CCOH@China: the Practice of Connecting Oral History and the Public

• In Event: OHA Poster Session and Project Bazaar

Abstract

As the largest oral history collection holder in China, CCOH(Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at Communication University of China) is dedicated to both collecting & curating and disseminating & illuminating. Our efforts to encouraging public participation contain a series of projects.
“Oral History in China series”, which was initiated in 2014, is a comprehensive project including academic lectures, international conferences, workshops, interviews of oral historians, campus activities and a sub-project called “Jian Jia project” aiming at drawing the attention of teenagers to oral history. Till now, the first five items gathering venerable oral historians, best-seller writers, esteemed journalists and documentary filmmaker have all been keenly involved by thousands of people that include scholars, students, workers, housewives, media professionals, etc. 20 students who are no more than 18-year-old have just finished their first 10-days’campus trip of “Jian Jia project” after having taken oral history and documentary classes and visits for free as well. Together with other U18 children who will also register, they will submit their proposals of short films, striving for the next two-phase contests.
“Memory of Movie” is a movie-themed project that mainly relates to memory of movie-watching in the past several decades, and it is based on our “Filmmaker of New China Oral History” project. It offers the public open access to some exclusive visual oral interviews, classical movies and opportunities to communicate with experienced oral historians. There have been around 220 hours’ interviews of 185 filmmaker, 11 outdoor movies and several theme events organized from late 2015, in which over 1,000 participants in total have been gathered. Meanwhile, we present edited oral history interviews and post activity information through all kinds of self- media. On WeChat, the most popular social media platform in China, our main two subscription accounts are followed by roughly 20,000 fans.

Authors

• Xueping Kang, Cuiyongyuan Center for Oral History at Communication University of China

• Xiaoyan Li, Cuiyongyuan Center for Oral History at Communication University of China