Oral-History.Digital 2. Consolidation and optimization of the curation and research platform for audiovisual narrative interviews

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Andreas Henrich; Dr. Almut Leh, since 12/2023; Dr. Dennis Mischke, since 5/2024; Privatdozent Dr. Florian Schiel
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437972564

The project "Oral-History.Digital 2" (oh.d 2) intends to consolidate and optimize a research infrastructure for scholarly collections of audiovisually recorded interviews. Narrative oral history interviews are important sources and research data in history, linguistics, social sciences and humanities. In the digital transformation, the demand for their FAIR archiving and – also interdisciplinary – secondary analysis is increasing. Therefore, the information infrastructure Oral-History.Digital (oh.d) has been established with DFG funding since 2020. It supports collecting institutions and research projects in archiving, curating and presenting their oral history interviews as well as researchers and other users in searching, annotating and analyzing them. So far, a functioning prototype has been implemented, a user community has been established, and a financially and legally viable operating model has been developed. With the project "Oral-History.Digital 2. Consolidation and Optimization of the Curation and Research Platform for Audiovisual Narrative Interviews" (oh.d 2), the functions of the infrastructure will be consolidated for regular operation, individual services will be advanced and integrated, the database will be expanded, and the cooperation with the user community will be extended and consolidated on an interdisciplinary and international level. In seven work packages (consulting and community, software consolidation, software integration, evaluation, interoperability, interdisciplinarity and internationality, coordination), oh.d 2 is creating a comprehensive reference system and a source-specific research environment that supports standard-compliant curation and archiving as well as digital research and analysis. In this project, Freie Universität Berlin (FUB, University Library/CeDiS) is cooperating with Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (UniBA, Chair of Media Informatics), FernUniversität in Hagen (FeU, Institute for History and Biography), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU, Modern and Contemporary History), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU, Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals), and the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (WdE, Werkstatt der Erinnerung).

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: CLARIN - European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology; Digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften (DARIAH-DE); Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH)
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Linde Apel
• Ehemalige Antragstellerinnen / Ehemalige Antragsteller: Dr. Andreas Brandtner, until 5/2024; Professorin Dr. Julia Obertreis, until 12/2023 (†)