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Paper short abstract

The paper discusses the challenges faced by a project, which aims to diversify (migration) history through building a digital oral history archive. Increased visibility comes along with increased vulnerability. Open data comes along with loss of control. Selective story telling has to be dealt with.

Paper long abstract

WHO CARED is a community based project to collect and make public the stories of nurses, who were recruited from India to West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Starting point of the project was the near invisibility of this migration history in Germany and the gaps in institutionalised archives. The project supports the children of the nurses to interview their mothers, it presents curated videos on who-cared.com to the general public and the full interviews on oral-history.digital for researchers. It thus intervenes on how history is told not only with respect to content but also to form and technological infrastructure.

The paper discusses which challenges the aimed for visibility poses to the project. In particular there is a tension between wanting these stories to be seen and not wanting to be harmed by going public. Accordingly, the interviewees, the interviewers and the project all need to decide what stories are told and what is presented how. Since independent of the attributed licenses the videos, once they are put online, cannot be controlled effectively anymore, their usage for example by anti-migration activists have to be taken into account. The openness of the archive thus will necessarily result in a particular selective story telling and will leave gaps in particular with respect to those aspects, where vulnerability is feared. The paper will provide reflections from a project in process. The first videos should go online in spring 2026.