By Dr Erica Payet, Programme Manager
Heritage of Displacement is 1 year-old! It is with pride and pleasure that we celebrate this important milestone and look back on the journey so far.
We are very grateful to the volunteers from all walks of life who have reached out to get involved throughout the year. The Armenian Institute has provided volunteer interviewers with free training with the Oral History Society to learn the ropes of proper oral history interviewing, which has its idiosyncrasies. They have also learned how to use the powerful Zoom H4 recorders and lapel microphones, as well as delved into the questions posed by ethical and legal issues. Together, we have carefully recorded, uploaded and saved over 25 interviews so far. We will be continuing to do so in the upcoming months: the interview phase was supposed to end when the next phase would begin, in early December, but we realised we still have the capacity to record several more interviews, as many of you are looking forward to seeing your own interview scheduled. You can visit our previous blog post to see our project timeline.
This year, many of the Armenian Institute’s events have been thought of as part of the Heritage of Displacement project, to foster reflection and discussion around the themes tackled in the interviews, but also to enhance the importance of recording family histories, preserving images and heirlooms with digitisation. There have been a splendid variety of approaches to these topics in the programme: discussions with podcast makers, filmmakers, authors and researchers about the importance of documenting history, and various methods to tell and record people’s stories; different angles of reflection around the idea of home, homeland, and placemaking; meeting creative members of the Armenian diaspora and get a glimpse of how their hybrid identities impact their work in literature, cinema, poetry, theatre and music; a writing workshop to craft poetry from photographs to express oneself in new and inventive ways; and of course events that celebrate Armenian traditions and heritage. In September we had a special event for our volunteers, in which we invited them to a documentary screening followed by a festive gathering. This was a nice opportunity to meet each other and chat about the project, while enjoying nibbles from Jakob’s restaurant. More exciting events are upcoming in 2025!
The project’s next phase has already been kickstarted! It is now time for the more quiet, desk-based phase of processing, a hugely important stage in being able to make the interviews openly accessible to the public. Again with the help of volunteers, it consists in producing summaries of each interview’s contents. Summaries provide a guide to what topics have been discussed in the interviews and where to find them, and as such are essential for research purposes. They are a point of entry into the recordings and help with their discoverability, thanks to the power of key-word search.
In addition, we have to carry out sensitivity reviews of the material we collected, to ensure its compliance with the law before it can be made available for public access. For instance, we must check that the interviews do not contain libellous or illegal information, and that they comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018. The purpose of the sensitivity review is to make sure the interviewee did not mention anything damaging about living and identifiable individuals. The Armenian Institute has put into place a rigorous process to comply with that regulation.
We need all the ears we can get to help us in that mammoth task of carefully listening to these many hours of recordings! Get in touch if you are interested in taking part, even if you have not been involved with the project thus far. After two successful training sessions in November and December, more sessions will be scheduled in 2025 to learn these. The training is conducted online, and only lasts under one hour, so do not hesitate to register when they will be announced!
You get to make a real impact getting involved through this phase: you have the opportunity to input on what ultimately gets to be heard from the interviews. Indeed, we listen to your ideas of particularly interesting passages or delightful extracts that you think should be included in the final exhibition, to help us make selections.
Through this project, we work to record family stories and personal relationships with cultural traditions. This project responds to the urgent need to document and preserve Armenian diaspora heritage, and to keep Armenian heritage accessible and relevant to new generations. If you are interested in taking part, email me today at erica@armenianinstitute.org.uk to get more information and to be made aware as soon as the next training sessions are announced.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players, they support projects that connect people and communities to heritage, like Heritage of Displacement. We are grateful for their support.