Oral History Research at the C²DH

Oral history research at the C²DH

At the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), oral history is more than a method—it’s a perspective. It serves as a critical lens through which we engage with the social, cultural, and political complexities of Luxembourg and the Greater Region. By tracing lived experience across linguistic borders and institutional landscapes, we explore how individuals and communities narrate migration, memory, inequality, and identity within—and beyond—national frames.

Situated at the intersection of historical inquiry, cultural anthropology, and digital humanities, our projects combine rigorous scholarship with innovative, ethically grounded digital practice. We go beyond testimony collection to develop reflexive methodologies that center narrative meaning-making, affective dynamics, and power asymmetries.

At its core, our work is collaborative and dialogical. We engage participants not merely as informants, but as co-producers of knowledge—acknowledging their interpretive agency in shaping the historical record. Through digital storytelling, public archiving, and contextualized dissemination, we strive to make oral histories intellectually accessible, socially resonant, and politically meaningful. In doing so, we open up new avenues for understanding how people remember, how they locate themselves in historical time, and how they envision the futures to which they aspire.

From conversation to archive

Every interview follows a documented lifecycle. This makes the research process traceable while protecting participants and preserving the context required for future interpretation.

Prepare responsibly. We establish the research purpose, participation conditions, access preferences and applicable ethical and data-protection requirements before recording begins.
Record and secure. Interviews are captured according to agreed technical standards and transferred promptly to managed institutional storage.
Transcribe and verify. AI-assisted transcription is used where appropriate, but every transcript is reviewed and enriched by a researcher.
Interpret and document. Coding, annotation and reflexive analysis develop iteratively, with methodological decisions recorded alongside the research.
Curate and provide access. Materials are described consistently, preserved under participant-approved access conditions and shared where permission allows.

Transcription and interpretation form an ongoing loop rather than a linear pipeline. This allows future researchers to understand not only what was learned, but how that knowledge was produced.

Our digital infrastructure

Our digital infrastructure translates ethical and legal commitments into practical safeguards and durable research resources:

Managed institutional storage protects recordings and associated documentation throughout the research lifecycle.
Human oversight of AI ensures that transcription remains accountable to language, context and narrative meaning.
Shared metadata makes interviews findable, understandable and citable across projects.
Open formats and documented provenance reduce dependence on individual software tools.
Controlled access aligns reuse with participants’ permissions and the sensitivity of the material.

The openly published IMM-Core Interview Metadata Model provides a reusable foundation for our Metadata Model.