Ethical-legal, technical, and methodological aspects of oral-historical research during pandemic times on the example of a project "Czech Russians and the Crossroads of Modern and Contemporary History: Biographical nterviews"
Abstract
The research project was started on April 1, 2020 and is designed for 3 years. The focus on the Russian community arose from the certain lacuna that exists in the Czech common consciousness regarding the historical memory of the representatives of the given community.
It is important that the research is based on the key issues of the modern Czech-Russian history: 1) the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia (1914-1918) and the Russian emigration in Czechoslovakia; 2) the liberation of Czechoslovakia and Prague (1944-1945); 3) the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia (1968); 4) the Velvet Revolution (1989) and the collapse of the USSR. During the research, a number of ethical, legal, methodological, and technical issues occurred.
The article provides an overview of ways to solve it. One of the important questions is: How does the form of the interview (present/distance) affect the length and number of interviews? In addition, questions will be asked and answered about the technical problems of remote recording and transcription, the difference in the length of the autobiographical narrative among different generations, audio-visual recording as opposed to audio recording.