Hands-On Solutions and Reflections on Ethics and Data Security for collecting, researching, and archiving born-digital audio testimonies from the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine

This paper 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. Originating from a collaboration among institutions in Luxembourg, Poland, Ukraine, and Great Britain, '24.02.2022, 5am. Testimonies from the War' (WARTEST) faced methodological challenges in implementing a unified procedure due to cultural and disciplinary differences, as well as ethical challenges related to the collection and digital preservation of testimonies amidst conflict. The U-CORE project, initiated in January 2024, aims to standardize, consolidate and archive the born-digital data sets of WARTEST to facilitate ongoing and future research.  

Using a digital hermeneutics approach, the paper offers an academic reflection on the ongoing key discussions and hands-on solutions related to the synchronization of metadata across 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 paper offers an insight into our discussions and negotiations on the final data repository and online platform for the testimonies. We display our experimental transfer of a part of the data to the 'Oral History digital' platform launched in 2023 and reflect upon our ongoing conversations with new Ukrainian digital repositories and platforms documenting the war.