THE ORAL HISTORY WORKSHOP

Preparations for our Oral History Workshop in Leicester are going ahead! We have our date (9th November) and a provisional list of participants. There will be 7/8 people from Congruence Engine (myself, Alex B., Daniel, Arran, Alex F., Tim Smith and Simon Popple – and I am waiting for confirmation from Tim Boon and Paul Craddock) and 6 people from Leicester (Stef De Sabbata, Colin Hyde, Sally Horrocks, Ross Parry, Neslihan Suzan and Rahul Baiju, the PhD student working with Stef). The Institute for Digital Culture will host the session in the Digital Culture Studio and support us in the logistics during the day, also arranging the catering.

I did a preliminary meeting with Stef to discuss the risk assessment and the ethics application that need to be submitted to the University of Leicester by the end of the month, and we will be scheduling a further meeting with Alex and Arran to discuss the schedule in more detail. I am looking forward to this workshop, as it will also be an opportunity to connect the preliminary phase of the Oral History work with the investigation we developed in the first year of the project, and start imagining future applications in preparation of the Bradford convergence. For this, it will be great to have Tim Smith, Simon, Arran and Alex F. with us.

We also received a positive news from Leicester City Council, they might be able to do a csv export of the Snibston museum’s collection data. I am hoping to receive the dataset by the end of the month, so Stef can further experiment with the inclusion of this dataset into the vector space and start reflecting on the connections between the Oral Histories and museum objects. Recently the East Midlands Oral History Archive publicly released 15 interviews from Mines of Memory, and this would give us much more freedom to share some of the content of the interviews during the workshop and include quotes in future presentations.

FOLK SONGS INVESTIGATION

In the first week of September, Daniel and I had a very productive meeting with Arran, Helen and Alex F. to reflect on the participatory element on the folk songs (our full conversation is documented on Jamboard). In the investigation meeting of the 21st August, we identified the model of participation as the key specific contribution of this investigation (considering that the list of linkable terms extracted from the songs can be approached within the wider reflection on creating links and contributing to the ontology work). Because Jennifer’s collaboration is coming to an end, we decided to focus the last session on a reflection on her contribution, to understand how her own expertise interacted with the machine element.

We started reflecting on the methods we used in the investigation (a series of online conversations & the collaborative annotation work), the tool to support the process (OCR & manual transcription to prepare our data, Word and Label Studio for the annotation, Teams for the sessions, Whatsapp for the internal communication and more informal exchanges), the outputs (an annotation schema with a series of categories, a list of industrial & dialect terms, Jennifer’s knowledge captured in written form) and the challenges we encountered (lack of in-person interaction, limited time available with Jen due to her not being a full time researcher, disconnection from the sonic/music dimension as we focused on the songs’ lyrics, and her very specialized expertise on Lancashire & textile folk songs).

We agreed that, in preparation for the participatory work in Bradford, it would be important to analyse two main dimensions: first, the overall experience of the investigation (what has been helpful in our work together); secondly, future potential for this kind of interaction (what might motivate people to contribute in the future?).

Following these lines, we generated a series of questions to ask Jen in the session:

• What would inspire Jen to contribute doing this work in the future? How connecting folk songs with collections would be helpful to her? (to reflect on the motivations in the Social Machine)
• Did she perceive herself as a contributor of knowledge & expertise, or did she also benefit from this work? And how? (to reflect on the mutuality of contribution in the Social Machine)
• What was exciting and what was challenging in our work together? (to identify moments of energy and moments when this energy decreased, and why)
• How was her experience with the tools we used? We cannot reflect on LabelStudio as she didn’t interact with it, and we don’t need to further reflect on Word (as we already learnt from its use about the need to choose open tools), but it might be interesting to reflect on Whatsapp as a potential engagement & contributory medium.

We agreed that, in preparation for the session, it would be helpful to prepare some concrete examples of how the annotation work led to connect songs with museum objects.

We started to reflect how we might expand the participation in Bradford, and again generated a series of key questions that can help to identify how to work with folk songs with a wider group of people:

• What would help us to refine the process with people who could have a variety of expertise and interests?
• Will we have online interactions again, or can we explore in-person participation?
• Will new participants be keen to work also with audio/video recordings of performances as well?