Stories in Motion. Community oral history in the CLARIAH Media Suite

How can we make oral histories tangible as sustainable and reusable data in large scale research infrastructures? This poster shows the results from the Stories in Motion project in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which sought to assess and develop methods for making oral histories discoverable and accessible within the Dutch infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities CLARIAH. The case study based project resulted in a model and technical protocol for collecting and enriching oral history data for grassroots organizations, disseminating the CLARIAH infrastructure among these organizations, and making oral history data tangible and accessible as reusable data for both scholarly and grassroots audiences, through standards for data interoperability. In addition, the model can be adapted to suit the needs of individual researchers seeking to integrate, use and share their own oral history collections through the CLARIAH infrastructure. 

Oral history is not only practiced by academics, but is often used by communities whose historical experiences have left few textual or material traces, such as the working classes, migrants, women and LGBTQI communities. They can play a crucial role in uncovering hidden voices and contribute to a more balanced and nuanced perspective on local and (trans)national history (Shopes 2002 & 2015, Thomson 1999). Oral history and storytelling in general are popular methods for grassroots initiatives to explore community histories which would otherwise go unnoticed in public archival institutions. However, until recently in the Netherlands community oral histories often fell outside the scope of public archives’ collection policies. As a consequence, traditional archives lack multiperspectivity (Dresscher 2018, Karabinos 2019). Community oral histories are frequently neither stored nor curated in a sustainable manner after a project ends due to a lack of awareness of the possibilities of data reuse, or due to a lack of digital skills to deposit the oral histories as data in archives and repositories. 

In order to remedy this issue, Stories in Motion sought to develop a model that could provide the necessary tools for both research infrastructures and community archives. This poster shows both the collaborative design process and demonstrates the final model with which grassroots organizations can collect and enrich oral histories for the purpose of digital archiving and reuse for both academic and societal means in the Netherlands through interoperable data-standards.