Month: January 2025

On 22 January, the Oral History Seminar was held at IFiS PAN, during which Dr. Marek Szajda (“Remembrance and Future” Centre, The Depot History Centre (Wroclaw); POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw)) presented an interview with a social and environmental activist from Lower Silesia. The interview was conducted as part of a project aimed at documenting the manifestations of social activity dedicated to counteracting environmental degradation and protecting nature in Poland, using the Western Sudetes as a case study.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History)”. If you would like to participate in future meetings or receive more information, please contact us at: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

Maciej Melon and Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek from the QDA participated in the conference ‘Poland in European and World Research Infrastructures,’ organised by the Centre for Research on Families and Generations at the Warsaw School of Economics (WSE) and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The event took place at the WSE on January 16–17, 2025. On the second day of the conference, which focused on infrastructures in the social sciences and humanities, the QDA representatives presented the Social Data Repository.

The QDA has published a new dataset entitled ‘Sociolinguistics of the Caquetá-Putumayo River Basins Dataset.’ It is based on genealogical data from seven Indigenous groups across three language families—Witotoan (Murui-Muina, encompassing two varieties: Murui and Mɨnɨka; Ocaina; Nonuya), Boran (Bora; Muinane), and Arawak (Resígaro)—as well as one linguistic isolate, Andoke, in the Caquetá-Putumayo River Basins of Colombia. Data was collected during fieldwork conducted in Leticia, Colombia, in 2024 by linguist Dr. Katarzyna I. Wojtylak under the SONATA 16 funding scheme of the (Polish) National Science Centre (NCN).

The dataset contains individual genealogical information, as well as data on familial relationships, marital ties, and linguistic repertoires. It is part of the cross-disciplinary project ‘Social Limits of Languages: The Dynamics of Contact in Northwest Amazonia,’ which aims to develop a framework for analysing diffusion patterns in language contact scenarios among the Indigenous languages of the Caquetá-Putumayo region.