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Curating large oral history archives with artificial intelligence

20 January 2025, 1:25 pm–2:45 pm

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We are pleased to welcome Chris Pandza (Columbia University) for this 'Voices Unbound?' seminar.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Marco Humbel, UCLDH Associate Director (ECR)

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents new opportunities for assisted oral history curation—but also new pitfalls. What could the role(s) of AI be in the process of curation? Does AI necessarily reinforce its own biases on a collection, or can it help curators measure and mitigate their own biases? How does AI interact with the ethical and epistemological frameworks that shape oral history?Using real-world examples from the Ellis Island Oral History (National Park Service), Obama Presidency Oral History (Incite at Columbia University), and The Elders Project (Incite), I will demonstrate a number of innovative AI techniques that practitioners can use to prepare oral history collections for public use. In addition, I will demonstrate how AI can be used to make a project’s curation process more rigorous and inclusive.

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

Chris Pandza

Oral historian and designer

Chris Pandza is a New York-based oral historian and designer. Through his work, Chris has developed a number of novel techniques to analyze and curate oral histories using artificial intelligence. Chris currently leads design for Incite at Columbia University and the Columbia Center for Oral History, where he is curating digital experiences for the Obama Presidency Oral History, the Elder Project, and the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab with the help of novel AI techniques. Prior to his work at Incite, Pandza worked for several years in the tech, media, and telecom industries