Current Projects

Heritage of the People's Europe (2010-2013)

OSA is participating as a research partner and content provider in a three-year European Union project entitled the Heritage of the People's Europe (HOPE). HOPE is a Best Practice Network of archives, libraries, and museums that works in close cooperation with the Europeana digital library to improve and integrate access to highly significant but scattered digital collections on social history throughout Europe. Collections include personal papers and correspondence from historical figures (political thinkers, labor movement leaders, etc.) and archives from organizations (trade unions, political parties, emancipation movements, etc.) in a range of original formats: manuscripts and typescripts; books, periodicals, brochures, leaflets and pamphlets; graphic material such as posters, prints, cartoons and photographs; audiovisual and sound recordings; banners and paraphernalia. The project will achieve its goal by: 1) promoting the adoption of standards and best practices; 2) relying on proven open source technologies to create a unified digital content repository service; 3) making metadata and content available through Europeana; 4) enhancing and extending labourhistory.net, the portal of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI); and 5) implementing a full-scale discovery-to-delivery model. The result will be an enabling infrastructure, which could never have been achieved by any of the individual partner institutions, big or small, by itself.
HOPE is supported through the European Union Competitiveness and Innovation Framework ICT Policy Support Programme on Digital Libraries.

Voices of the 20th Century Archive (2009- )

The Voices of the 20th Century Archive (Voices) project is led by the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with OSA and the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary (NAVA). The purpose of the project is to analyze how different types of interview material can be enhanced through digital technologies and re-used for further research. To this end, the Voices team will work closely with new qualitative research projects and collections as well as with undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate university programs. The final Voices Archive will have three pillars: archiving, research, and public access and will include features such as audio transcription and machine-generated text, refined access, links to methodology resources, and tagging and annotation. The Voices team seeks to collaborate with similar domestic and international initiatives, including other archives, user networks, and partner institutions.
http://www.socio.mta.hu/voices_of_the_20th_century/

Open Document Format Alliance Hungary
(2008- )

OSA was one of the initiators and founding members of the Hungarian Chapter of the Open Document Format Alliance (ODF Alliance). ODF Alliance Hungary promotes the use of the international standard Open Document Format (ODF), encouraging research on its application and developing the Hungarian terminology to support its use. The use of ODF puts an end to dependence on suppliers of office software widely used today and at less expense allows anyone to create documents without license agreements, restrictions, and limitations, at the same time guaranteeing their long-term readability. ODF Alliance Hungary will be organizing the upcoming OpenOffice.org Annual Conference (OOoCon2010) on August 31-September 3, 2010 in partnership with the Central European University and Eötvös Loránd University.
http://www.odfa.hu

Was There a 1989? (2009- )

OSA teamed up with local archives, news agencies, and online journals in a one-year project to bring new sources of the Hungarian "annus mirabilis", the miraculous year, to the attention of the wider public. We selected, scanned, and put online transcripts of radio broadcasts from both sides of the Iron Curtain, press surveys, a chronology of events from the Hungarian News Agency (Magyar Távirati Iroda, MTI), the minutes of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party Politburo meetings, the daily operative reports of the Hungarian secret police, as well as transcripts of telephone calls to the Hungarian television in Budapest and the Hungarian desk of Radio Free Europe in Munich—day by day, from January 1 to December 31, 1989.
In January 2010, the site was expanded to include the Dunagate Dossier, which attempts to reconstruct the most important events of the political scandal involving wiretapping and systematic shredding of state security documents by the help of transcripts of radio broadcasts, press surveys, news agency reports, and excerpts from documentary films.

Book Cube (2007- )

In 1995, OSA inherited 100,000 books on the history and economy of the Cold War period from the Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). A large portion of that collection now forms the core of OSA's reference library while another portion has been donated to cultural institutions or offered gratis to the general public. The remaining 20,000 books, candidates for disposal, have been set aside for artistic projects, including our Concrete: Books Bound in Concrete exhibition held in June 2008 and more recently the Book Cube.
The book cube itself is a public place object. 20 cubes have been made, standard in form but differing in content. The cubes are currently exhibited at 20 different cultural or academic sites, moving every half year. The intention behind the project is to provoke public debate, performances, and programs on the relation of books and collecting to history and memory.

1956 Digital Archive (2006- )

The 1956 Digital Archive is a digital collection dedicated to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and developed by OSA in cooperation with Columbia University's Butler Library and the Hungarian National Library on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the event. The scope of the project is to make crucial documents on the history of the revolution publicly available. Among these are the Blinken Collection, comprising the Columbia University Research Project on Hungary (CURPH) interviews with Hungarian refugees after 1956, and the Zwack Collection, a personal archive on the revolution. The archive continues to grow and currently includes several collections from the holdings of OSA and other institutions. The digital archive has been generously funded by Donald and Vera Blinken and supported by the United States Embassy in Budapest.
The most recent collection in this project is the Hedervary Collection, the Documents on the Activities of the United Nations Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, donated by Claire de Hedervary, the former Director of the Political Affairs Department of the United Nations.

Chachipe (2007- )

Chachipe is an international online photography competition organized by the Roma Initiative Office of the Open Society Institute and OSA under the aegis of the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005-2015). The competition and its accompanying events, including the main exhibition at the Galeria Centralis, the award ceremony, and a traveling exhibition, are intended to combat visual stereotypes and to authentically portray the Roma as an integral part of their broader national communities. The competition is organized every two years; each competition highlights a novel perspective, targeting a particular group. Selected works from the contest have been put on display across Europe in cities from Brussels to Bucharest and also hosted in several smaller towns in Hungary with the help of the National Association of Local Municipalities (Települési Önkormányzatok Országos Szövetsége, TÖOSZ). The new competition will be announced in September, 2010.
http://photo.romadecade.org

The House of Freedom of Speech: A Forum for Information Rights (2008- )

In 2007, in accordance with an agreement signed by the two governments, the United States returned Táncsics's prison to the Hungarian State. The building, located in the historic Castle District of Budapest, was used to detain the Hungarian journalist Mihály Táncsics, an advocate of free speech and hero of the 1848 Revolution. The site has been in the possession of the United States government since the end of World War II. In 2008, OSA initiated a public campaign to turn Táncsics's prison, a symbolic center of the struggle for the freedom of expression, into a museum, a memorial, and a public center devoted to information rights. We propose to use the space to conceptualize freedom of expression and free speech in modern terms and to explore access to, rights over, and the use and abuse of information in contemporary society.
The campaign is currently suspended awaiting the renewal of premises promised to the United States government in exchange for the historic site.

Martus: The Tool for Human Rights Activists (2001- )

Since 2001, OSA has hosted a Martus server, a secure and remote safe to store and preserve information gathered by human rights activists and investigative journalists. The tool developed by Benetech allows users to create a searchable and encrypted database and back this data up remotely to their choice of publicly available servers. The Martus software is used by grassroots organizations, activists, journalists, attorneys, and others around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses. Martus is Greek for "witness".
The Martus software was designed in consultation with human rights groups to be Simple, Secure, and Searchable. The stored records are kept secret by default and are available only to their owners. However, users can choose to make selected records public. The Martus software and documentation are currently available in 8 languages: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Thai, Arabic, Nepalese, and Burmese. The system currently has over 130,000 reports uploaded by users. OSA provides accounts to individuals and organizations upon request. Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Digitized Documents and Films of the Hungarian State Security (2007- )

OSA is digitizing records on the structure and modus operandi of the Hungarian political police and other repressive organs of the communist regime. These have been obtained under strict scrutiny by private persons and researchers from various Hungarian archives, particularly from the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security and its predecessors. By uniting the fragmented, scattered and often artificially separated files, we hope to give a full picture of the activities and culture of the former state security organs.
Over the past few years, OSA has digitized and published online several collections of state security documents. Among these are over 200 Educational and Propaganda Films from the film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior presented with three-minute viewable excerpts of each film, as well as over 10,000 pages of the Collection of Directives from the same ministry.

Samizdat Text Corpora (2006- )

Run within the framework of the International Samizdat [Research] Association (IS[R]A), the Samizdat Text Corpora (STC) aims to bring together the various linguistic and regional bodies of samizdat to create a unified constellation of materials for scholarly research. The project rests on six pillars: Research; Rich Description; Integration; Network Mapping; Multiple Language Access; Community. As envisioned, the final product will comprise a union catalogue and digital repository of samizdat held by IS[R]A institutions and by individuals around the world and include tools for annotating texts and engaging in scholarly discussion with fellow researchers. The first stage, a project entitled Soviet Samizdat Periodicals (1956-1986), was initiated and supported by OSA and Dr. Ann Komaromi, through a grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The objective is to identify, locate, describe, and digitize Soviet samizdat periodicals created between 1956 and 1986 that are held in institutions in Europe and North America and to present our results online for research, education, and public debate.
http://www.samizdatportal.org/index.php/-samizdat-text-corpora/about-stc

Public Digital Archive of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2007- )

The Office of the High Representative (OHR) is an international agency overseeing the implementation of the civilian aspects of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and coordinating the activities of the civilian organizations and agencies operating in Bosnia and Herzegovina. OSA is currently cooperating with OHR on a project to digitize their public archive for preservation and research purposes. The project covers 20,000 documents on the activities of OHR, half of which are currently available at the OHR Archives in Sarajevo, while the rest are being transferred on an ongoing basis to the OHR Archives from the various local and regional offices. Much of this material will be available for archiving and digitizing only after the formal closure of OHR.
http://www.ohr.int/

Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching "Alternative Culture Beyond Borders: Past and Present of the Arts and Media in the Context of Globalization" (2007-2010)

Alternative Culture Beyond Borders is a three-year international research and educational project which explores the idea of alternative culture in several independent contexts. In so doing, it takes up issues at the leading edge of current research in the humanities and social sciences with the aim of creating an exciting new area of interdisciplinary study that will reframe our approach to the study of culture in both contemporary and historical settings. It probes the concept of alternative culture in order to develop the teaching and research of contemporary culture, both in former socialist countries and in the West. The project is organized by the International Alternative Culture Center based on support from the Open Society Institute's Higher Education Support Program Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching (ReSET) and in collaboration with St. Petersburg State University, McMaster University, and OSA.
http://www.alternativeculture.org