The Story Share Initiative (SSI) was a 2-year project conceptualized by CAP that culminated in December 2019. Under the umbrella of CAP’s OHP, we collaborated with StoryCorps (https://storycorps.org/) in 2018 to best gather personal histories as a means to bind people together and remind them of the complex ways in which oral traditions represent and preserve their societal values, identities, and meanings. The collaboration happened through webinar sessions, encompassing all the knowledge and training necessary for conducting interviews in a new hybrid format. During these semi-structured sessions, our teams interacted, discussed, and compared best-case practices and ways to improve the existing oral history collection.
In the same year, we managed to conduct a total of 441 oral history interviews in Punjab and Sindh. As a result, we gathered personal narratives on various aspects of culture, such as literature, arts, and heritage. From cities to smaller towns, our teams went out into the field to conduct interviews in Karachi, Hyderabad, Jamshoro, Mirpurkhas, Hala, Sukkur, Shikarpur, Khairpur Rawalpindi, Lahore, Gujranwala, Chinot, Faisalabad and Multan. This allowed us an opportunity to expand our archive by also digitizing over 1000 images from private collections during this period and as a result produced 40 animated videos for young children, which were disseminated on various media channels.
The animated videos can be found on CAP’s YouTube channel and can be accessed from the links below:
