Witness seminar
In addition to interviews, the project makes use of another oral history documentation technique: the witness seminar. A witness seminar is essentially a group interview about a well-defined theme, which is recorded and transcribed and thereafter can be used as historical evidence. The seminar is usually led by an academic or someone else with relevant experience, and is often conducted with an audience which may or may not participate in the seminar. The method was pioneer by two British centres, the Centre of British Contemporary History (CCBH) and The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. In Sweden witness seminars have been organised since 1998 at the Centre for Contemporary History at Södertörns högskola, in total 27 seminars. In the recent projekt ”Från matematikmaskin till IT”, 44 witness seminars on the history of computing in Sweden were conducted from 2006 to 2008. The latter project and the methods used there provided the immediate inspiration for this project.
Within The Digital Wonder, one witness seminar will be organised, preliminarily on 17 February 2010. The topic is ”Internet, the IT boom, and the advertising industry in the second half of the 1990s”. While the other activities in the project focus mainly on the winning of international awards from 2001, this witness seminar will provide valuable evidence on the background for this development: the appearance of the internet as a new communication medium from about 1994-95 and its appropriation by different firms and individuals. This first phase of marketing on the internet created a legacy which is necessary to comprehend for anyone interested in the developments of this millennium. We will gather about 8 people who can contribute memories of the 1990s from different angles – advertising agencies, the new internet consultancies, media firms, and not least state-owned firms such as Telia and Posten. The seminar will take place at ABF-huset in Stockholm and will be recorded on video as well as audio. If this sounds interesting, you are most welcome to join the audience.
