The Armenian Memory Project
As part of the Norian Armenian Programs, the Office of Global Affairs, Human Rights Institute, and Department of Digital Media & Design are leading an initiative to create a variety of digital media archives that tell the Armenian story--ensuring that history and heritage is not lost.
The Department of Digital Media & Design at the University of Connecticut offers a special topics course, cross-listed with the Human Rights Institute and the Honors Program, in which students create a digital representation of Western Armenian communities that once flourished in the pre-1915 Ottoman Empire, but no longer exist in present day. Drawing from primary sources in archives, memoirs, photos, maps, interviews, and first-person narratives, the final projects include documentary films, digital archives, and augmented and virtual reality presentations, thereby reviving communal life, cultural, religious, educational and economic practices for the layperson and students of history.
The Course
This fall, the topic of the course is Human Rights Archives I: Documenting & Curating Community Memory. The course focuses on methods and best practices of collecting and managing digital visual and audio-visual archival assets. Students will apply what they’ve learned about human rights archives, digital asset management, and storytelling by documenting, digitizing, and curating the family stories and artifacts of an immigrant community that bears the multi-generational scars of genocide and displacement.
Tell Your Family's Story
Building upon the past oral history event conducted at the UConn Library Archives, we are asking community members to share their memories, through video recorded interview sessions and scanning of artifacts using our 3D scanner, or documents or photographs you may have that detail life in Armenia before 1915.
Sign up for the dates and location that are convenient for you. Our students and staff will be on hand that day to video record your personal oral history, which will be used to create a documentary-style feature about the Armenian diaspora in Connecticut and New England. If you have an artifact, a family heirloom, or document or image that helps tell your story, our 3-D scanner will be able to create a three-dimensional digital copy for our archives.
Please note that all of our students and staff will be ensuring UConn's COVID-19 guidelines are enforced, including mask-wearing and social distancing, regardless of vaccination status.
We will also ask community volunteers to sign a release form at their scheduled session, prior to recording their stories/artifacts, so that we may have your permission to publish these in a collected volume and/or through various digital platforms.
Should you have any further questions, need assistance completing the form, or to request reasonable accommodations, please contact global@uconn.edu, or call 860-486-3152.