oral history

The innovative aspect of the site lies in the subject indexing that was done for the interviews. Each interview is divided in many shorter clips. Each clip is summarized and tagged with keywords. These keywords are then available in a faceted search page, with facets for: People, Plants, Land, Animals, Dates, and Places. This method allows the researcher to rapidly filter down specific portions of the interviews, and then hear or see that portion of the interview.

The A-V Barn presents over 300 hours of audio and video interviews with a wide variety of people engaged in some aspect of agriculture. There are over 130 interviews, some archival dating back to the 1970s, and some conducted in 2007-2009 for this project.

If you attended the ICHIM07 Conference Reception, you may remember seeing a giant, green, ear-shaped, metal sign with a mobile phone number and the words “hear you are” stamped on it in the atrium of the MaRS Collaboration Centre in Toronto. [murmur], a documentary oral history project, created the distinct marker.

Call for Papers

SHARING AUTHORITY: Building Community-University Alliances through Oral History, Digital Storytelling and Collaboration

A Bilingual (English/French) International Conference Workshop

Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Conference 7-10 February 2008
Deadline for Proposals: October 5, 2007

Please send a one-page abstract of your proposal and curriculum vitae o the chair of the organizing committee: