Critically approaching the digital turn in method, meaning and recollection

Oral History is undergoing somewhat of a digital turn. Digital technologies and digital methods are now expanding the range of forms that oral history can take and, potentially, the kinds of questions that we can ask about oral history interview collections. From an earlier oral history landscape that was constituted of the oral history interview, its analogue or digital recording, its transcript and, potentially, its publication, we are now asking whether oral history can be understood as “data”? What happens when we try to organize or represent the rich and complex experiences shared in an oral history interview using a structured format, like a knowledge graph? And do such changes matter? Or, to put it another way, if we understand oral history as ‘data’, can digital methods be used to analyze it without epistemological loss or consequence?

These are the questions that this talk will pursue, drawing on new and ongoing research towards a “Multimodal Digital Oral History” (Smith, Nyhan and Flinn 2023) and the TU Darmstadt and UCL bilateral project entitled “Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: Enfolding semantic web technologies and historical-interpretative analysis” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation (2024-27)

Professor Nyhan's research focuses on the history of Digital Humanities, especially in terms of researching non-canonical histories and the role that participatory approaches can play in this. Her particular interest is on uncovering 'hidden', overlooked or devalued contributions to the field's emergence and development.

This is the sixth lecture in the UCLDH Susan Hockey Lecture series, named after Susan Hockey, Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at UCL, and a leading figure in the establishment of Humanities Computing as an academic discipline. As chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing from 1984 to 1997, she founded the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing, now the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and is widely published in this field. The aim of this annual public lecture series is to celebrate and promote work in Digital Humanities: the application of computational techniques within the arts, humanities, culture and heritage.

All welcome but registration is required.

This event is organised by UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. In 2025, UCLDH is celebrating its 15th anniversary.

UCLDH draws on UCL's world-class research strength especially in information studies, computing science, and the arts and humanities. It supports and coordinates work in many institutional settings throughout the university, including the library services, museums and collections. The research facilitated by UCLDH takes place at the intersection of digital technologies and humanities. It produces applications and models that make possible new kinds of research, both in the humanities disciplines and in computer science and its applied technologies. It also studies the impact of these techniques on cultural heritage, museums, libraries, archives, and culture at large.

About the Speaker

Julianne Nyhan

Chair of Humanities Data Science and Methodology at Institute of History, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Julianne Nyhan’s research seeks to understand more about the social, cultural, intellectual and technical processes and conditions that have shaped the remediation and analysis of Humanities and Cultural Heritage sources as data. Accordingly, her research is interdisciplinary and often undertaken at the interface of computing, the humanities and cultural heritage. Areas of particular research interest include: digital humanities, digital history, oral history, the history of computing (especially in the humanities), collections as data and the history of information.

More about Julianne Nyhan