Today we heard from Stef Scagniola, an Italian researching Dutch military history. Her project is a collection of stories from Dutch veterans from all the conflicts from May 1914 to the Afghanistan war. She noted that since this time, there's actually been "a lot of conflict for people who perceive themselves as peacemakers,” a nation working as mediator between fellow nations.
Stef is collecting stories from all these conflicts, but not using them for research herself. Her interest is in the technical side of things: the database used to store and retrieve and access the stories, on enhancing the possibility for qualitative researchers, who can use the database to do things like: Compare veteran’s experience in various roles during several conflicts, like interviews with mechanics, cooks, or chauffeurs, to see the changes in such roles over time.
A random cool feature of this database is the ability to search for words within video and go straight to the word in a specific video. Amazing.
Stef noted that older veterans tended to be conscripted and serve for longer periods of time, so there are notable differences between them and younger veterans, who usually serve for 4 months and who are often professionals. She also talked about adding to the archive things like family photos and other documents you are often given when people tell their stories. The quote about heroes came from her noting that it's often so much easier to talk about stories of heroism as opposed to stories where one has done things one is highly ashamed of, especially in war.
Some people are extremely gifted at framing discussions that draw out a lot of good thoughts, and Stef is one of those people. She started by setting oral histories in a research context, how they might be useful and also how collected and accessed, and then moved into an awesome discussion.
She asked us to share stories of history we'd grown up with and then think about how those stories meshed with what we were taught in school, which spun into discussion on the democratization of history, which we all got into, and then she left us with this fabulous thought about how soldiers immediately after being in a conflict, don't talk about it, nor does society, about how often we need a lapse in time or history to talk about uneasy issues - she said this amazing thing: "...taboos are functional because they put away something dangerous so that people can connect to each other." Whew. I've been thinking about that one ever since she said it.
It felt like this class touched both on the practicality of what technology can do - the accessible database of oral histories - and also the importance of that technology for the people involved, the veterans, the researchers, and for your average Dutch citizen looking for stories.
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