Houshamadyan

The scope of Houshamadyan’s content is limited to the 19th and early 20th centuries. One reason for this is that Armenian periodicals and books directly related to the project's purpose are from this period. Another reason is that the books written after the genocide in the houshamadyan genre often include personal testimonies by their authors about their hometowns. Like these books, the Houshamadyan Association also strives to reconstruct the wealth of forgotten and neglected Armenian heritage.

The word houshamadyan is a compound of housh (memory) and madyan (book or register), thus memory book. The project team explains that the use of the word madyan for the book, instead of the more commonly used word kirk, which would yield houshakirk, was a conscious decision, as the word madyan holds special connotations of distant and completely lost times. The authors of the books in this genre themselves referred to them as houshamadyan despite madyan being an archaic and defunct word by the 20th century. The majority of these books, published after 1915, were written by authors who were born in the Ottoman Empire and who had become members of the diaspora, all with the awareness that it was no longer possible to go back home. The Why Houshamadyan? page of the association's website explains the importance of the books in this genre: “[T]he publication of a book becomes a monument placing ceremony, in this case to the memory of a dead town or time gone by. But this monument-book has to keep the life of times past or the memory of a lost town with its history, customs, architecture, heroes, glory, cuisine, songs, dialect, and so on, forever. There are, today, several hundred books of this genre."

The Open Digital Archive on the site contains the materials obtained at the workshops the organization has held in different cities around the world and the family stories prepared during interviews regarding these materials. The archive material collected through these workshops is divided into separate sections of North and South America, Armenia, Europe, the Middle East, and Turkey. Houshamadyan generally establishes partnerships with a local Armenian association or a media company in the cities where it holds workshops, for example, with the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul. People who attend Houshamadyan’s workshops bring many objects that hold memories, such as cutlery, knives, lace, veils, wedding dresses, nightgowns, socks, books, ladles, and copper pots. Film recordings shot in the US in the 1930s, ‘40s, and '50s also sometimes show up.

The project itself has its origins in the diaspora community, Houshamadyan's materials published in Armenian, English, and Turkish have, in particular, significantly increased its influence in Turkey and the interest of Turkish visitors to the site. According to Arlet İncidüzen, one of Houshamadyan's Turkish translators who manages the site's correspondence in Turkish, the most visits to the site come from Turkey, and "[h]ate speech is nearly totally absent in incoming correspondence; it is almost always very positive. People show genuine interest and curiosity. A great many people doing academic research also reach out with requests to use both the articles and visual materials." Houshamadyan specifies that its digital archive is an open source whose written and visual materials are available to all, including those not undertaking academic or commercial research, provided that the logos on the images are not removed and that the source is correctly cited. The website accepts articles from all academics who do research in various countries and on topics that are included in Houshamadyan's research framework.

Those whose families are partly Armenian or who have poor knowledge of their Armenian identity can also get in touch with Houshamadyan in the cities in which it holds workshops. Although people who attend the workshops often bring photographs with Armenian writing on the back among the other items they bring, many say that there is no one left in their families who can read Armenian. Here, Houshamadyan aids in satisfying their curiosity about these objects that hold such memories. The Houshamadyan team says that this is precisely the effect they are looking to create, not only to record the Armenian presence before 1915 but also to keep curiosity and awareness of the past alive in today's younger generations. The project team relates coincidences and chance encounters, such as one in which after an article about a family whose story was recorded in an interview in the US was published, it turned out they were second cousins with a family in Marseille, France, and the two families got in touch. Another example is that of an attendee to a workshop who brought in an old family photograph with no writing on the back. The attendee also didn't know who the people in the photograph were. After Houshamadyan published the photograph, however, a visitor to the site from another part of the world saw the photograph and was able to get in touch with their relatives, neither of whom had known the other's existence. Once a photograph is published in the archive, it brings about the possibility for visitors to the site to recognize the people in it and correct or add missing information such as names and familial relationships. The symbiotic relationship Houshamadyan has with visitors to its site allows for collective efforts to further enrich the archive.

Arlet İncidüzen related her experiences with Turkish-language correspondence sent to Houshamadyan from Turkey at a panel held at the Hrant Dink Foundation on November 12, 2018. She explained how there was an explosion of interest in Houshamadyan coming from Turkey after the government made genealogy records available on its e-devlet (e-government) website. This service began to be available on the e-devlet site under the umbrella of the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs on February 8, 2018. Those who write Houshamadyan from Turkey are generally people who have discovered in various ways that a member or members of their extended families were Armenian. İnçidüzen also said that although it is rare, the association receives emails from people who claim to be in possession of Armenian goods and/or property, which they try to sell.

As with visitors to the Houshamadyan site, the members of the project team itself also live in countries in different corners of the world, which they say is one of the biggest challenges they face as they have to coordinate and hold meetings across many time zones. Project director and chief editor Vahé Tachjian lives in Berlin, Germany, while the core staff includes people who live in the US, Canada, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia. The team says that they are able to overcome this difficulty through online communication and meetings. Apart from the difficulties multiple time zones create, another of the biggest challenges is the workforce. For the academics, translators, artists, and historians who make up the team, developing content for Houshamadyan is secondary. Since there is no single person specifically employed to curate the website, it continues to be a digital platform to which academics can contribute as much time as they can set aside from their own tasks.

According to Arlet İncidüzen, one of the difficulties created by the team being spread around the world is that they cannot organize workshops to collect materials as often as they would like: "The specific situations in destination countries also cause various obstacles. For example, there was going to be [a workshop] in Istanbul recently. A statement was made there that there was the possibility of bombings; the US Consulate put out a statement too, and the Hrant Dink Foundation hesitated amid that climate. Vahé was going to come, but the workshop was canceled three days before it was set to happen. We don't know when that workshop will be held. I can also have problems with obtaining visas when workshops are held outside Turkey. I couldn’t attend one in Berlin because Germany refused my visa application."