Oral History under scrutiny in München; a multidisciplinary workshop with interview data

The challenge that we have taken up as a multidisciplinary group of scholars interested in strengthening the position of interview data in the Digital Humanities realm, is to encourage scholars to use technology to handle their interview data, and to engage with practices of fellow scholars in adjacent disciplines. Coming from distinctive disciplines such as oral history, ethnography, sociology, media studies, speech technology, computational linguistics, socio-linguistics, phonetics, human media interaction, information - and computer science, we all have a different interest in human expression, the modalities in which it is conveyed - written text, speech, gestures, sounds - and the ways in which it can be structured in order to be studied.

Technology is now able to facilitate processes that used to be cumbersome, such as transcription and its alignment with audio, but it also offers ways of venturing into other disciplines or teaming up with a scholar from a different discipline to compare each others analytical approaches and results.