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One example of oral-historian field research in pandemic age

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2021

Abstract

The research project ((Historical anthropological research. Czech Russians and the Crossroads of Modern and Contemporary History: Biographical Interviews}} (https://cestirusove.fhs.cuni.cz/CR-1.html) was begun on the Spring of 2020, e.g. during the pandemic COVID-19 era.

Thus, from the very initial stages there was the dilemma: to postpone fieldwork until the end of pandemic complications or to continue it in both present and remote modes? The second way was chosen. Hence the first answer is why we have done so? Then in the course of the research, a number of technical and methodological questions occurred alike.

For instance, one of the important questions is: does the way of the interview, e.g present or distance, influence the length and content of the interviews? The other ones are about the technical problems of remote recording and transcription, the difference in the length of the autobiographical narratives for different generations of narrators, audio-visual recording as opposed to audio recording and try to compare the current project with the experience of Finnish colleagues recording oral-historical conversations also "at a distance". The contribution is aimed to share such practical experience, including the technical problems of the "distance interview" recording, and discuss the questions above, but it's rather a try to give the hypothesis than some final explanations.