Telling the Cambodian Oral History Project
Location
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
Document Type
Poster
Start Date
23-2-2018 3:30 PM
End Date
23-2-2018 4:00 PM
Description
For various reasons, family histories are uncommon in Cambodia. Many of the few records that did exist were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge period (1975 to 1979). With up to one third of the adult population killed during the purges, the population is young and the remainder of the older generation’s stories are being rapidly lost. Many of Cambodia’s younger generation hardly know their families’ backgrounds. With the goal of preserving and making available these vanishing histories, BYU’s Cambodia Oral History Project (COHP) launched in January 2016. Youth and young adults in Cambodia interview family members to learn about their lives and stories. To date, close to 1000 audio interviews have been recorded, with more than 300 currently available on the project’s website. Additionally, volunteers in both Cambodia and the United States are working to transcribe and translate selected interviews. In this presentation, we will discuss, first, the history of the project to date and, second, the development of different digital humanities affordances to make the project more accessible. For the former, we will present on our audio collection procedures and the training of our Cambodian volunteers. The volunteers are a critical component of the project since, at any given moment, there is only a single BYU student or faculty member in Cambodia that is connected with COHP. We will further discuss how the project makes possible opportunities for mentored undergraduate research, ranging from experience with interviews and oral histories to managing publication workflows and the project’s website. Finally, we will cover the challenges of coordinating a crowdsourced research project from half a world away. On the digital humanities side of things, we will discuss our ongoing efforts to move our data from a hand-edited WordPress site to a flexible database that powers a new front-end that will enable multiple queries against our interviewees characteristics. We will also present on our collaboration with the BYU library to refine our metadata structure, moving from our current keyword system to a controlled vocabulary. Finally, we will talk about how we are structuring the data from the site with a focus on reuse by sociolinguists, computational linguists, and others who are interested in our large and growing body of spoken Khmer.
Telling the Cambodian Oral History Project
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
For various reasons, family histories are uncommon in Cambodia. Many of the few records that did exist were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge period (1975 to 1979). With up to one third of the adult population killed during the purges, the population is young and the remainder of the older generation’s stories are being rapidly lost. Many of Cambodia’s younger generation hardly know their families’ backgrounds. With the goal of preserving and making available these vanishing histories, BYU’s Cambodia Oral History Project (COHP) launched in January 2016. Youth and young adults in Cambodia interview family members to learn about their lives and stories. To date, close to 1000 audio interviews have been recorded, with more than 300 currently available on the project’s website. Additionally, volunteers in both Cambodia and the United States are working to transcribe and translate selected interviews. In this presentation, we will discuss, first, the history of the project to date and, second, the development of different digital humanities affordances to make the project more accessible. For the former, we will present on our audio collection procedures and the training of our Cambodian volunteers. The volunteers are a critical component of the project since, at any given moment, there is only a single BYU student or faculty member in Cambodia that is connected with COHP. We will further discuss how the project makes possible opportunities for mentored undergraduate research, ranging from experience with interviews and oral histories to managing publication workflows and the project’s website. Finally, we will cover the challenges of coordinating a crowdsourced research project from half a world away. On the digital humanities side of things, we will discuss our ongoing efforts to move our data from a hand-edited WordPress site to a flexible database that powers a new front-end that will enable multiple queries against our interviewees characteristics. We will also present on our collaboration with the BYU library to refine our metadata structure, moving from our current keyword system to a controlled vocabulary. Finally, we will talk about how we are structuring the data from the site with a focus on reuse by sociolinguists, computational linguists, and others who are interested in our large and growing body of spoken Khmer.