| --- |
| task_categories: |
| - text-classification |
| language: |
| - el |
| tags: |
| - oral-history |
| - interviews |
| - greek |
| - transcription |
| - named-entity-recognition |
| pretty_name: Istorima Dataset |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| license: cc-by-nc-nd-4.0 |
| --- |
| |
| **Dataset Language:** <br> |
| Greek |
|
|
| **Dataset Info:** <br> |
| This dataset consists of oral history content collected from the Istorima archive, including transcribed interviews and associated metadata. The material reflects personal narratives and life stories, primarily in Greek, covering a wide range of social, cultural, and historical topics. |
|
|
|
|
| **Metadata Info:** <br> |
| This dataset consists of 13,548 oral history interview records, structured as a tabular dataset with mixed data types. Each record includes a unique identifier (id) along with textual fields such as title, |
| summary, transcription, speaker_name, and researcher_name. Additional metadata fields capture thematic and categorical information (themes, tags), |
| geographic references (geonames, interview_place), and temporal attributes (date, published_at). |
| The dataset also includes numerical and boolean features such as duration_minutes, is_age_restricted, and is_on_demand, |
| as well as a language field indicating the interview language. |
| |
| |
| **Metadata Field Descriptions:** |
| | Field | Type | Description | |
| |---|---|---| |
| | `id` | int | Unique numeric identifier for the interview, as assigned by the Istorima archive (ranges from 9790 to 267770, not sequential). | |
| | `title` | string | Title of the interview, typically a quote or summary phrase chosen by the editorial team. | |
| | `summary` | string | Editorial description of the interview content — a paragraph summarizing the topics, people, and events discussed. | |
| | `transcription` | string | Full transcribed dialogue of the interview in the format `[Speaker Initials]: text`, with each speaker turn on its own line separated by blank lines. Empty string for the 297 on-demand interviews that have no public transcript. | |
| | `speaker_name` | string | Name of the interviewee (the person telling their story). For anonymous speakers (`is_age_restricted` or by request), this is a pseudonym or alias, not their real name. | |
| | `researcher_name` | string | Name of the Istorima researcher who conducted and recorded the interview. | |
| | `themes` | string | Broad thematic categories assigned to the interview (e.g., `Καθημερινή Ζωή, Διατροφή και Συνταγές`), comma-separated. These are high-level editorial classifications from a controlled vocabulary. | |
| | `date` | string | Date the interview was conducted, in `YYYY-MM-DD` format. Ranges mostly from 2019 to 2024, with a handful of historical recordings dating back to 1943. | |
| | `tags` | string | Specific keyword tags describing the interview content (e.g., `Γιαγιά, Μαγειρική, Ποντιακά Φαγητά`), comma-separated. More granular than themes — typically 5–25 tags per interview. | |
| | `geonames` | string | Geographic locations referenced in the interview (places the story talks about, not where it was recorded), comma-separated in the format `Place Name (latitude, longitude)`. Sourced from the GeoNames database. | |
| | `interview_place` | string | Free-text description of where the interview was physically recorded (e.g., `Λόφος Λειβάδας`, `Θεσσαλονίκη`). This is the recording location, not the places discussed in the story. | |
| | `published_at` | string | Date the interview was published on the Istorima archive website, in `YYYY-MM-DD` format. Typically 1–2 years after the interview date. | |
| | `duration_minutes` | float | Duration of the interview audio/video recording in minutes (e.g., `38.52` means 38 minutes and 31 seconds). | |
| | `language` | string | ISO language code of the interview, almost always `el` (Greek). | |
| | `is_age_restricted` | bool | Whether the interview contains sensitive content requiring age verification to access on the website (2,392 interviews). The transcription is still included in the dataset. | |
| | `is_on_demand` | bool | Whether the interview is available only on request and has no public transcript (297 interviews). These entries have an empty `transcription` field. | |
|
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|
|
| **Dataset Statistics:** <br> |
| Words: |
| 96,479,186 <br> |
| Tokens: |
| 138,933,365 |
|
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|
|
| **License:** <br> |
| This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Any commercial use requires prior written permission from Istorima. All intellectual property rights remain with Istorima. |
|
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|
|
| **Dataset Moved:** <br> |
| This dataset is hosted by the Mozilla Data Collective. Please use the official link below for the most up-to-date version:<br> |
| [Istorima - Mozilla Data Collective](https://datacollective.mozillafoundation.org/datasets/cmmxib8ic00v6nw07bjrci8vj) |
