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Research

Through collaborations both within Freie Universität Berlin and with international partners, the Digital Interview Collections team contributes to a wide range of externally funded research projects in oral history, memory culture, educational research, research data management, and digital humanities. Partnerships span institutions in the United States, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, the Netherlands, and Spain, among others.

The team actively organizes workshops and conferences and disseminates its findings through international presentations and publications. Current research priorities include the DFG-funded infrastructure project Oral-History.Digital and participation in Germany’s National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) consortia 4Memory and Text+ .

Publications

The Digital Interview Collections team publishes on oral history, audiovisual research data, research and learning environments, history education, National Socialism, and related topics. Their findings are actively discussed at conferences and workshops.

Oral-History.Digital

“Oral-History.Digital” is an infrastructure for scholarly collections of audiovisually recorded narrative interviews. The interview portal and research environment allows cross-collection search, annotation, analysis and quotation over 5000+ interviews from 50+ institutions. The curation environment supports interview projects in archiving, indexing and giving controlled access according to the FAIR principles.

Participating in "NFDI 4Memory"

Freie Universität Berlin is a member of the 4Memory historical consortium of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). The Digital Interview Collections address the needs of oral history in all five task areas. In particular, they contribute the infrastructure Oral-History.Digital and are developing the Oral-History.Literacy digital handbook.

Oral-History | Literacy

As part of its involvement in the NFDI4Memory consortium, the Digital Interview Collections team is developing the Oral History | Literacy information portal.

Oral History | Literacy is an online compendium aimed at researchers, teachers and students alike, bringing together knowledge that was previously scattered regarding the production, cataloguing, preservation and secondary use of oral history interviews.

Open.Oral-History

The DFG-funded pilot project Open.Oral-History: Recommendations and Tools for Risk Assessment, Anonymization, and Provision of Legally Protected and Ethically Sensitive Audiovisual Interviews (2025–2027) is conducted in collaboration with the Institute for Biographical Research at FernUniversität Hagen.

It addresses the ethical and legal challenges of biographical-narrative interviews by developing guidelines and risk assessments in partnership with legal experts. Building on this foundation, the project creates an AI-supported anonymization process to enable the safe reuse of sensitive audiovisual sources.

ASR4Memory

The ASR4Memory project has developed an innovative tool for the research community that automatically transcribes audiovisual research data in historical contexts. The tool uses AI technology to support a wide range of languages and source materials, making it easier to process, analyze, and preserve historical audiovisual resources for research, reuse, and long-term archiving. The project was funded by the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI 4Memory).

Audio-Visual.Digital

The “Sharing Multimodal Data” project conceptualizes the infrastructure “Audio-Visual.Digital” for audiovisual research data from the humanities and social sciences. In collaboration with researchers at Charité, Technical and Humboldt University, it develops a prototype based on the interview portal "Oral-History.Digital". The project funded by Berlin University Alliance (BUA) aims at sharing resources in a joint research space in Berlin.

Text+ohd

The project “Text+ Interfaces to the Interview Collections in Oral-History.Digital (Text+oh.d),” completed in 2025, made interview collections developed in historical research projects accessible via the Text+ infrastructure.

Through the development of interfaces and the standards-compliant transformation of transcripts within the cross-collection interview portal Oral-History.Digital, extensive corpora of everyday spoken language have been made available for reuse by text- and language-based research communities. On the one hand, metadata from interview archives and collections are now cataloged in the Text+ Registry, harvested through an OAI-PMH interface; on the other hand, researchers with appropriate access permissions can now download transcripts of interviews lasting several hours in ISO-compliant TEI files.

Interactive Memories of Colonia Dignidad

The Latin American Institute and the Digital Interview Collections are collaborating with the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (MMHD) in Santiago, Chile, to shed light on the history of Colonia Dignidad through a media station, and to contribute to the process of coming to terms with the crimes committed there. The project is based on the video interview collection, "Colonia Dignidad: A Chilean-German Oral History Archive” and other sources. An interactive media station is being developed and will launch as part of a temporary Colonia Dignidad exhibition at the MMDH in October 2026. The bilingual application will be made available online the following year.

Lanzmann Collection

The Jewish Museum Berlin preserves, catalogs, and provides access to a collection of audio interviews conducted by Claude Lanzmann. The collection comprises 152 interviews that Lanzmann conducted while researching his film Shoah. The interviewees include survivors of ghettos and concentration camps, resistance fighters, historians, clergy, intellectuals, politicians, and perpetrators.

Since November 2025, the Lanzmann collection recordings have been cataloged and published progressively on the Oral-History.Digital platform. By the end of 2027, all of the collection's audio recordings will be available to listen to and explore alongside related materials. The Digital Interview Collections team is supporting and consulting on the project.

Project "Accessing Campscapes"

The project "Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage" investigated the transformation of former Nazi and Stalinist camps into contested or forgotten sites of memory. This interdisciplinary project led by the University of Amsterdam combined approaches from oral history, memory studies, contemporary archaeology, and augmented reality.
Freie Universität Berlin contributed by examining the (past, present, and future) role of audio and video interviews in the preservation, interpretation, and representation of these camp sites. To this end, a catalog of relevant interviews was compiled, and a prototype of an online application featuring survivor interviews was developed.

Survey: "University Teaching about the Holocaust in Germany"

More than 70 years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, what is the state of Holocaust education at German universities?
Verena Nägel and Dr. Lena Kahle conducted a study, jointly funded by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and Freie Universität Berlin and carried out in 2015–2016. Through empirical analysis of course catalogs and expert interviews, it addressed the gap in research on Holocaust education at German universities.

Project "Frank Falla Archive"

The "Frank Falla Archive" project investigated British victims of Nazi persecution and created a website documenting the memories of Channel Island residents who were deported to German prisons and camps. The Channel Islands, located off the coast of France, were the only part of Great Britain occupied by German troops. During the Second World War, approximately 250 residents of Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney were deported to Nazi prisons and concentration camps. In the mid-1960s, over 100 victims applied for compensation; these applications, along with accompanying testimonies, photographs, and documents were compiled on the website "The Frank Falla Archive," named after a victim and long-time activist. The project was a collaboration between University of Cambridge, Jersey Heritage and Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the EVZ Foundation.

Conference “Remembering Forced Labor: Interviews with Eyewitnesses in the Digital World” (2012)

From October 4–6, 2012, the Digital Interview Collections ,in collaboration with the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” , hosted the conference “Remembering Forced Labor: Eyewitness Interviews in the Digital World” in Berlin.
What will the digital future of oral history look like? How can Nazi forced labor be integrated into an increasingly digital and internationalized remembrance culture? The conference used the online archive "Forced Labor 1939–1945" as an example to discuss potential uses, challenges, and quality standards in creating a digital interview archive. It also facilitated an exchange on current projects.

The conference proceedings were published in German in December 2013: Apostolopoulos, Nicolas / Pagenstecher, Cord: Erinnern an Zwangsarbeit. Zeitzeugen-Interviews in der digitalen Welt, Berlin 2013.

Conference "Preserving Survivors Memories. Digital Testimony Collections about Nazi Persecution: History, Education and Media" (2012)

From November 20–22, 2012, Freie Universität, together with the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future” and in cooperation with the USC Shoah Foundation, hosted the international conference “Preserving Survivors’ Memories: Digital Testimony Collections about Nazi Persecution—History, Education, and Media” at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

The aim of the conference was to bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of experts to exchange views on the current state of development of digital testimony collections on Nazi persecution and related historical audiovisual repositories, and to discuss future prospects.
In addition to introductory lectures and keynote presentations, the conference focused on discussions in parallel workshops on the three thematic areas of Digital Humanities, Education, and Visual Media.

The conference proceedings were published in 2016 and are available online:
Apostolopoulos, Nicolas / Barricelli, Michele / Koch, Gertrud on behalf of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future” (EVZ): Preserving Survivors’ Memories. Digital Testimony Collections about Nazi Persecution: History, Education, and Media, Berlin 2016