Announcements

New article out in the Oral History Review on what AI can do for large collections: what works, what needs adapting, and what to avoid.

I build toward a framework for archivists, curators, and other practitioners using five years of real-world experimentation, from humble beginnings (attempting to clone Alanis Morissette) to building President Obama's digital oral history archive and beyond. It is geared toward oral history work, but the lessons are portable to other media and document types.

"Healthy Distance: Critical Computational Curation in Oral History Archives"

Full abstract

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly cheap and accessible, oral historians confront a critical question: Computational methods, with their speed, distance, and efficiency, can seem antithetical to oral history's embrace of relationship-building, close reading, and slow work-but do they have to be? Through five years of experimental practice with major projects including the Obama Presidency Oral History and Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project, I build toward a framework for "healthy distance"-using computational approaches to create analytical space that deepens rather than replaces close engagement with testimonies. These cases demonstrate that computational methods, when applied thoughtfully with continuous reflection on their biases, can align with or even deepen oral history's ways of working and knowing.