Month: April 2025

On 23 April, during the Oral History Seminar at IFiS PAN, Ms. Katarzyna Szarla, a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Warsaw, presented an interview recorded as part of her doctoral project, which focuses on the social history of HIV/AIDS in Poland during the 1980s and 1990s.

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.

A new dataset titled ‘Interviews with System Operators and Users of the Polish BBSes,’ authored by Michał Owczarek, has been published in the QDA. The dataset includes 19 anonymized transcripts of individual interviews with the system operators and users of the Polish BBSes. BBSes were computer servers connected via telephone line. They were used as a social media before the internet, the users were sharing knowledge, software and sense of community in the decentralized fashion. The interviews were conducted from November 2023 to February 2025 with the people engaged in the BBS culture in the 90s. The interviews were part of the project funded by the National Science Center (NCN), Poland, under the PRELUDIUM BIS funding scheme. The PI of the grant was Professor Mirosław Filiciak (SWPS University).