Freie Universität Berlin

Since 2006, the Digital Interview Collections team has been compiling oral history archives and supporting research and teaching at the university. The team's expertise covers the entire process from conducting and recording interviews to collection management, automatically supported transcription, scientific indexing and archiving as well as the user-friendly, ethically adequate and didactically sound presenting of oral history interviews.

Since 2008, it has created 6 interview archives with over 800 interviews. Topics include Nazi forced labor and the German occupation of Greece, the history of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Iron Curtain, the Church Asylum movement, and the German sect “Colonia Dignidad” in Chile. Almost all interviews are transcribed and translated into German, are indexed with place and person names, have tables of contents and short biographies. Many have interview protocols and additional material like photos. They are accessible after registration via the online portal “Oral-History.Digital”.

The Digital Interview Collections team also provides access to important collections of interviews on National Socialism and the Holocaust, such as the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the Refugee Voices collection of the British Association of Jewish Refugees and Luke Holland's Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies collection.

One of its main projects is the Oral-History.Digital interview portal. It is an indexing and research platform for the audiovisual research data which currently lists more than 40 archives with more than 4,000 interviews. 

Researchers, educators and the general public can browse the portal using filters and full-text searches. Registered users can view the audio or video files with subtitles and accompanying materials, and annotate them in their workbook. 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 rights situation, the interviews can be made accessible through a differentiated user administration or just made findable with metadata.

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. The platform has been created as a Ruby-on-Rails software with a MySQL data base and a media server. The software is available as open source on GitHub.

Around the “Oral-History.Digital” platform, the team is involved in the development of the National Research Data Infrastructure in the Text+ and 4Memory consortia. In the ASR4Memory project, an AI-based service for automated transcription with automatic speech recognition was developed. The Text+ohd project is developing interfaces for metadata and TEI transcripts. The Open.Oral-History project is developing recommendations and tools for risk assessment, anonymization, and the provision of legally protected and ethically sensitive audiovisual interviews.

For historical and political education, various multimedia learning applications with eyewitness interviews have been developed for use in schools and memorial sites.

In addition, publications, lectures, and seminars also communicate the results of the various cooperation and third-party funded projects.