Oral-History.Digital: Interview portal, curation platform and research environment

Archives and Oral History Special Interest Group

For the September meeting of the Archives and Oral History Special Interest Group, Dr. Cord Pagenstecher will speak about his work developing Oral-History.Digital.

Since 2020, Freie Universität Berlin and its partners have developed “Oral-History.Digital” as an infrastructure for audiovisual research data from oral history. Guided by the FAIR principles, “Oral-History.Digital” makes interviews findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as research data.

It is an interview portal: Researchers, educators and the general public can search for interviews across collections using filters and full-text search.

It is also a curation platform: Interview projects, museums, universities and foundations can upload their audio and video interviews with accompanying materials, edit them with tools for transcription or keywording and make them available for education and scholarship.

And it is a research environment: Registered users can view interviews with subtitles and accompanying materials, and annotate, analyse and cite them using the workbook and other features.

Dr. Cord Pagenstecher, historian, works in the Digital Interview Collections department of the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin, where he leads the “Oral-History.Digital” project (2020-2026) and the FU Berlin participation in the NFDI4Memory consortium of the National Research Data Infrastructure. He has worked on interview-based research and learning platforms about Nazi forced labor, Colonia Dignidad and the church asylum movement, and published on National Socialism, Tourism History, Migration Research, Oral History, Visual History and Digital Humanities.

This is an online meeting via Zoom. For more information contact the Chair of this Special Interest Group, Charlie Morgan.