“There Will Be an End, But We Don’t Know When”: Preserving Diverse COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences Through Oral History

Nyitray, Kristen J.; Reijerkerk, Dana; Kretz, Chris

doi:10.1177/15501906221079052

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…The call to "collect the moment" through newspapers and social networks during the pandemic has actualised the method "rapid response collecting" (RRC), which had previously been implemented in museum practice (Tenenbaum, 2020;Debono, 2021;Rodriguez, 2021). The RRC was used in the creation of national and international projects A Journal of the Plague Year, The COVID-19 Memory Archival Project, The COVID-19 Oral History Project (C19OH) to document everyday life and record people's experiences during quarantine (Rodeghero, & Weimer, 2021;Nyitray et al, 2022).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

Hudoshnyk¹

2023

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The relevance of analyzing the Ukrainian “text of war”, where individual voices are part of a coherent narrative, is related to the rate of changes in this content and the need for scientific understanding. The purpose of the paper is to describe the most illustrative examples of platforms and online resources that have collected witness interviews since the beginning of the war. The method of rapid response collecting and interdisciplinary methods were used to achieve the goal. The creation of platforms for collecting war stories, their structure, goals and working methods have become the subject of our research interest. Openness, accessibility, end-to-end tagging, simplified cataloguing, ease of navigation around a website or platform, and the ability to upload one’s own story have driven the popularity and demand for such resources. Structured and archival capabilities have helped war witnesses preserve not only their experiences but also the memory of those who did not survive. As a result of this research, we offer a description and structural analysis of the online Museum of Civilian Voices and certain platforms with oral testimonies and interviews of eyewitnesses (#MyWar, War. Stories from Ukraine, Ukrainian Witness). The mediatisation of all spheres of life is determined by the modern information space, in which the voices of witnesses become an important part of the process of forming national memory. The involvement of media in collecting and disseminating war testimonies and memories has become an everyday reality, in which individual stories are transformed into a common memory space. We have highlighted the following factors in the mediatisation of modern oral history: сommunicability (stemming from the public sphere as an integral part of oral history research), interdisciplinarity (using oral history methods to create different narratives) and global practices of powerful platforms for the collection and dissemination of stories and witness interviews (exemplified by StoryCorps). The speed of access, the efficiency and the possibilities of content dissemination have defined the nature of new media, and the internet has become the main tool for documenting war history, an archive of personal stories and testimonies. Social media has spread storytelling as a fundamental genre of the modern information field.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

Hudoshnyk¹

2023

Synopsis

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We Collect ‘Everything’: A Case Study of a Local Studies Collection in an Australian Public Library

Forsyth

2024

Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association

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Contemporary Collecting in a Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions for Documenting the COVID-19 Pandemic in Memory Organizations

Zuanni

2022

Heritage

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This paper draws on a survey of contemporary collecting projects aiming to document the COVID-19 pandemic in museums and other memory organizations. The survey focused on European memory organizations and investigated the practices they adopted in collecting, accessioning, recording, preserving, and displaying material and immaterial witnesses of the pandemic. This paper presents the results of the survey, with a particular attention on the challenges faced by these projects in relation to born-digital objects. It discusses how organizations were able to quickly launch initiatives aimed at collecting memories of the pandemic, drawing on different collection methods, adapting to the circumstances, and using a proactive attitude to reach out to different communities. The paper highlights the solutions adopted to ensure legal compliance in these projects and discusses the need for ethical considerations in relation to the collection of traumatic memories. It suggests that these collecting projects are likely to face significant challenges in the subsequent processing of this material—due to its volume and the need for new digital curation and preservation workflows. Therefore, the paper argues that these projects could also lead to a renewed attention and collaboration across the heritage sector on issues of digital curation and preservation.

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“There Will Be an End, But We Don’t Know When”: Preserving Diverse COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences Through Oral History

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

We Collect ‘Everything’: A Case Study of a Local Studies Collection in an Australian Public Library

Contemporary Collecting in a Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions for Documenting the COVID-19 Pandemic in Memory Organizations

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