Chronoferencing the Italian-Slovenian Borderlands. Citizen Science, Oral History and Output Criticism

This article unravels the opportunities and limits for generating new academic knowledge about the use of articulations of time in interviews conducted and produced by students. We narrate the experiences of a citizen scientist throughout an interdisciplinary experiment in which citizen scientists and border scholars expressed what borders mean to them. Analysing citizen scientist Termime’s (pseudonym) oral and written expressions as a case study with the help of Achim Landwehr’s concept of Chronoferenzen (chronoferencing), we decipher the intricate links citizen scientists identify between the past, the present and the future in the way they see borders within the three different genres practised during the experiment: a monologue, a dialogue and a digital café.

At the same time, the article also presents a reflection on the digital research process applied during the study. The hermeneutic layer evaluates the methods and tools we used throughout the workflow, from organising the experiment to analysing the oral data and presenting the findings in the Journal of Digital History with respect to the three well-known stages in digital hermeneutical research: digital source criticism, tool criticism and visualisation criticism. Adding ‘output criticism’ as a fourth step enables us to present our reflection on the presentation possibilities and constraints of digital publishing and propose changes.