The Year of Documentation: Challenges, Experiences, Trajectories for Development

In mid-March 2022, the Center for Urban History team, with the participation of its fellows and the support of colleagues from Poland, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom, began documenting the experiences of the daily life of the war. The project is called "24/02/22, 5 am," as this time marker became the starting point for Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the six months of recording stories, we collected more than 150 interviews with people forced to leave their homes because of Russian aggression and those who have shifted their focus to volunteer work. These conversations have been transcribed and archived, and now we are describing them and working on a tagging system to help navigate the collection better. The following steps should be to re-contact the storytellers and develop algorithms for preserving and accessing the collected stories. During the seminar, we will discuss our progress over the past year and what should be done in the future.

This event is our opportunity to reflect on the experience in participating in this initiative and think about how we dealt with the documentation challenges in the conditions of a full-scale invasion, namely, what we succeeded and failed to implement, and what areas we should develop in the future. The notes from the discussion will become the basis for the methodological publications we are preparing due to the first project phase and will also help us prepare other interview-based documentation initiatives.

The discussion will be held in Ukrainian.

Organizer: Center for Urban History with the support of Lund University

Contact: Natalia Otrishchenko, [email protected]

Credits

Cover Image: Anna Ozerchuk // Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History