Oral history interviews are valuable sources for the history of science, technology, medicine, and the environment, but they can often be challenging to use, especially when interviews relevant to a particular subject are distributed across institutions with varying interfaces, formats, and access policies. Relevant collections are often underutilized, and important stories often remain untold.
The aim of CORAL: Commoning Oral Histories of Knowledge project is to develop a digital platform that enables researchers to search across institutions for oral history interviews on specific themes, as well as to analyze the content and distribution of interviews within each thematic collection. Importantly, CORAL does not provide direct access to interview recordings or transcripts, which can only be viewed via the institutions that have chosen to make them publicly accessible. The aim of the project is to raise the visibility and impact of existing oral history collections by facilitating their use by historians of science, technology, medicine, and the environment.
CORAL is being developed in close coordination with the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life’s Laboratory for Multimodal History. It is a continuation and expansion of the CommoningBiomedicine (ComBio) project, which was originally developed at the MPIWG by the independent research group “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences” led by Lara Keuck from 2021 to 2024.
The CORAL search tool can be accessed here.
