earticle

영어

Oral history has a long tradition in human societies, capturing the stories of people, places and times, using the recollections and experience of witnesses. As an academic discipline, it has been fruitful in capturing the details of those important stories for analysis, feeding into historical and sociological research. Yet some academic researchers continue to regard oral history as not always factually accurate thus down playing its evidentiary value. Our experience departs from this view. Oral history brings its own truth to our understanding of how a culture has been made. It brings the kind of texture that raw facts cannot supply. And it brings an emotional dimension only possible when someone speaks in their own voice of their own experience. This leads simply to the conclusion that these important oral histories should be published and enjoyed by the wider community and not just languish out of view. Cultural Conversations is a collaboration involving artists, critics, authors, cinematographers, translators and IT experts, in building an online living archive of the stories of eminent Australian and South Korean visual artists. The online archive is freely available to the international audience via bespoke technology developed by the Australia Centre for Oral History. This paper will discuss the research leading up to the bespoke technology behind the Cultural Conversations collaboration, showing its support for multiple parallel synchronised channels of communication delivered through a standard web browser, delivering synchronised video, audio, images and text in a way that allows the user to select the channels most applicable to them at the time. Our usage statistics, nearly 120,000 international visitors between April 2018 and March 2019, is indicative of the efficacy of our approach. In addition, the archive has been accessioned by the Pandora/Trove facility at the National Library of Australia as a significant Australian cultural web site.