IE: Hidden Histories: Deaf Lives Ireland
The Deaf Lives Ireland project is a part of the broader Hidden Histories project. This broader initiative involves a consortium led by the Centre for Community Engagement at the University of Sussex in the UK along with Inspire in Austria and Noema in Finland.
The Irish project’s principal aim was to train a number of community members with a strong interest in the oral history of their community. The goal was to support them in learning how to document and preserve community history.
Training involved workshops that introduced participants to
- \I(a) oral history,
- (b) interviewing techniques,
- (c) camera set-up,
- (d) filming and editing and
- (e) encoding and uploading media content.
The output of th e project includes 18 different video clips in Irish Sign Language, ranging from one minute to three minutes long. The interviews are prepared, edited and done by the interviewers themselves.
"This archive, while a first step into the development of Deaf community archives proper, has captured a set of data that adds to the cultural capital of the Irish Deaf Community. The data also now functions as an artefact of what it is to be a Deaf person in 20th century and early 21st century Ireland."