Data

In the talk by Inna Ganschow, the camp experience in the Soviet Union will be treated as a consequence of the forced conscription, namely in its artistic processing. Secretly written diaries and letters of Luxembourg Wehrmacht soldiers or poems of deceased comrades learned by them by heart, they also reached their homeland.

This Memorial is bridging stories and memories of victims and survivors of the Shoah.

While TV-interviews are recorded for an already written documentary film script, interviews for the Ukrainian oral history archive of war testimonies are recorded without any expectations. When creating our archive, we do not know what research question of linguists, philosophers or historians will be later. We know that the archive is not going public, that´s the deal.

The aim of this panel was to draw attention to the large number of archived web collections, and to rethink the challenges and possibilities that they constitute for studies of past and present mediated communication.

At the core of our data collection method in our project “Testimonies from the war” is collecting interviews with displaced population, forced to leave Ukraine because of the Russia’s invasion. Interviewing is a qualitative method of data collection whose results are based on intensive engagement with respondents. In our case, the topic is forced migration and the change of peoples’ lives from 24th February till today. Strategies for engaging interview participants.

Gifs and memes (Kaplan and Nova, 2016), “buzz” on the Web and social networks are inherent to digital cultures since the very first steps of the Web (i.e., Godwin’s Law, Dancing babies, Hamster Dance, cf. McGrath, 2019).

From the Hampster Dance and the Dancing Baby in the second half of the 1990s to the hijacking meme of Bernie and his mittens at the US presidential inauguration or the images of the Evergreen blocked in the Suez Canal, memes have become in the last twenty years an important part of our digital cultures (Shifman, 2014), whose often absurd, playful, corrosive and viral character cannot hide also multiple political dimensions.

The COVID crisis has been a shared worldwide and collective experience from March 2020 and lot of voices have echoed each other, may it be related to grief, lockdown, masks and vaccines, homeschooling, etc. However, this unprecedented crisis has also deepened asymmetries and failures within societies, in terms of occupational fields, economic inequalities, health and sanitary access, and we could extend the inventory of these hidden and more visible gaps that were reinforced during the crisis.

This presentation focused on three oral interviews I conducted during the COVID crisis, respectively with the BnL (Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, Els, 2020) in Luxembourg and with INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Schafer, 2020b) and BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gebeil et al., 2020) in France, to document their web archiving practices and choices during the pandemic.