Email a copy of 'Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection Officially Announced' to a friend
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Guest Contributor
Guest contributions to the Armenian Weekly are informative articles or press releases written and submitted by members of the community.
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An remarkable contribution by this remarkable man. The father of modern Armenian history scholarship, his work will educate , inspire and motivate generations to come. His “ Armenia On the Road to Independence” was the first scholarly Armenian book I read and has inspired me for decades. God bless you Dr. Hovannisian.
“A pilot of 10 testimonies will be available to the public … The rest will be added as they are digitized and indexed to the high standards used by the Institute”. Exactly how long does it take to digitize a recording? No longer that the time the recording lasts! Then the same time again to listen to it and check it is OK. Then a few seconds to upload it to a server. So why the delay? Is it to extract money from future donors? The chosen title for the collection makes it sound embarrassingly like a personal aggrandizement project by the donor. But who are the real donors – the recorder or collector of the voices of the eyewitnesses, or the eyewitnesses themselves, who volunteered to be recorded so their voices could be heard and experiences preserved. If professor Hovannisian wants all his recordings to be heard to maximum effect by anyone anywhere, within his lifetime, he should simply release them all to PD and allow volunteers access to the tapes to do the digitizing – get enough people and it could be all done within weeks! State-of-the-art digitizing software is available to anyone at little or no cost, vintage playback equipment, now obsolete, is available at a fraction of the original cost, and high recording standards are universal, not in-house to the USC Shoah Foundation. There are plenty of online archives that would host and catalog the recordings without any cost, making it freely available to academics and researchers worldwide. Otherwise, I suggest this will become not a project to release eyewitness content, but a project to own and restrict that content for the benefit and enrichment of the key-holders of the collection.