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The project "Oral-History.Digital"

The project Oral-History.Digital develops and implements a curation and research platform for scholarly collections of audio-visual narrative interviews.

Trailer "Oral-History.Digital" (1min 43sec). This German short film with English subtitles presents content and functionalities of the interview portal "Oral-History.Digital". Concept and realization: Philipp Bayerschmidt, 2024

Researchers, educators and the general public can browse the portal using filters and full-text searches. Currently, Oral-History.Digital lists 42 archives with 202 collections and 4113 interviews from 46 institutions. Registered users can view the audio or video files with subtitles and accompanying materials, and annotate them in their workbook. See the Research page for more information.

Interview projects in museums, universities or foundations can upload their audio and video interviews with accompanying materials and edit them with tools for transcription (e.g. ASR4Memory) or keywording (e.g. Topic Modeling). Depending on the indexing status and rights situation, the interviews can be made accessible through a differentiated user administration or just made findable with metadata. Further information can be found on the Join page.

Following the F.A.I.R. principles, Oral-History.Digital makes the interviews findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable as audiovisual research data. A sophisticated rights management system protects the privacy of the interviewees. The infrastructure includes a media server for transcoding and streaming and a repository with an indexing and a research interface. It will be available permanently, regardless the duration of the project. For more information, see the page Documents (in German).

Through the FU Berlin's participation in the 4Memory and Text+ consortia, Oral-History.Digital is being integrated into the German National research data infrastructure. The project ASR4Memory has developed a automatic transcription service. The project Text+ohd develops an OAI-API and an TEI export functionality.  serve this purpose. In addition, the Oral-History.Digital team participates in various working groups of several task areas in the 4Memory and Text+ consortia.

Five partner institutions are involved in Oral-History.Digital. With the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin, the Archive Deutsches Gedächtnis of the Institute for History and Biography at the FernUniversität in Hagen, and the Werkstatt der Erinnerung at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg, the largest oral history institutions in Germany are contributing their extensive collections, many years of experience and networks to a joint research infrastructure. The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München is responsible for long-term archiving and supports interview archives with speech recognition, alignment and anonymisation. The Chair of Media Informatics at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg is responsible for data modelling and supports the work on authority files, search functionalities and rights management. The FernUniversität Hagen (formerly the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) is using the research environment for a pilot study on topic modeling and migration narrations.

Oral-History.Digital is being developed and tested in collaboration with the community which includes archive partners from research projects, museums, archives and foundations. Researchers from linguistics, social sciences, education and anthropology are accompanying the project in a scientific advisory board.

The interview portal has been online since 2023. An opening event on September 25, 2023, and a workshop the following day showcased and discussed the cataloging and research environment for audiovisual narrative research data with participating archives, researchers, and external experts. Photos and video recordings document the program.

In the period that followed, numerous workshops, conferences, and colloquia strengthened interdisciplinary networking, including through the NFDI consortia 4Memory, Text+, and KonsortSWD; at the FORGE research data conference; in the Social Data Working Group of the Association of Historians; at the “Emergent Memory” conference; and at the FID “Performing Arts.” Announcements and reports can be found in the News section. 

International networking was promoted through presentations at events such as the European Social Science and History Conference (in Leiden in March 2025) and the International Oral History Association (in Krakow in September 2025). In November 2025, oh.d hosted an online meeting with European interview portals.

Oral-History.Digital has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) since 2020 in the funding programme "e-Research Technologies". A second funding phase (2023 to 2026) has been approved by the DFG. Freie Universität Berlin will continue the infrastructure thereafter. The software is also available as Open Source.

Literature (in German):