13 July 2022
MDOH: The Forward-View with Machteld Venken and Elspeth Brown
The third in the Multimodal Digital Oral History seminar series welcomed Machteld Venken from the University of Luxembourg and Elspeth Brown from University of Toronto, Canada.
The recording of the seminar can be accessed here: Multimodal Digital Oral History: The Forward-View Seminar – 4
Firstly, Machteld’s paper, titled Talking borders, history and digital hermeneutics, introduced her research arising from an interdisciplinary citizen science experiment hosted in Vienna on the centenary of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This entailed Citizen Scientists (CS), bachelor students in the humanities studying at different border region universities throughout the ex-Habsburg area, talking to each other or to a Border Scholar participating in the Association for Borderlands Studies World Conference as equals about the meaning of borders. Machteld explained the set up of the exchanges, which took place in person and were followed by a Digital Café for 100 days after the event. She described the unexpected shifting of dialogues from between CS and Border Scholar to CS talking to CS about their experiences of life and history in border regions, and the different dynamics and non-academic, affective quality of discussion that this led to. The Digital Café allowed users to post a memorable quote from the exchanges as a spark for discussion and comments, and the paper focused on one participant who was particularly engaged with this forum and who demonstrated an arc in their perspective on received history throughout the exchanges. The second major aspect of the paper was to discuss the potential for such oral histories to be presented in the newly established Journal of Digital History (De Gruyter & University of Luxembourg), which uses a novel form of digital publishing that layers narrative, hermeneutics and data and allows for more expansive presentation of the research process, not simply the results. Machteld and her colleagues on the project have been using Clarin Elan to annotate and analyse these oral testimonies. They are now exploring how they might present their oral histories and their analysis as both a narrative layer and hermeneutic layer, whereby the reader can see the analytic process in the publication rather than static screenshots.
Secondly, Elspeth’s paper, titled Is there anybody out there? Multimodal research creation and queer oral history, raised three challenges in doing multimodal digital oral history and anchored these provocations around the Pussy Palace Oral History Project a collaboration between the LGBTQ Digital History Collaboratory and The ArQuives and the first of it's kind in Canadian history. 'Pussy Palace' was a lesbian and trans bathhouse event that was raided in 2000. The three challenges Elspeth raised were:
- How can we make our oral histories accessible in meaningful ways, beyond simply putting them online?
- How can we queer oral history interviewing strategies to facilitate narrators’ sensory engagement with the past?
- How can we sidestep the colonial logics of research extraction through an ethical collaboration with narrators in the creation and circulation of research findings?
Elspeth discussed the use of research creation, ethical collaboration, and a multimodal, multisensory and site specific methodology while working with narrators to explore their memories of the Pussy Palace as an event and as a physical space, and later to co-produce creative materials for presenting and sharing those memories. Elspeth asked: 'Why not make the most of these rich sonic and visual sources from our complex, multi modal sources and create shorter form creative works, based on the oral histories, with the goal of engaging community members in the research project and directing them to longer form versions if those might be of interest?' She raised some unsettling realities throughout the paper and in the subsequent discussion, notably the extent to which oral history recordings are actually listened to or watched, if at all, and how little data we have to assess end-user engagement. Furthermore, the consequences of making LGBTQ oral histories accessible online where they may be weaponised and misrepresented by anti-LGBTQ groups in a volatile political climate.
Questions that followed concerned the possibility for reconciliation in politically fractured borderlands such as the Italian-Slovenian one through dialogues such as the Digital Café; what ethical issues might arise in doing multimodal oral history projects around queer histories; and future possibilities for representing paralinguistic features using software like Clarin Elan and publishing such data in a live form such as in the Journal of Digital History.
- Hannah K. Smyth, 26 July 2022
Speakers:
Machteld Venken, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Title
Talking borders, history and digital hermeneutics
Abstract
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an interdisciplinary citizen science experiment was hosted at the University of Vienna, during which Citizen Scientists, bachelor students in the humanities studying at different border regions’ universities throughout the ex-Habsburg area, talked to each other or to a Border Scholar participating in the Association for Borderlands Studies World Conference as equals about the meaning of borders. In this talk, I compare how participants recalled the past within the different genres of the monologue, dialogue and digital café.
It is argued that the monologues generated through expert interviews among CSs offer us limited new knowledge about the way CSs used the past in order to give meaning to themselves in the world, compared to the monologues articulated by Border Scholars who sometimes possessed more scholarly expertise as well as storytelling skills. The dialogues, however, were a more suitable genre for CSs to express their past practices of growing up in borderlands in South Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. Whereas participants also mentioned and commented on the past while chatting in the digital café, their contributions only offer us similar new knowledge about contemporary history than the CS dialogues.
The paper uses digital hermeneutics in order to reflect upon the creation of new source materials with citizen scientists, evaluates the opportunities and hindrances of the newly created global digital café environment, and investigates new publishing possibilities for a sonoric analysis of the data.
Bio
Machteld Venken is a Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). She studied Slavic Languages and Cultures, European Studies and History in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine. Venken earned her PhD in 2008 at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and her habilitation in 2018 at the University of Vienna (Austria). She has been a Principal Investigator of eight research projects funded in four European countries. Venken joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2019 after a Visiting Scholarship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg / Institute of Advanced Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) and an Attract Brains for Brussels Fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium). Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children, and citizen science.
Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto, Canada
Title
Is there anybody out there? Multimodal research creation and queer oral history
Abstract
"In the shift to on-line oral history archiving and access, researchers face new opportunities, and challenges, in creating wide-spread access to oral histories and their associated data, including video and sound files, ephemera, transcripts, metadata, and more. For community-engaged projects seeking to reach broader audiences, who exactly is our audience, and do they have the time and patience to view and listen to hours of un-edited oral history footage? Is getting oral histories on-line enough to ensure meaningful access?
My talk will focus on one strategy to increase community access to digital oral history projects: research creation. Research creation is an approach to research that combines creative and academic research, and which supports the development of knowledge through creative expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. In our current oral history project on the last major police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canada, we have turned to research creation to address three challenges: 1) how can we make our oral histories accessible in meaningful ways, beyond simply putting them on-line? 2) how can we queer oral history interviewing strategies to facilitate narrators’ sensory engagement with the past? and 3) how can we sidestep the colonial logics of research extraction through an ethical collaboration with narrators in the creation and circulation of research findings?"
Bio
Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, her research concerns modern queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; the history of US capitalism; and queer archives. She is currently the Director for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and the Digital Humanities Network, U of T. She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a SSHRC-funded multi-year public humanities collaboration with community and university partners. From 2014-2021, she served on the Board of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBQT2+ Archive, most recently as Co-President.