MeDoraH: A multidisciplinary project introducing a digital turn in oral history research
Professor Julianne Nyhan (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany), Dr Andrew Flinn and Dr Andreas Vlachidis have been awarded a research grant funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation for the project “Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: Enfolding semantic web technologies and historical- interpretative analysis”.
The project last 34 months, starting on 01 February 2024. It will involve the recruitment of two PDRAs at TU Darmstadt with expertise in hermeneutics, network analysis and oral history research and one PDRA at UCL with expertise in semantic web and information extraction technologies. The project is supported by the AHRC-DFG funding programme aimed at developing research collaborations between the UK and Germany and it is one of the eighteen collaborative projects funded in round 5.
Information scientists, digital humanists, archivists, oral historians, and computer scientists from the UK and Germany ask how semantic web technologies and historical-interpretative analysis can be mobilised to foment a digital methodological-hermeneutical turn in oral history.
Positioning the emerging sub-field of the history of Digital Humanities as an exemplary case, the project seeks to understand the impacts that digital technology is making on the production, organisation and ‘peoplescapes’ of Humanities knowledge. The history of computing and the humanities has attracted much interest and Digital Humanities is understood as an important arena of historical research, with the potential to offer new perspectives on the impacts of electromechanical and digital technologies on dispersed communities of knowledge production, and vice versa.
The project will employ a mixed methods bundle of qualitative and data-driven research to explore the processes of change in the Humanities while devising digital approaches and processes that can be used by oral historians and historians more broadly. In doing so, it will develop and make freely available an interoperable infrastructure of interconnected entities, in the form of a Knowledge Graph, to promote shared understanding, information representation, interrogation and discovery. Using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles the project will advocate data sharing and reuse, ensuring transparency and reliability of research outputs.
Combining oral history as a source and process, semantic web technologies and digital methods, this project will create new knowledge, digital artefacts and hermeneutic critical reflections that have relevance right across the fields of oral history and the history of knowledge, the history of the humanities and science, information studies and computer science including semantic technologies.

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valentinaprishchepova (February 20, 2024). MeDoraH: A multidisciplinary project introducing a digital turn in oral history research. HDSM. Retrieved April 19, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/2493