Digital Tools, Multilingual Sources, and Oral History

An archive is only as useful as it is accessible. Particularly when working with multilingual archival materials, it’s important to keep in mind different audiences. In these presentations, you will learn about how to leverage the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to create a bilingual index. We offer an introduction to indexing and bilingual indexing and examine why some oral history collections can greatly benefit from this type of enhanced access. Drawing from our experience creating bilingual indexes for interviews conducted in Yiddish, French, Russian, Spanish, and other languages, we will walk through a step-by-step model workflow developed by the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. Along the way, we explore the importance of style guides, controlled vocabulary lists, and quality control. Finally, we will discuss the various challenges and opportunities raised by working within the bilingual index structure.

In an intermediate Italian language class at the University of Michigan this past semester, we focused on an oral history interview given at Yale in 1987 which is part of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The objective of this course was two-fold:  to develop students’ language skills through communicative language teaching and transcription and to learn first-hand about oral history and the cultural and historical context of the life of the woman who gave the interview, an Italian-Jewish woman who was born and raised in Tunisia and later became French and moved to France. The class’ project was to transcribe the interview so that there would be a transcription for researchers and others to access for years to come. The real-world value of their contribution was important in motivating the students to better their language skills. We will outline the pedagogy used in this class, the technology and logistical aspects of transcribing in groups in the classroom, report on the students’ response to the course, and make a case for incorporating transcription and oral history in all kinds of classrooms.

Indexing and metadata creation are vital components of preparing any material for use. However, these processes include several challenges and considerations for indexers and catalogers to make the resource as findable and usable as possible. These considerations take on new meanings and urgencies when indexing bi-cultural materials. This presentation will address some of the challenges associated with indexing through the lens of working with bi-cultural materials, specifically oral history interviews of Iranian-Americans in Michigan. These include ensuring descriptions and metadata encompass the meaning of the material in a relevant, culturally mindful way and navigating the limitations of Western-centric information practices (e.g. the use of the Library of Congress Subject Headings). The presentation will also explore how we used the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to mitigate indexing challenges and why OHMS is a beneficial tool for this bi-cultural oral history project. The structure and schema of OHMS allowed freedoms during the indexing process that ensured the descriptions and metadata would be findable and usable across cultures and academic disciplines. Also, this presentation will address some of the other considerations of indexing bi-cultural oral histories, including the importance of remaining an objective describer and the challenges of creating robust descriptions as a cultural outsider. Throughout the presentations, I will use examples from the Michigan Iranian-American Oral History Project's use of OHMS to illustrate the challenges, experiences, and solutions from the indexing process.

Our presentation will briefly describe the work of two project teams.  First, we’ll describe the work of adapting OHMS for the emerging Michigan Iranian-American Oral History Project, a digital collection to be hosted on Mardigian Library’s Oral Histories Collection web page.  We’ll address the customization of the OHMS Viewer and the separate work of transcribing, translation and subtitling that is underway to make the interviews as accessible and discoverable as possible.  Second, we’ll describe the creation of MISI, which began as project to make a local Iranian-American bilingual newsletter, the Persia House of Michigan Faslnameh, part of Mardigian’s digital collection but has evolved toward the development of an open-source software application that could serve a variety communities seeking to preserve and share their multilingual content.  We will cover the both design priorities that have gone into MISI and the process we’ve established to index the PHOM Faslnameh content bilingually.  What unites these two projects is their focus on the Iranian-American Community and we will close with some examples to illustrate how these sources can complement each other to illustrate the “real time” and historical fluidity of Iranian-American identity as it is expressed in the use of language. There is not a simple Persian-English bilingualism here, but an interplay of Perisans and Englishes. Our main presentation is organized into three segments; plus there is “bonus material” featuring conversations on details  from both projects (as well as a tangent or two!).