That’s what we called it. The Oral History Project. We recruited 126 immigrants to Canada from German-speaking central Europe, conducted hour-long interviews about their life, transcribed and annotated the entire corpus, and condensed their individual stories and the different histories into 14 book chapters.
Immigrants have many stories. Immigrants contribute a lot to society and culture, to economy and business, and especially to the community where they settled. And we thought it was worthwhile to write down these stories. And the book is still available, although Petra Books does not seem exist anymore.
I used to live and work in Waterloo Region. It started off as Waterloo County, and that was when the first German speakers moved there from Pennsylvania. We talked to the ones who came in the second half of the twentieth century or, like I did, in the first decade of the twenty-first. Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge is the metropolitan census area in Canada with the largest proportion of German speakers and people of German heritage – broadly conceived. Larger cities, like Toronto and Edmonton, have a larger number, but not a larger proportion.
This was a big project: 126 interviewees, 23 interviewers, 32 interview transcribers, 14 research assistants, 23 chapter authors – many of them graduate students – and we had the support from many, including the University of Waterloo, whose tech staff helped with the production of this promotional video.
Once in a while, I have a blog post that has nothing to do with AI. But heck, what would a technology like AI be if there were no contents …
