I thought this might be helpful. It is virtual. AfroCrowd had a brief partnership with the Oral History Master program, and one of their students worked with AfroCrowd for a year.
At the Wikimania Conference in Singapore several presentations I attended talked about AI. In 2019, at the Wikimania in Sweden a panel I went to said, pay attention to AI.
Take care.
So many events are virtual since the COVID lockdowns. This is a blessing.
Linda Fletcher-Dabo
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: OHMA Columbia University ohma@columbia.edu Date: Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 10:34 AM Subject: Using AI to Analyze and Organize Oral History To: belrivers@gmail.com
Register for the second event in our fall workshop series below!͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
*Using AI to Analyze and Organize Oral History | October 5* Register below for the second fall workshop event, Using AI to Analyze and Organize Oral History! https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2Fcan-ai-collect-oral-histories-tickets-712793794427%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=ZbEETFKYzqyfw9IwSljB_Do2ZF0%3D *Thursday, October 5, 6:00-7:30pm ET | Virtual Event* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2F712807736127%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=Sr8Jp4L-lnA3pEO2Ru0fK9iSC3g%3D*Using AI to Analyze and Organize Oral History with Chris Pandza ‘23* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2F712807736127%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=Sr8Jp4L-lnA3pEO2Ru0fK9iSC3g%3D
When transcribed, a modestly-sized oral history project with 20 interviews might produce 270,000 words—almost five novels worth of text. But unlike novels, oral history interviews are not neatly structured into chapters but rather follow the idiosyncratic richness of human memory recall and storytelling. This quality is part of what makes oral history interviews so valuable, but it can also create significant barriers to information access and analysis.
Outside of oral history, other fields are approaching challenges related to unstructured human language using natural language processing (NLP). NLP is an AI field that deals with understanding and generating human language. Treating language as data can feel antithetical to oral history’s epistemological and ethical tenets—but does it have to be?
To explore this possibility, OHMA alum Chris Pandza set out to organize and analyze the Ellis Island Oral History archive, a collection with nearly 2,000 immigration-related interviews from various projects conducted since the 1970s. Applying AI to the archive, Pandza was able to approach key disciplinary questions at a scale never before possible. For example, how do interview topics relate to project design choices? In practice, how are interview agendas negotiated by interviewers and narrators? Do different interviewers produce measurably different interviews?
Through some practical examples, Pandza will demonstrate why and how oral historians might consider NLP and AI tools as part of their toolkit in this workshop series.
*Chris Pandza*'s oral history work focuses on using a variety of artificial intelligence tools to analyze, organize—and sometimes generate—oral histories.
While an OHMA student, Chris produced Nobody’s Diary, a chatbot trained to emulate his daily audio diaries. For his thesis work, which won a Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award in 2023, Chris used several tools to organize and analyze the Ellis Island Oral History archive, a collection of nearly 2,000 narrations from immigrants and others whose lives intersected with Ellis Island.
Chris graduated from OHMA in 2023 and now manages design at Incite. His research interests include immigration, environmental justice, aging, and memory. *REGISTER HERE* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2F712807736127%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=Sr8Jp4L-lnA3pEO2Ru0fK9iSC3g%3D
Oral history as a research tool has been at times almost synonymous with a certain kind of interviewing: one-on-one, biographical, long-form, recorded, and intended for the archive.
In this series of events https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fcc%2Fexperiments-in-oral-history-methodology-2585269&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=ZgF85xx4RHH9h7vASjJviSypTvk%3D, we will explore other approaches to doing oral history, from using scuba diving to record the stories of underwater landscapes to creating chatbots to elicit oral histories and using AI to make sense of how interviews work.
Workshops take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:30PM, where each event will include a hands-on experience or interactive space to try out and reflect on these new approaches.
Series Lineup
Thursday, September 21, 2023, 6-7:30pm *Can AI Collect Oral Histories? Probing a Community-Based Conversational Storytelling Agent to Document Digital Stories of Housing Insecurity* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2F712793794427%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=m5ZaIjAIogz5Pxa4YQKUQCtj180%3D *with Brett Halperin (recording available online TBD)*
Thursday, October 5, 2023, 6-7:30pm *Using AI to Analyze and Organize Oral History* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2Fusing-ai-to-analyze-and-organize-oral-history-tickets-712807736127%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=NIjMVB4ohmzims0tiGuzm8YJaqU%3D *with Chris Pandza ‘23 (online)*
Thursday, November 2, 2023, 6-7:30pm *History is not Past - Using Oral History for Policy Change* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2Fhistory-is-not-past-using-oral-history-for-policy-change-tickets-712811286747%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=j7RTDSoF3zAhMcJYBSvdfGIVOEo%3D *with Danita Mason-Hogans (in-person)*
Thursday, November 16, 2023, 6-7:30pm *The land that sustains us is the land of the ancestors* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fe%2Fthe-land-that-sustains-us-is-the-land-of-the-ancestors-tickets-712813192447%3Faff%3Doddtdtcreator&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=JfWhKnnq_W3SrXtJFXAmgDbeCqk%3D *with Kristina Douglass (online)*
*All events will be hosted either in person or online via Zoom.* They are free and open to the public with pre-registration required. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
*These events are open to all. *You can use this quick survey https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fforms%2Fd%2Fe%2F1FAIpQLSf_dqlzjv7DAaypptOguQHafOyLcmCkM47OssjndWtOQcSkdw%2Fviewform&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=LOcYOESgNiaqg_LxEBNMeDv5t48%3D to let us know how we could make these events more accessible for you. Note that we are able to provide ASL interpretation for any event, but need two weeks' notice. Please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu with specific access requests or questions. *SEE AND REGISTER FOR SERIES* https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.com%2Fcc%2Fexperiments-in-oral-history-methodology-2585269&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=ZgF85xx4RHH9h7vASjJviSypTvk%3D
*FOR MORE INFORMATION*: Please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu or visit the OHMA site https://f69e.engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=65119a7432ae0b782b9fa919&u=http%3A%2F%2Foralhistory.columbia.edu%2F&w=561bf748e4b0f7b2b488f369&c=b_651195ac44297f72c9d26892&l=en-US&s=aajYFO3TBEmLOM0eN6Yb7Ahy9xI%3D .
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