2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Does AI simply impose its own biases, or can it be guided to help create more inclusive, accessible, and dynamic oral history collections? In this proposed presentation, I will use a real-world case to demonstrate ways that data and AI can be used to assist with curation, research, and analysis of oral histories.

ABSTRACT: The proliferation and consumer accessibility of artificial intelligence tools has inspired hope and fear among many—including oral historians. As with the advent of any technological advance—the tape recorder, the iPhone, and so on—oral historians have carefully considered how new tools can be adopted into their practices. The time to consider AI is now.In this session, I will guide participants through a case study using one of my recent projects, either the Elder Project or the Obama Presidency Oral History, demonstrating the steps that were taken to turn these massive, opaque collections into a web of interconnected stories using natural language processing, a branch of AI dealing with human language. Both of these projects have interactive collections, with the Elder Project launching on April 16, 2024. While preserving the continuity and integrity of full-length interviews, these websites create new pathways for displaying stories in nonlinear ways that serve their respective project designs.I will use case-based education, developed at business schools such as Harvard Business School and Ivey Business School to lead a discussion about generating and using data to guide curation. Participants will leave the session with improved knowledge of what artificial intelligence tools are at their disposal, how these tools might be used, how to design topic and data structures for collections, and ultimately, how to inform curatorial decisions with data.