Persistent Identifiers
Researchers Veteran tapes project
7 disciplines 7 perspectives
• Ideas about allies and enemies • Discourse about acts of violence• Moral dilemmas• Religion and spirituality• How to deal with shocking incidents• We and Them: ideas about local inhabitants • Personal experiences versus formal history
The fragment fitter tool Veteran tapes project
Find fragment
Inspect audio
Adjust transcription
Add annotation
Select metadata
Enhanced publication Veteran tapes project
The data behind the publication
Interview and fragment
Audio
Transcription
Metadata
Problems and drawbacks Veteran tapes project
• Access to the fragment versus access to the whole interview
• Rating system• Decontextualisation• Difference between disciplines• Archive format versus analyses format• Persistent identifiers• Citation
Telling Witnesses of WOII
• Project of the Ministry of Welfare • Interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses
to the Second World War on video• Digital core collection oral history
Things to be solved
• 47 different project leaders to deal with• Much diversity: researchers, filmmakers,
archives, organisations like the Anne Frank foundation
• How do we get the appropriate metadata• Which formats? Archive versus distribution• Streaming server embedded in our
archiving system• Privacy aspects
Cooperation – ‘Verteld verleden’
• Platform for oral history in the Netherlands• Institute for audio visual heritage - Beeld en
Geluid • Institute for women history – Aletta• Institute on language and culture in the
Netherlands – Meertens Institute• DANS – Data Archiving and Networked Services
Many oral history data