In recent decades, the history of science has become more capacious. No longer centered around the professional scientist, it now encompasses a much wider range of previously sidelined agents, from healthcare workers and environmental activists to patients and consumers. This expansion has opened new historiographical vistas, revitalizing the field. At the same time, it has drawn scholars out of the library and archive and into less familiar spaces. Increasingly, we find ourselves learning about the past not only from manuscripts but also, and in more direct ways, from communities of one kind or another.
These new modes of engagement have thrown into relief significant ethical and practical challenges that remain unresolved. Ethical because doing research not on but with stakeholders, in a meaningfully inclusive and non-extractive mode, requires special care; practical because delivering on the promise of collaborative, community-centered research typically involves experimenting across methods, genres, and formats—from oral history and ethnography to filmmaking and community archiving. To support these new ways of working, and critical reflection on them, we established the Laboratory for Multimodal History in the Department "Knowledge Systems and Collective Life," directed by Etienne Benson, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
A research partner shares private documents during an oral history interview. Source: Eddie Bolger.
Learning about the Past from Living People
The Laboratory for Multimodal History, which opened its doors in September 2025, provides researchers and practitioners based at the Institute with the equipment, know-how, and physical and ethical space necessary for genuine collaboration across disciplinary, political, and other divides, while at the same time upholding the highest academic standards. The aim is not only to push the boundaries of the field but also to intervene, from a historical perspective, in public discourse. This includes intermediating between professional and lay experts with divergent knowledge claims, whether about public health, the environment, or other topics.
In practical terms, the Lab focuses on three interrelated approaches: (1) oral history, ethnography, and other interview-adjacent methods that involve learning about the past from living people; (2) more-than-textual forms of research and communication, including audio-based scholarship and filmmaking; and (3) inclusive, collaborative research with non-academic partners, at eye level. The overarching goal is to facilitate collaboration on historical research and communication with non-academic partners. Oral history and audiovisual media are a means to this end.
Introducing Multimodal History
Extending a lively discourse in anthropology to historical practice, we also introduce the new concept of multimodal history. In the past several years, anthropologists have adopted the term “multimodal” in ways that extend nontextual methods beyond those of visual anthropology. These include multisensorial practices such as performance, dance, or cooking. Importantly for our purposes, anthropologists also use the term to describe modes of collaboration with nonacademic interlocutors as equal partners in research and communication. Multimodal, in other words, goes beyond multimedia or multisensory to encompass multiple modes of engagement.
On-location filming in Berlin for the course in essay-film production offered by the Lab. Source: Eddie Bolger.
Of course, history, like anthropology, has always been multimodal: one only has to think of museums, documentaries, reenactments, walking tours, oral history, public history, and so on. But historians have not explicitly engaged with multimodality, a term that helpfully captures the three core elements of the Lab—oral history, audiovisual media, and collaborative research—while leaving the interpretive space quite open. Here, we see an opportunity to advance historical scholarship by developing our own set of tools, ethics, and politics of care in conversation with colleagues in oral history, anthropology, critical archival studies, journalism, filmmaking, and beyond.
Making Historical Knowledge Responsibly
To be both cutting-edge and ethically sound, multimodal research depends on an array of material and intellectual resources. As a physical space, the Lab occupies an acoustically isolated room that can be flexibly arranged for meetings, training sessions, audio and video recording, test screenings, and listening sessions. It is fully equipped to support the production of new oral history interviews, podcasts, essay films, and other experiments in audiovisual research and communication, including with borrowable field kits and a workstation for transcription and video editing.
Researchers during a workshop organized by the Lab.
As an ethical space, the Lab seeks to provide researchers with the less tangible but no less essential tools needed to develop community-based partnerships responsibly—that is to say, with care and without perpetuating harm. This aligns with the core intellectual and political mission of the department, which seeks to historically understand knowledge production as a relationship-making activity. When applied to the production of historical knowledge, this means reckoning with our own relationality as historians, and all the critical self-reflection that entails.
Projects, Training, and Partners
Through a series of projects over the course of the next years, researchers working with the Lab will develop and experimentalize the concept of multimodal history as it applies to research and communication in the history of science, broadly conceived. We will offer technical support as well as guidance on ethical and legal considerations, including through ethics workshops, oral history training sessions, and a crash course in filmmaking.
In parallel to the Lab, the “Living Knowledge” working group hosts a series of meetings to discuss methods, ethics, and sources across oral history, critical archival studies, and related fields; an edited volume is in the works. We are also helping to develop CORAL (Commoning Oral Histories of Knowledge), a digital platform that enables researchers to search across institutions for oral history interviews on specific themes, and to analyze the content and distribution of interviews within each thematic collection.
Oral history books acquired by the Research Library for the Lab’s collection.
Crucially, the development of the Lab has been supported by the library, a student assistant, an external media consultant, and an Institute-based team experienced in audiovisual production, communication, data management, and digital humanities. Further guidance is provided by an international advisory body, or “Sounding Board,” with expertise in oral history, ethnography, and filmmaking. As part of a broader strategy that involves building bridges beyond the institute and field, we are actively exploring partnerships with venues, journalists, filmmakers, artists, activists, and communities, both in our vicinity and farther afield. Such connections are vital to achieving the Lab’s aim of encouraging scholars to responsibly experiment with new, more inclusive modes of engagement while bringing historical perspectives to bear on the wider, more public conversations of our times.