Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: enfolding semantic web technologies and historical-interpretative analysis to better understand narratives of formation, disruption and change in the history of computing in the Humanities

• Applicant: Professorin Julianne Nyhan, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528052031

Long before social media and the internet, oral history used representational technologies, like the tape recorder, to capture and amplify voices that would otherwise have gone unheard. Yet, despite oral history’s long use of technology, its engagement with the digital turn in the humanities has thus far been limited, focussing more on recording and accessibility rather than analysis and new research possibilities. Oral historians are predominately using the digital to publish and disseminate interviews or to interrogate individual interviews according to timestamp, project-specific annotation and interview-specific keyword. The field has engaged little with research that is ongoing in other fields of the Humanities, such as History, which is showing the potential of Semantic Web technologies to open a new quality of research horizon. Based on formal languages such as RDF, RDFS or OWL, these technologies can describe the meaning and the connections among data to define concepts, persons, places, and any kind of entity and to facilitate multifaceted retrieval, reasoning, optimal data integration and knowledge reuse. It is this innovative and far-reaching research potential that this project seeks to unlock. This project will bring together experienced researchers in the UK and Germany to ask how semantic web technologies, historical-interpretative analysis and digital research methods can be mobilized and interfolded to foment a 'digital methodological-hermeneutical turn' in oral history research. Positioning the emerging sub-field of the history of Digital Humanities as an exemplary case study for this research, this project will seek to understand the impacts that digital technology is making on the production, organization and 'peoplescapes' of Humanities knowledge (and vice versa). In doing so, it will develop and make freely available an interoperable infrastructure of interconnected entities, in the form of a Knowledge Graph, to promote shared understanding, information representation, interrogation and discovery whilst ensuring data consistency, reusability and accessibility. Moreover, this project will generate new historical knowledge and data about the processes of formation, disruption and change that have underpinned the take up of technology in the wider Humanities, leading to the field now known as Digital Humanities. Using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles we will advocate data sharing and reuse, ensuring transparency and reliability of our project. Combining oral history as source and process, semantic web technologies and digital methods, this project will create new knowledge, digital artefacts and hermeneutic critical reflections that have relevance right across the fields of oral history and the history of knowledge, the history of the humanities and science, information studies and computer science including semantic technologies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Andrew Flinn; Dr. Andreas Vlachidis