From the perspective of a fellow: Dr. Inna Ganschow on how Ukrainian Narrators are Co-Shaping their Data Environment in an Oral History Participatory Experiment.

• Inna Ganschow is one of the LivArch scholarship holders at the Herder Institute. She spent time with us in April and May 2025.
• She is a research associate at the Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH).
• Her research focuses on the digital infrastructure of an oral history project dealing with war testimonies of Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons in Ukraine, Poland, and Luxembourg.
• In Marburg, she worked on a paper asking how Ukrainian narrators can participate in shaping their digital environment.

The U-CORE research project (Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analyzing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War) is an interview project featuring born-digital interviews with Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons in Ukraine, Poland, and Luxembourg.

Since the team is recording interviews with what according to the General Data Protection Regulation applicable within the EU (GDPR) is defined as a vulnerable population, we ensured that their voices were not only collected but also heard with care.

Taking into account data protection, representation in the digital space, and access rights to these testimonies during the ongoing war situation, the U-CORE team operating in three countries welcomed the challenge of finding a balance between the documentation task, ethical reflections about the workflow, and a disclosure strategy for the interviews on a digital public platform.

To protect personal and sensitive data, for which different regulations apply within the EU than in Ukraine, we saw the solution in a participatory approach. We asked the interviewees what they considered sensitive in their interviews. We also wanted to compare this with the perspective of the researchers, who were inspired by scientific literature while defining sensitivity.

To ensure the participation of interviewees throughout the analytical workflow of our project, we organized the process in three steps:

First, we asked the interviewees to reflect on the sensitivity of the content during the recording of the interview. We then trained them in a group workshop on how to edit their interviews in the central digital environment within a multimedia asset management tool. In individual sessions, we then discussed disclosure options for access to their interviews. This helped researchers to co-define a new solution with participants.

During my stay at the Herder Institute, I was able to reflect on, analyze, and write about this contribution to the participatory approach in the U-CORE project. In addition, I worked on upcoming publications centralizing the digital workflow developed in the project, visualization options for the migratory paths of interviewees, and the influence of language skills on the migratory decisions of Ukrainian refugees.

The library, map collection, and image archive of the Herder Institute were extremely useful during my work.

My work highly benefited from exchanging with scholars at the Herder Institute. I especially value their expertise in the areas of data collection, data storage, data modeling, and data standardization. Their suggestions helped me to define sensitivity as an additional component of the U-CORE data model.

The presentation I gave at the Herder Institute on April 30th, 2025, which will be reworked and submitted to an international journal, demonstrated how the U-CORE project adopted a bottom-up approach in defining data preservation and disclosure strategies for interview data.

This approach emphasizes the rights and needs of interviewees and links participation to empowerment. By involving U-CORE participants as co-decision makers, the project ensured that their voices are heard, and their memories preserved in a way that makes them feel protected. Our research team positioned narrators not as hierarchical research subjects “inside” the interview, but as horizontally placed subjects “outside” the interview – alongside researchers. 

I would like to thank the Herder Institute and the LivArch Research Project for the opportunity to contribute to a cross-disciplinary methodology in digital humanities, particularly at the intersection with oral history, sociology, and refugee research.

The result of my Fellowship at the Herder Institute is a best practice model for iterative participatory data modelling. I recommend its applicability in projects conducted amid ongoing conflict, enabling reflection, revision, and restriction of narrators’ statements. I highly recommend other scholars in Digital Humanities to become Fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East and Central Europe.