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Context Added and Subtracted: Ethical Considerations for the Digital Reuse of Oral Histories

27 January 2025, 1:25 pm–2:45 pm

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We are pleased to welcome Mary Larson (Oklahoma State University Libraries) for this 'Voices Unbound?' seminar.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Marco Humbel, UCLDH Associate Director (ECR)

For the last few decades, oral historians have spent a great deal of effort trying to capture and present fuller contexts for oral histories, with the hope that the additional information would help researchers as they make meaning from the interviews. As oral histories intersect more frequently with digital analytics--whether through the parsing of texts, incorporation into large language models, or reuse in training AI applications--we need to be aware of how those approaches might impact how we are able to understand the oral histories in question. The stripping of carefully curated context from interviews can have ethical repercussions for how oral histories are used and reused, and this talk addresses considerations of context and its addition to or subtraction from the historical record.

All welcome to join this online seminar. Please register to receive the joining details: https://voices-unbound.eventbrite.co.uk


Voices unbound? Exploring new and/or possible directions in digital and experimental oral history

A lecture series co-organised by TU Darmstadt, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. The series is convened by Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt), Andrew Flinn, Andreas Vlachidis, and Marco Humbel (UCL), Shih-Pei Chen (Max Planck Institute), and Gerben Zaagsma (C²DH), offering an important way of keeping up to date with the methodological and theoretical state of the art in digital oral history. We invited speakers to present work on recent technological developments that may hold promise for digital oral history. In this way, the seminar series appeals to (digital) oral historians, digital humanists and scholars of the history of information, memory and knowledge systems.

About the Speaker

Mary Larson

Associate Dean for Distinctive Collections at Oklahoma State University Libraries

A former president of the Oral History Association (US), she has been an oral historian for over thirty years, earning her MA and PhD in anthropology from Brown University. Much of her research has revolved around the intersection of oral history and digital technology, and in 2014 she and Doug Boyd co-edited Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement. Some of her other writing has focused on under-represented groups in the cultural record and ethics in oral history.