Talking Borders

Talking Borders is a multilingual citizen-science initiative that emerged from the 2nd World Conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies in Vienna in 2018. Initiated by Machteld Venken and Johanna Jaschik, the project brings together scholars, activists, and citizens to reflect on how borders—both visible and invisible, historical and contemporary—structure lived experience, mediate belonging, and shape social imaginaries across Europe.

Through a series of filmed interviews conducted in multiple languages, Talking Borders captures the lifeworlds of border scholars and residents whose memories, research trajectories, or migration biographies are entangled with Europe’s shifting border regimes. These narratives do not merely recount personal experiences; they reveal borders as emotional and symbolic terrains—spaces where mobility, exclusion, identity, and power are continuously negotiated. Hosted as an open-access collection on Zenodo, Talking Borders contributes to an emerging form of transnational historiography that values listening as much as analysis, and curation as much as critique. The project invites audiences to rethink Europe from its margins rather than its centres, and to trace the enduring role of borders in shaping collective memory and the cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion.

Context and Project Background of the Digital Exhibition

The Talking Borders digital exhibition presented here emerged from an advanced Master’s seminar in Public History, jointly taught by Machteld Venken and Klaus Behnam Shad at the University of Luxembourg during the Winter Term 2025. Building on the original Talking Borders collection, the seminar pursued an experimental approach to oral history research and teaching. Rather than treating interviews solely as sources for retrospective interpretation, students were encouraged to engage with them as dynamic analytical material.

Within the context of the digital exhibition and publication process, the instructors assumed an explicit editorial role. This involved curating and presenting selected interviews and analytical materials that most clearly convey both the diversity of narrative positions within the collection and the interpretive logic developed during the seminar. The exhibition does not claim exhaustiveness or definitive interpretation; instead, it foregrounds transparency, reflexivity, and analytical openness.

Central to this approach was the ambition to visualise qualitative coding processes and to work with them dynamically. The project therefore combined cutting-edge transcription technologies with advanced qualitative and visual analytical methods, allowing coding structures, thematic relations, and interpretive decisions to remain visible and traceable throughout the exhibition. Conceived at the intersection of teaching, research, and digital experimentation, the exhibition reflects an effort to rethink how oral history analysis can be conducted, documented, and communicated in a digital environment.

Talking Borders (2018, Vienna) – Oral History Collection

The Talking Borders oral history collection (Vienna, 2018) brings together a heterogeneous corpus of narrative interviews exploring experiences of borders, mobility, and belonging in contemporary Europe. Rather than striving for representational uniformity, the collection deliberately foregrounds diversity across biographical trajectories, narrative forms, emotional registers, and interpretive perspectives. This plurality is not treated as methodological noise, but as a core analytical resource for qualitative inquiry.

For the purposes of this digital exhibition, the original interview dialogues have been editorially reassembled into thematically focused monologues. Through this process, only the voices of the interviewed border scholars are presented, allowing each participant to articulate, in a coherent narrative form, what borders mean to them individually. These curated monologues constitute the primary exhibited materials and form the basis for the accompanying analytical visualisations.

Narrative Diversity and Analytical Orientation

The interviews display substantial variation in narrative structure and expressive mode. Some accounts unfold along linear biographical trajectories, while others are episodic, reflexive, or fragmented; some are emotionally charged, others analytically distanced. These differences are understood not as irregularities but as meaningful expressions of how borders are experienced, narrated, and interpreted within specific social, historical, and affective contexts.

To engage analytically with this plurality, the project adopts a qualitative research design that combines openness with methodological rigor. Interpretation proceeds neither through rigid standardisation nor through purely impressionistic reading, but through a systematic and iterative coding process that remains responsive to the material while maintaining analytical coherence.

Coding, Visualisation, and Analytical Transparency

Within Talking Borders, coding is conceived as a dynamic and reflexive analytical practice that operates across distinct interpretive levels. At the first level (L1), coding remains primarily descriptive, capturing recurrent themes, motifs, and narrative references as they appear in the interviews. At the second level (L2), these descriptive codes are analytically interpreted and synthesised into broader overall narratives and thematic patterns that cut across individual interviews.

Codes are developed, refined, and occasionally reconfigured in response to emerging narrative constellations. Ambiguity, overlap, and tension are treated as constitutive features of oral history data rather than as analytical shortcomings.

The visualisations of the coding process play a central epistemic role in making this distinction visible. In the coding trees, relational mappings, and thematic diagrams, L2-level categories are explicitly marked as overarching themes or overall narratives, representing the interpretative patterns identified through cross-interview analysis. These visualisations do not fix meaning; rather, they document how analytical categories relate to one another, intersect, and shift across the corpus.

By translating interpretive processes into visual form, the project enables users to follow the movement from descriptive narrative elements (L1) to interpretative thematic patterns (L2). The visualisations thus function as mediating instruments between narrative complexity and analytical structure, preserving interpretive openness while ensuring methodological clarity.

Visual Analytics and Qualitative Reasoning

The coding visualisations are not illustrations of predefined results but representations of the processual nature of qualitative reasoning. They show how themes emerge, branch, and occasionally dissolve; how certain categories gain analytical prominence while others remain peripheral; and how interpretive focus evolves in dialogue with the material.

This visual approach fosters reflexivity by making interpretive pathways explicit. It allows researchers and readers to reconstruct analytical decisions and to assess how conclusions are grounded in the narratives themselves, while simultaneously leaving space for alternative readings and future re-analyses.

A Living Digital Research Archive

The Talking Borders collection is conceived not as a closed analytical product but as a living digital research archive. Interviews, codes, and visualisations are presented as interrelated layers that document both empirical material and analytical reasoning. This layered architecture invites users not only to explore the narratives but also to critically engage with the methodological practices underlying their interpretation.

By integrating narrative diversity, iterative coding, and visual analytical tools, the project demonstrates how qualitative research can be both methodologically rigorous and epistemically open. The collection contributes to broader debates on transparency, reflexivity, and complexity in oral history and qualitative social research.