February 2007 - Present
Sharing Authority with Baba: A Collaborative History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community, 1901-1939 views community as an ongoing process that is mediated through a range of conflicting and converging factors which change over time, over space, and over generation. Sensitive to this and other important variables, like gender, ethnicity, class, region, and age, this website examines how Catholic, Orthodox, nationalist, and progressive Ukrainian men, women, and children, both immigrants and those of Ukrainian descent, formed a distinct ethnic community in the Sudbury region between 1901 and 1939.
|visit website|
February 2007 - Present
Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations is an oral history project exploring Montrealers’ experiences and memories of mass violence and displacement. A team of both university and community-based researchers is in the process of recording life story interviews with more than 500 Montreal residents over the course of the next five years.
|visit website|
Stories Matter
September 2008 - Present
The software currently under development at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling will allow for the digitization and archiving of digital video and audio materials so that users may annotate, analyze, evaluate and share materials in their collections. The project is being developed in two phases and will provide online (large scale, collaborative) and offline (small scale, local) versions of the software that will operate in both French and English. The core team is comprised of Canada’s Research Chair in Public History, Steve High, two embedded oral historians, Stacey Zembrzycki and Kristen (Krissy) O’Hare, and a software developer, Jacques Langlois.
|visit website|
2004-Ongoing
The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling has sought to “rebuild” the demolished corrugated paper mill in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. We hope that the resulting “mill-scape” will be something more than a memory site, but a site of interpretation of place identity and attachment as well. This website uses the mill’s floor plans, aerial photos and insurance plans to create a three dimensional model. “Visitors” can take a virtual tour of the mill and listen to dozens of embedded audio clips taken from 70 interviews conducted with former hourly and salaried workers and see a selection of the photographs collected.
|visit website|
Memoryscapes and Public History
Ongoing
By making this website availavble to the public Dr. Steven High's Working Class Public History class have created a platform to warehouse the memory projects in the research community. The innovative use of the map to locate these memories in Montreal, Quebec and Canada gives a sense of the scope and scale of lived histories within these regions. The website houses over 40 projects which can be browsed through the interactive maps. If you would like to have your project become part of the map email the Centre coordinator at cohds@alcor.concordia.ca
Spring 2009
The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling developed a program and web story-generator as part of a spring 2009 Open University course with L'Abri en Ville. During the course of the class, participants were asked to find a photograph of themselves or of a community occasion and tell a short story about it. The web-based application is not only a showcase of the community's stories but also acts as a outreach tool to other communities. It is hoped that the L'Abri en Ville will continue to add stories to the online community story generator, as it has the capacity to hold an unlimited number of stories.
|visit website|
In Search of Stories - Montreal’s Chinese Community is a joint project of the Musée de la Personne and the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. The main idea of the project is to assign young Montrealers to “reSearch” the city’s Chinese community. Besides a conventional historical inquiry, a more personal component, the Search, will allow the participants to explore their own contexts and relationship to the project. ReSearchers of Chinese origin will discover their history by gathering testimony from members of their ethnic community, and reSearchers of other backgrounds will learn much about a culture and history other than their own. The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling is also collaborating in the project by training the reSearchers.
|visit website|
Dans la Rue
A Friend in the Night
Pops’ Inaugural Van Route
A bus tour of the inaugural Dans la rue van route, accompanied by an audio presentation of anecdotal stories from the founder - Father Emmett Johns (Pops), and its first employee, Chloe Guilherme, have captured the beginnings of this ground breaking organization. The idea was originally conceived as a 20th anniversary activity but is recognized as a wonderful archival tool, and potentially, could be further developed to share with potential supporters and donors. The organization took advantange in the 2009 International Day for Sharing Life Stories and worked with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling to edit and deliver the stories.
| read may 21 2009 journal article | visit website |
February 7 - 10, 2008
Sharing Authority Conference is a three-day interdisciplinary conference co-organized by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and the Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations project, and Centre d'Histoire Montreal. This conference seeks to bring scholars, artists, professionals and community-based researchers together to promote deep engagement in sharing authority with interviewees and demoncratize historical writing in public and oral history. Its guiding principle is a sincere commitment to public engagement.
|visit website |
November 5 - 8, 2009
Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New Media and the Arts is a three-day interdisciplinary conference co-organized by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and the Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations project. This conference seeks to bring scholars, artists, professionals and community-based researchers together to promote deep engagement with life stories that contain or are defined by experiences of mass human rights violations. Its guiding principle is a sincere commitment to public engagement.
|visit website |
May 28 - June 1, 2010
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication. In telling stories about the past, historians, novelists, playwrights, teachers, museum curators, film-makers, artists, illustrators, musicians and public historians (to name just a few) engage in the task of making sense of “histories” that are often violent, sometimes contradictory, and endlessly fascinating. This year’s annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association at Concordia University features ninety-three conference panels that explore the dynamics of history and storytelling in the world of graphic novels (“Getting Graphic with the Past”), on stage (“Theatre, History and Storytelling”) and in the digital age (“Researchers, New Media and Archives: Case Studies of Immigrant Subjectivity”), to name just three examples. As part of our special programming activities “Outside the Box,” we offer a one-day series of public history workshops (prior registration required), free historical walking tours offered by Montreal historians, and a free theatre performance of “Someone Between” that played at Montreal’s recent Wildside Festival to a packed and enthusiastic house.
|visit website |