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Julianne Nyhan: Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: Reflections on Limits, Horizons and Emerging Findings

Oral history as source has comprised five key components: the interview, the recording, the transcript, and the interpretation of the transcript presented in published works and archival metatata. Yet oral history is now increasingly being created, accessed, and understood as data. Oral histories now appear as machine-generated transcripts, RDF triples, knowledge and network graphs, ontologies, machine-actionable metadata and more. Digital technologies are central to this transformation. Advanced AI tools for Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) are enabling the large-scale transcription and capture of audio and audio-visual collections. New digital methods, pipelines, and platforms enable data-driven exploration of oral history materials. As these technologies evolve, they offer powerful new ways of asking questions of the past. Yet they also raise wider questions about the future of memory, of recollection, of meaning making in a datafied age.

This paper reflects on two ongoing projects from the Digital Oral History Lab, a collaboration between University College London (UCL), UK, and the Humanities Data Science and Methodology (HDSM) group at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. It explores the possibilities and issues that attend the take-up of digital methods in oral history with particular focus on AI-based approaches. The first project, Mixed-Methods Digital Oral History, funded by the DFG-AHRC bilateral initiative, integrates Semantic Web and AI technologies with historical-interpretative analysis to better understand narratives of formation, disruption, and change in the history of computing in the humanities. The second, Multimodal Digital Oral History (Smyth, Nyhan, and Flinn 2023), develops methodologies and technical workflows for engaging with the full range of oral history modalities—transcripts, sound, waveforms, and metadata—across both retro-digitised and born-digital collections.

References

Smyth, Hannah K, Julianne Nyhan, and Andrew Flinn. “Exploring the Possibilities of Thomson’s Fourth Paradigm Transformation—The Case for a Multimodal Approach to Digital Oral History?” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38, no. 2 (June 1, 2023): 720–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac094.

Vortrag im Rahmen des „Digital History“-Forschungskolloquiums
Zeit: Mittwoch, 9. Juli 2025, 16-18 Uhr
Ort (hybrid):
– Hauptgebäude der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Raum 1066e (um eine kurze Anmeldung via E-Mail wird gebeten)
– Zoom-Konferenz (Zugang auf Anfrage oder via Mailingliste)


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Digital History Berlin (Redaktion) (4. Juli 2025). Julianne Nyhan: Mixed-methods Digital Oral History: Reflections on Limits, Horizons and Emerging Findings. Digital History Berlin. Abgerufen am 17. Juli 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/14a9c


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