The Case Of Interview Data: A multidisciplinary approach to the use of technology in research using interview methods

As increasingly sophisticated new technologies for working with numbers, text, sound and images come on stream, there is one type of data that begs to be explored by the wide array of available digital humanities tools, and that is interview data. (De Jong, 2014), (Corti and Fielding, 2016). A stream of concerted activities by the authors of this workshop based on their engagement with interview data from different perspectives, led to a series of 4 workshops from 2016 to 2018, held in Oxford, Utrecht, Arezzo and München, that were funded by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure).

This workshop intended to present the motivation for this DH2019-workshop by sketching the complex design and results of these series of multidisciplinary workshops. The premise was that the multimodal character (text, sound and facial expression) and multidisciplinary potential of interview data (history, oral and written language, audio-visual communication) is rarely fully exploited, as most scholars focus on the analysis of the textual representation of the interviews. This might change by getting acquainted with scholarly approaches and conventions from other disciplines.