Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Abstract

The paper discusses a project proposal centered on Kasos, a small island, where oral history intersects with academic research to capture the island's rich cultural heritage. Through interviews, digitization of documents, and the use of advanced technologies, the project aims to transform oral narratives into a comprehensive digital archive and virtual museum, preserving Kasos' history for future generations.

Introduction

Oral history plays a significant role in information retrieval and realistic representation of the past,  since it is the collective consciousness of society and are priceless instruments of thought which human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries.
The project, currently in the planning phase, will be implemented on the small island of Kasos, investigating the open borders between the disciplines of academic and oral history, position them in a dialogical relationship. Personal testimonies and experiences and transmedia storytelling from individuals who lived in various periods of history bring vitality and depth to events. Their combination with academic sources, such as archival documents, historical research, diaries, correspondence, allows the extraction of rich information about the history, culture, traditions, and customs of the island through time, composing a more complete and colorful mosaic of local history.

Methodology

Initially, dozens of interviews will be recorded with people of various ages, who are connected to the island due to their origin, activities, or research. Diaries and correspondence from the period will be digitized, as well as archives and bibliographic references, while a collection of old photos and artifacts from the era will be gathered.
Subsequently, the most user-friendly and specialized tools will be sought, so that with the use of appropriate algorithms, indexing, topic extraction, and clustering can be achieved from the entire set of information, which will be collected and continuously enriched with new media.
Acting as researchers-digital curators, we must address contemporary challenges so that the volume of information recorded through scientific methodology meets the criteria: interconnectivity, tellability, visual attractivity and originality.
With the ultimate goal of preserving history and ensuring the sustainability of testimonies in the future, the project has a dual purpose. On the one hanad, it has the ontological, aiming to represent knowledge in a user-friendly and accessible repository with modularity that could offer the opportunity to provide different versions of the same testimony for distinct use cases. On the other hand, it aims to create a virtual museum and thematic exhibitions using immersive technologies that enable visitors to actively participate in their search for meaning by actively interacting with the story.

Keywords: oral history, archives, computational linguistics, virtual museums