Linguistics Associate Professor, Dr. Panayiotis Pappas, worked extensively on the Virtual Museum and is one of the project's leading investigators. He led the team that conducted interviews in Western Canada with Greek immigrants who came to Canada between 1945 and 1975, and oversaw the transcription of interviews from all provinces.
The transcripts and audio recordings from these interviews are a main feature of the Virtual Museum. They offer an opportunity for linguistic study, and tells the experience of Greek-Canadian immigrants in their own words. The Immigrec researchers also collected and digitized articles from Greek and Canadian newspapers, official documents of the period, personal photos and objects鈥攁ll of which are easily accessible within the Virtual Museum.
Visitors can explore the inside the Virtual Museum covering aspects of the Greek-Canadian immigrant experience, with one room focusing notably on how the Greek language and its dialectal variaties have evolved in a language-contact situation.
The Virtual Museum project is part of a movement to redefine the museum experience by blending standard practice in linguistic and historical research with technologies within the digital humanities.
This project also constitutes the first attempt to conduct a thorough and systematic study of language contact on the basis of data drawn from immigrants in Canada, and in an area geographically remote from Greece.
