Oral history and media: platforms for collecting witness stories

war testimonies and memories has become an everyday reality, in which individual stories are transformed into a common memory space. We have highlighted the following factors in the mediatisation of modern oral history: сom-municability (stemming from the public sphere as an integral part of oral history research), interdisciplinarity (using oral history methods to create different narratives) and global practices of powerful platforms for the collection and dissemination of stories and witness interviews (exemplified by StoryCorps ). The speed of access, the efficiency and the possibilities of content dissemination have defined the nature of new media, and the internet has become the main tool for documenting war history, an archive of personal stories and testimonies. Social media has spread storytelling as a fundamental genre of the modern information field.


Introduction
Since the beginning of the war on 24 February 2022, the field of personal narratives has become a powerful discourse of big and small stories.Collecting war stories is complicated not only by the obvious limitations of traditional archiving tools, but also by powerful changes in the media field, where multiplatform, speed of access and efficiency have become determining factors.The active participation of Ukrainians in documenting current events and recording their own testimonies is linked to the desire to present personal experiences and stories of those who did not survive.Recording one's own experience becomes an objectification of a person and their life; "the gesture of testimony emerges as a possible action in the present" (Rodeghero, & Weimer, 2021).With the emergence of official websites, numerous platforms, channels, projects, and authorial initiatives, this area has become structured, and digital tools have provided a clear and simple form for rapid information col-lection.The relevance of analysing the Ukrainian "text of war", where individual voices are part of a coherent narrative, is related to the speed of changes in this content and the need for scientific understanding.The purpose of the paper was to describe the most illustrative examples of platforms and online resources that have collected witness interviews since the beginning of the war.
Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase "The medium is the message", despite the time distance (1964), is now filled with new meanings.It is not only about the expansion of oral history archives, contextuality or levels of access, and the principles of curation that were relevant in the late 2010s (High, 2010;Larson, 2016).Media and new technologies have changed the practices of recording, archiving, and disseminating testimonies (Martini, 2018), and have become the main source of the information agenda.In this sense, media "act as a memory network that also functions as a hub for other memory networks" (Kitch, 2008, p. 318).ISSN 2311-259X Synopsis: text, context, media 2023, 29(2), с. 139-145 pp. 139-145, 29(2), 2023

Theoretical framework
In the contemporary field of oral history scholarly discussions, we have identified several areas of research and practice that are significant for our topic.
Communication opportunities of oral history.
The fourth paradigmatic revolution of the 1990s-2000s, defined by A. Thomson as the digital stage of oral history development, actualized interdisciplinary and international relations in the academic discourse, intensified international dialogue, and brought the mediality of oral history to a new level (Thomson, 2017).According to A. Thomson, this rapid revolution is manifested through the emergence of new tools for collecting, archiving and distributing oral history documents: powerful contextualization, a departure from the document and instead the generation of non-textual digital sources, globalism.Subsequently, the use of digital technologies in oral history sphere has focused on the possibilities of changes in collection, curation, archiving and dissemination (See, for example, special issue The Oral History Review.2013.Volume 40.Issue 1).
Following the general trend, the Ukrainian oral history school at the International Conference "Communicative Horizons of oral history" (Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, 2013) proposed to consider the communicative nature of oral history "at the level of bringing it into the scientific and public field, at the level of publicizing the results of oral history research, or, better, oral historical interaction, and the perception of these results by society" (Grinchenko, 2013; see also Grinchenko, 2021).Accordingly, the following communicative features of oral history were identified: the dialogic nature of the oral message itself; "articulation of the oral history message in certain 'arenas', i.e. in communication environments that ensure both scientific and public circulation of oral history" (Grinchenko, 2013, p. 13); contextuality (ideological guidelines, state policy, trends in the development of historiography itself); assessment and perception of oral histories by society (reception).
Interdisciplinarity. Oral history and media.
Simultaneously with the use of various media as a means of popularizing oral history, the direction of interdisciplinary research was intensified, which formed new tasks of interpreting stories and contributed to increasing interest in them.The use of oral history practices in various fields of humanitarian knowledge has expanded the terminological content of "oral history".In the collection Oral history and qualitative methodologies: Educational research for social justice, "oral history" is defined as an umbrella term: "It is an umbrella term that integrates history, life history methods, and testimony accounts.It refers to the process of data gathering as well as to the product of such research" (Mulvihill, & Swaminathan, 2022, p. 8).
The process of interdisciplinarity is multifaceted, oral history methods were increasingly used to create a variety of narratives, from educational to graphic (Hudoshnyk, 2021), and the practices of interaction between oral history and the media becoming the subject of both admiration and devastating criticism in academic research (Feldstein, 2004;Freund, 2015;Zion et al., 2021;Hudoshnyk, & Temchenko, 2022).It became all the more relevant in times of crisis situations when oral history was objectified "somewhere in the middle between fast journalism, in-depth psychoanalysis and social sciences" (Cave, & Sloan, 2014).Understanding testimony as an act of memory and interviews as interpretation rather than evidence became the point of intersection between media and oral history (Mulvihill, & Swaminathan, 2022).
Thus, oral history, which is based on life memories and uses in-depth interviews as a key method, is now rapidly expanding its capacity through digital storytelling, participatory practices (Martini, 2017), collaborative writing, even art and performance (High, 2021;Jones, 2021).At the same time, widespread audience access to oral history archives and materials has provoked a problem that S. Cohen defined as "The Burden of Access" back in 2013.Many visitors, as the researcher notes, quickly leave the online space of oral history collections without evaluating the breadth of ideas it contains, because "listening and understanding requires enormous efforts, abilities and skills" (Cohen, 2013, p. 161).On the contrary, the volume of traffic, speed of access, comprehensibility, and ease of perception of content have become defining for today's new media.The mediation of contemporary oral history archiving by digital means increasingly demonstrates the impact of multimedia not only on the technological process of reproducing the nuances of "the interview as a multi-layered communicative event" (Dunaway, 1984, p. 116).The requirements for oral history text disseminated through various are changing: long forms continue to wait for their inquisitive researcher and analyst, while short forms are rapidly making inroads on social networks and YouTube channels.The five dilemmas of contemporary oral history identified by S. Cohen (listening / reading, hits / hours, the burden of access, metadata, and aesthetics) can become opportunities for "other fields that are migrating from analog to digital and building online collections" (Cohen, 2013, p. 167).This is relevant for media as well.
Experience in creating digital collections and platforms.The method of rapid response collecting.
The practices of recording, archiving and disseminating oral histories have been implemented in various projects, such as the American StoryCorps, the Listening Project of the British BBC, the Australian Story Project.Multiplatform is becoming an integral part of such projects that engage in public debate, reach out to local audiences through regional projects, disseminate their content through media, books, films, programmes, research projects, and involve universities, libraries, NGOs, and charities.
Active media promotion, ease of downloading and archiving materials, and involvement of a mobile application in the StoryCorps program, for example, have made it possible to collect the stories of 600,000 people since 2003.Subsequent projects based on StoryCorps collections have been successful.They include books (e.g.The New York Times bestseller "Listening is an Act of Love") based on the life stories of the project, cooperation with thousands of organizations, schools and teachers, the collection of the stories of the LGBTQ community (StoryCorps Out-Loud), the initiative to spread the stories of veterans and military personnel (Military Voices Initiative), programs on morning broadcasts, podcasts, thematic selections, animated films (in cooperation with the Steven Spielberg Foundation) and much more (Discover StoryCorps, n.d.;Mancino, 2019).
At the same time, the possibility of archiving a large number of testimonies using new media poses a difficult question for the modern oral history (Freund, 2015).New research and analytical tools are needed for the vast content of thousands of interviews and life stories, replicated by modern information technologies, recorded on social networks and media platforms, openly accessible, devoid of dialogically oriented mediation, and embodied in global projects (Faulkenbury, 2020).Analyzing the spread of digital storytelling, researcher Pirita Juppi draws attention to the crucial importance in its functioning of self-presentation and self-reflection, which are realized through the opportunity to present oneself individually (have the right to speak and be heard) and explain to other people one's own changing identity (Juppi, 2017).Personal testimonies go through a complex process from personal identification to "bearer of history", "truth, era and experience" (Wieviorka, 2006), raising important issues of trust in media testimonies (Smit et al., 2016), new media and digital technologies in general (Bodo , 2020;Thor Tureby, & Wagrell, 2022).
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has also influenced the practice of media presentation of memories and oral history materials and contributed to the formation of a new approach to preserving and archiving the experiences of ordinary people, disseminating their life stories in newspapers, magazines, on thematic sections of websites, on multimedia platforms of universities, foundations, public organizations, and global international projects (Mubarek, 2020;Cramer, 2020;Faulkenbury, 2020).
The call to "collect the moment" through newspapers and social networks during the pandemic has actualised the method "rapid response collecting" (RRC), which had previously been implemented in museum practice (Tenenbaum, 2020;Debono, 2021;Rodriguez, 2021).The RRC was used in the creation of national and international projects A Journal of the Plague Year, The COVID-19 Memory Archival Project, The COVID-19 Oral History Project (C19OH) to document everyday life and record people's experiences during quarantine (Rodeghero, & Weimer, 2021;Nyitray et al., 2022).

Oral history and war: the Ukrainian dimension
Characterization of the contemporary war narrative is impossible without taking into account the powerful wave of historical-documentary texts about the war of 2014.From academic research to everyday chronicles -the books documenting this conflict show striking diversity of genre, they range from amateur accounts to professional intelligence, diary prose, novels and collections of memories.With the beginning of hostilities in the East of Ukraine in 2014, experts from university centers of oral history in Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, national universities, public organizations, volunteer centers and regional state administrations engaged in the collection of war testimonies.
The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has done serious and fruitful work on preserving the memory of the war events (website at http://uinp.gov.ua).Collections of 1 600 oral history interviews represent important events of recent years: the Revolution of Dignity, the Russian-Ukrainian war, the Ukrainian liberation movement, the Chernobyl disaster, and the occupation of Crimea.The work of the Institute is distinguished by its active media policy: joint projects with the First Channel of Ukrainian Radio, TSN.ua, internet resources.
Directly related to our topic is the project ATO: oral history, launched in 2016 with the aim of "recording, collecting and storing and making public oral testimonies of participants in the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas" (website at https://uinp.gov.ua/usna-istoriya/ato-usna-istoriya).Stories from this collection were published thematically: the history of the creation of volunteer battalions, memories of participants of military operations, women in the military, chaplains.
It should be noted that at this stage of collecting war memories and testimonies, the new media began to play an important role.The involvement of social media and video hosting channels in the collection and dissemination of war testimonies and memories has become an everyday reality, and individual stories are being transformed into a "common space of memory": What was experiential became phenomenological.Hence the rise of autobiography over biography, in which the problem of self became its own solution, and the invention of the reflexive researcher, where the interview as a 'memory event' reflects the theory that history itself is performative, collaborative, remembered.(Jolly, 2012, p. 51) Information about the war, localized in certain regions of Donbas, spread throughout the country through social networks, news from television channels and information sites, videos on YouTube.The information collected and structured by journalists was later reproduced in journalistic and documentary projects (Shtogrin, 2016).Thus, at the initiative of Radio Liberty journalists and a group of activists, a unique collection of memories of the defenders of the famous Donetsk airport was published -a documentary book AD 242 History of courage, brotherhood and self-sacrifice.The war of 2022 changed the subject of resources already known since 2014 (BABYLON'13, Ukrainer, The Museum of Civilian Voices), transformed the modern social media sites and messengers into a common place for gathering evidence.

Witnessing the war. Platforms for collecting testimonies during the war
The Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022 is exceptional in the new century for the number of victims and the global nature of the challenges posed to humanity.It has turned out to be the most mediatized.Numerous testimonies of terrible war crimes, photo reports from cities scorched by artillery, and life stories of refugees, victims, and children create a new information order.
In its diverse content, we have extracted the following typological features: -the discreteness of separate war experiences is embodied in numerous life stories, storytelling becomes a common practice; -perception of life stories and testimonies as documentary evidence with appropriate codification and aggregation on specialised resources; -a synthesis of genres, a combination of professional forms of in-depth interviews and minute-long videos, and short-format sketches of life, presented on various multimedia platforms; -the integral factor of the media -time -does not allow for postponing testimonies for later, the effect is needed here and now.S. Cohen's idea that "time allows memory to create both errors and perspective" is complicated by the lack of such distancing during wartime.
Another important difference from the 2014 war is the mass involvement of Ukrainians on the Internet: 86 % against 54 % in 2014.At the same time, the share of mobile traffic has increased to 83 %.According to the data of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, there has been a "big resettlement" online (especially Telegram and YouTube) (Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 2022).
The media are lightning-fast in their reactions to audience demands.Platforms, YouTube channels, Ukrainian and world media, telethon Yedyni novyny, social networks and messengers, mobile phone applications (the Ukrainian program Diya (Action) invites users to download evidence of property damage), chatbots, archives of humanitarian funds and testimonies of war crimes -the voices of war fill the information field with an irresistible wave of human interest stories 24/7, depriving the researcher of the luxury of detached distancing.
We limited the choice of research material to a clear framework: -relevance (the Similar Web resource is involved); -focus on the stories of civilians rather than combatants.
In the diverse discourse of witness stories, we selected sources (platforms, websites, channels) that used interviews in their work, had a stated programme, purpose, clearly defined conditions and restrictions on information collection.
The Museum of Civilian Voices (website at https://civilvoicesmuseum.org/) is an online museum project that archives the stories of civilians of Ukraine who became victims or witnesses of the war.Currently, the Museum's archive already has 68,976 stories (data as of 29/04/2023), at the time of the opening of the project, the museum had collected 2,000 stories.The project aims to become "the world's largest archive of Stories told by Civilians who suffered from hostilities in Ukraine; to create a reliable source of information about the life of Civilians amid the war told in the first person" (from the project's website).
Participants in the project can tell a story in different ways: take a survey in a chatbot or via e-mail, contact a free hotline, fill out a questionnaire on the website and tell a story.Contributors to the project are requested at the outset to give their consent to the processing of personal data and permission to place the story on the digital sites of the museum and the foundation that created it.
The site's accessible navigation and non-linear document presentation combines both traditional keyword searching and advanced granularity by category (stories, artefacts, children's drawings, collections), place names, years of events (2014present), content types (audio, video, text (in Russian, Ukrainian, English).The principle of tagging includes various metrics: from those established by museum practice (year, groups, events, source), as well as the author's own.The Experience tag includes: relocation, damaged housing, psychological trauma, loss of loved ones, occupation, deportation, filtration process.The Conflict Impacts tag allows users to group evidence into different groups: security, education, water, sanitation, health, housing, work, food.The traditional description of archival units (Guide to working with the online archive of The Museum of Civilian Voices) is supplemented by opportunities for research work through a personal account with portal access to closed archive pages.
The fundamental difference between the story archive and the traditional closed nature of museum collections is the active feedback, responding quickly to requests for help.A separate task of the project: "To become a unique psychotherapeutic project that will contribute to the psychological well-being and mental health of Ukrainians who survived the trauma of the war by telling their stories" (from the website).In 2014, 250 psychologists attended the War Trauma course organized by the Foundation.As Natalya Yemchenko, a member of the Supervisory Board, testifies, psychologists accompany the collection of stories.The museum clearly takes the position of responsiveness -talking about the most terrible memory is a help.Being able to tell a story becomes a form of combating the stigma of trauma.
The multiplatform nature of the project is united by the common slogan "Every story counts!Tell your story in order to preserve the memory of the past and present for a better future" and is based on various media collaborations: creating a telegraph channel for teenagers called Your Superpower, publishing individual stories in the media (Bykvu, gordonua.com);participating in the creation of the documentary "Mariupol Survivors" (2023) and the documentary performance "The Face of War" (Gnatiuk, 2022), and much more.Active public activity, the presence of the project on various media platforms and in professional community (the Museum of Civilian Voices becomes the first representative of Ukraine in the Oral History Association) allows us to talk about the online museum as an archive, a communication channel and a social phenomenon.The principal difference from classical practices of witnessing the war is the absence of temporal distance.Eyewitnesses and participants transfer their stories to new media, forming a new layer of historical reality, including emotions of "experience here and now".This process can be seen as a kind of life cycle of information preservation in society.Whereas life cycles in economics and society are constantly studied by scholars (Sardak et al., 2021), life cycles of the accumulation, preservation and reproduction of one's own stories during war need research and reflection.
The following project can be attributed to government initiatives.The #MyWar platform (website at www.mywar.in.ua) was created with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine and has a telling slogan: "Everyone has something to say in Ukraine -everyone will be heard in the world!"The resource contains a clear road map of the resource, simple instructions for filling out a profile and uploading your story.The platform is just mastering the Beta version, although, according to the resource, published stories have received more than 10 million views (data as of 24/08/2022).The future development of the portal is spelled out in a road map with filtering capabilities, pinning hashtags and options for feedback on stories and publishing stories on its own Telegram channel.
The project War.Stories from Ukraine (website at https://www.warstoriesukraine.com)was prepared by a team of professional journalists, editors, illustrators, translators, communicators and designers who set themselves the goal of collecting, recording and telling the stories of people in a time of fullscale war.The project is implemented with the support of the Lviv Media Forum and the European Union under the House of Europe program.The project attracts attention with the professionalism of the materials produced.The thematic longreads present 3-4 life stories with active use of quotations from interviews, multimedia and original illustrations.
The texts are translated into 10 languages and present complex topics that are not always relevant in the operational information field: testimonies of a pregnant woman, a disabled person, a foreigner, children, elderly people, victims of violence, stories of inhabitants of occupied towns.To some extent, such a project can be attributed to the authors, but the means and quality of its implementation attests to the interdisciplinary interprofessional interaction that is important for us.
The YouTube channel @UkrainianWitness (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSw52AtaknWAZLUP6ZCKm8A/videos) was registered in February 2022 by the founder of the Return Alive fund Vitaly Deinega, has more than 104 thousand subscribers and more than 15 million views (data as of 1/05/2023).The author of the project himself noted that one of the reasons for its emergence was the lessons of the previous years of the war "when Russian propaganda wrote our history for us and Ukraine lost the information war" (Deinega, 2022).
The resource presents in-depth interviews, as well as reports from the scene of events, live broadcasts, advice, and thematic interviews.The task of disseminating information about the war is solved by the resource through the provision of ready-made stories and reports.The use of Instagram and Facebook social media, subtitles and video descriptions for the stories extends the channel's audience reach, visitors are invited to participate in the collection of video materials from the scene of the events via e-mail.
Children's voices of war are an especially painful experience for Ukraine.According to the Prosecutor General, 477 children have died in Ukraine, 960 children have been injured (data as of 01/05/2023).The segment of children's memories is one of the most tragic during the entire war.It is represented by the archive of children's stories of the already mentioned portal Civilian Voices.War through the eyes of children -20 stories about the childhood that was not there, which presents war events through the eyes of children from the occupied territories, Donetsk, Luhansk, since the time of the war in 2014.
The work of another fund Voices of Children (website at https://voices.org.ua/) is related to the provision of psychological and psychosocial support to children during the war, assistance to families in solving household problems, treatment and rehabilitation of children (organized by the site).Along with the tremendous work of the foundation in the areas of targeted psychological, humanitarian aid, advocacy and education, the project presents short (up to 2 minutes) videos (Video stories for the sake of children) and children's stories.In an effort to give the child a voice, a principle for the collection of materials is the ban on depicting children as victims to be pitied; "blowing out a tear, because it won't help the child".In the selection of stories one finds stories of actions, dreams and hopes.Individual stories are specific reports on the work of the fund itself (Individual aid section).It is difficult to categorize small scale life stories as professionally described archival units.This is a foundation for children and about children.The clear audience focus of the project presents memories of the war as a tragic episode of life that continues.To mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Children's Voices charitable foundation published a book, "War through the voices of children", with 100 quotes from children's memoirs.Since February 24, the fund has also managed to rank among the top 10 Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations that have collected the most donations, according to Forbes.

Conclusions
During the war, the Ukrainian Oral History Association, the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes "Territory of Terror", the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and other traditional bases for oral history archives are pausing their work.Some staff members are on the frontline, while others are involved in volunteer projects and heritage preservation.But time is becoming a luxury, so the internet has become the most popular medium for documenting reality, an opportunity to engage the international community freely (all the platforms listed in this article are open access).Not losing the voice of fellow citizens is the goal of history, media and science alike.It is not even a question of what we will do with the thousands of stories collected professionally or by amateurs, published on large-scale platforms or in short videos, according to academic standards or alternative methodologies.The area of oral history testimony and storytelling has become an important and influential part of our informational everyday life and cannot be ignored.The shift to the internet, with its demands for rapid response and direct access, has posed new challenges for oral history archives.
The experience of platforms like StoryCorps, with its powerful promotion of content through regional projects, thematic initiatives, books, podcasts and comics, is creating new standards of codified authoring and extended communication.Openness, accessibility, internal end-to-end tagging, simplified cataloguing, easy site or platform navigation, and the ability to upload your own story is becoming necessary.
The logic of presenting relevant personal narratives in contemporary Ukrainian information field goes far beyond the interpretation of "life stories as a pursuit of attention" (Freund, 2015).The presented projects prove the opposite -to be heard means to empathise and act.In this sense, the "voices of war" become part of history and, together with the media, form a public dialogue that is critically needed in periods of national formation.Oral history is becoming more than just a public story about oneself ("selfdocumentation"), digital storytelling has become a new social, cultural, economic, and intellectual phenomenon, a widespread practice and a means of shaping individual and collective memory.