Crafting a Best Practice Digital Workflow Amidst Conflict: Hands-On Solutions and Reflections on Ethics and Data Security

This short presentation delves into the ongoing interdisciplinary effort to create an efficient digital workflow for collecting, researching, and archiving born-digital audio testimonies from the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The U-CORE project aims to standardize, consolidate and archive the born-digital collected in Luxembourg, Poland and Ukraine data sets to facilitate ongoing and future research on the 400 testimonies. Three innovative approaches are presented. First, it includes an experimental research approach to engage with born-digital materials in the form of a preliminary qualitative analysis of the reflection of respondents on the digital display of their born-digital testimonies. Second, it displays a digital workflow developed within the project that guarantees interviewee security during war by means of encrypted recorders, secure external servers, and the two-factor identification media asset management tool CatDV. Third, the author reflects upon the ethical dilemma of compensating Ukrainian refugees for manual transcriptions of testimonies versus using automatic transcription software. Comparisons of AI-driven, manual, and mixed transcription methods are provided. 

Lastly, the short presentations offers an insight into our discussions and negotiations on the final data repository and online platform for the testimonies to the 'Oral History digital' platform launched in 2023.