Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

Abstract

The relevance of analyzing the Ukrainian “text of war”, where individual voices are part of a coherent narrative, is related to the rate of changes in this content and the need for scientific understanding. The purpose of the paper is to describe the most illustrative examples of platforms and online resources that have collected witness interviews since the beginning of the war. The method of rapid response collecting and interdisciplinary methods were used to achieve the goal. The creation of platforms for collecting war stories, their structure, goals and working methods have become the subject of our research interest. Openness, accessibility, end-to-end tagging, simplified cataloguing, ease of navigation around a website or platform, and the ability to upload one’s own story have driven the popularity and demand for such resources. Structured and archival capabilities have helped war witnesses preserve not only their experiences but also the memory of those who did not survive. As a result of this research, we offer a description and structural analysis of the online Museum of Civilian Voices and certain platforms with oral testimonies and interviews of eyewitnesses (#MyWar, War. Stories from Ukraine, Ukrainian Witness). The mediatisation of all spheres of life is determined by the modern information space, in which the voices of witnesses become an important part of the process of forming national memory. The involvement of media in collecting and disseminating war testimonies and memories has become an everyday reality, in which individual stories are transformed into a common memory space. We have highlighted the following factors in the mediatisation of modern oral history: сommunicability (stemming from the public sphere as an integral part of oral history research), interdisciplinarity (using oral history methods to create different narratives) and global practices of powerful platforms for the collection and dissemination of stories and witness interviews (exemplified by StoryCorps). The speed of access, the efficiency and the possibilities of content dissemination have defined the nature of new media, and the internet has become the main tool for documenting war history, an archive of personal stories and testimonies. Social media has spread storytelling as a fundamental genre of the modern information field.