AI in OH: How New and Evolving Technologies Will Impact the Profession

Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has pervaded our shared discourse and lexicon. Myriad organizations and sectors are at once hurriedly embracing and cautiously considering the impacts large language models and complex algorithms might have on their industries. Oral history is not immune to AI’s influence, and in certain cases the profession might already hold extant examples of its effects on practice.

For this online symposium, OHA invites oral history practitioners and scholars from all disciplines who utilize oral history in their work to submit paper or roundtable proposals detailing any number of intersections between artificial intelligence and oral history. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Augmenting/Improving oral history workflows with AI tools
• Impacts of utilizing oral histories for large language model training
• Influences of AI in representations of racial/ethnic identity or racial power structures
• Creative/Productive uses of oral history material via AI tools
• Ethical considerations regarding AI behaviors or products
• Ruminations on the future of the field in an AI-driven world

The symposium is tentatively set for the work week of July 15, 2024, with its ultimate timing/length determined by the strength of the submission field. Proposals may either be submitted as stand-alone papers/presentations, a panel of topically coherent papers/presentations, a roundtable centered around a central theme, or a two-hour workshop. Your proposal should include:

• The title of each paper, presentation, and/or proposed panel/roundtable/workshop
• An abstract of no more than 500 words for each individual paper/presentation/workshop, or a single abstract for a proposed roundtable
• Name, affiliation, and email address for each prospective participant
• A short bio of no more than 250 words for each prospective participant

For those looking to find fellow presenters for their panel, roundtable, or workshop idea, feel free to use OHA’s collaborative Google Doc for the symposium found HERE.

Submit your proposals within the OHA Symposium Portal by January 1^st, 2024. If you have any questions about the submission process, please reach out to AI in OH program co-chairs Steven Sielaff (steven_sielaff@baylor.edu) & Sarah Milligan (sarah.milligan@okstate.edu).

Proposals will be reviewed by a program committee in early 2024, with applicants being informed of their acceptance or declination by March 1^st, 2024. The full program will be released and registration for the symposium will open shortly thereafter. For future news and updates, please visit the official symposium website: https://oralhistory.org/ai

Contact Information

Steven Sielaff – Associate Director, Oral History Association

Contact Email

Steven_Sielaff@baylor.edu

URL

AI in OH Virtual Symposium (July 2024)

Call for Papers: Cultural Heritage Institutions, Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
45th Annual Conference, February 21-24, 2024
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
http://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open on September 1, 2023

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2023

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 45th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.  For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

The Cultural Heritage Institutions area solicits proposals from librarians, archivists, curators, graduate students, faculty, collectors, writers, independent scholars, and other aficionados (yes! including people who use libraries, archives, and museums!) of popular culture and cultural heritage settings of all types. We also encourage proposals for slide shows, video presentations, panels, and roundtables organized around common themes.

Some suggested topics include:

• Histories and profiles of popular culture resources and collections in cultural heritage institutions; a chance to show off what you’ve got to scholars who might want to use it
• Intellectual freedom or cultural sensitivity issues related to popular culture resources
• Book clubs and reading groups, city- or campus-wide reading programs
• Special exhibits of popular culture resources, outreach programs, etc. of cultural heritage institutions
• Collection and organization of popular culture resources; marketing and ethical issues
• Web 2.0, gaming, semantic web, etc. and their impact on libraries, archives, museums, and digital humanities collections
• The role of public libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions in economic hard times and natural disasters
• Oral history projects
• Digital humanities and other digital/data-based projects on popular culture, the Southwest, and other relevant subjects, both those based in cultural heritage institutions and those in academia or other organizations.

We encourage proposals for panels and roundtables organized around common themes.

All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca

For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/

Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.  

For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.  

The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2023.  

SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2024.  SWPACA also offers travel fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/

Registration and travel information for the conference will be available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/conference-registration-information/

For 2023, we are excited to be at a new venue, the Marriott Albuquerque (2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110), which boasts free parking and close proximity to dining, shopping, and other delights.

In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at http://journaldialogue.org/

If you have any questions about the Cultural Heritage Institutions area, please contact its Area Chair, Suzanne Stauffer, Louisiana State University, stauffer@lsu.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@southwestpca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.

This will be a fully in-person conference. If you’re looking for an online option to present your work, keep an eye out for details about the 2024 SWPACA Summer Salon, a completely virtual conference to take place in June 2024. However, do keep in mind that the Summer Salon is a smaller conference with limited presentation slots and no student funding assistance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) have emerged as powerful tools that enhance and expand the role of libraries, empowering them to provide innovative services and experiences to their patrons. Delve into the myriad ways AI, VR, and other emerging realities intersect with library services and learn how libraries leverage these developments to redefine their work.

Amigos Library Services is now accepting presentation proposals for the November 30, 2023, online conference, “Reimagining Libraries: Exploring the AI & VR Revolution in Library Services.”

Potential presentation topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Impact of AI and VR on information literacy and library instruction
• Intellectual property, privacy, and ethical considerations and challenges
• AI-driven information retrieval
• Virtual collections, repositories, and archives
• Collaborative opportunities and partnerships with AI and VR
• Automated cataloging and metadata tagging
• Enhancing user experience

If you are interested in sharing your knowledge and experiences, please submit your proposal by September 20, 2023: https://forms.office.com/r/u9ea0ViSPT(link is external).

For more information about this conference, contact Jodie Borgerding, borgerding@amigos.org(link sends e-mail) or (972) 340-2897.

The Minnesota Archives Symposium will be held Monday, November 6 at the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul, MN. Driving and parking instructions can be found here: https://www.mnhs.org/historycenter/visit/directions. (Please note that parking at the History Center is free during the symposium).

The theme of this year’s symposium is “Handle With Care.”

Providing care is core to the archival profession. It is well-recognized that we provide care for the collections entrusted to us as well as to the collection users and community members who activate the materials under our care. Recent archives discourse has investigated how providing care and the act of caregiving impacts our profession more broadly, asking us to think deeply about what concepts such as responsible stewardship, radical empathy, and work-life balance mean to us and our profession.

During the symposium, we will reflect on the concept of care. How are we caring for our collections, our community, our colleagues, and ourselves? How might an ethic of care guide our work during difficult or uncertain times?

The planning committee is seeking proposals that explore the myriad ways care manifests itself in our work. Please send proposals to tcartmn@gmail.com by September 8th. Include a title for your presentation, a brief description of your talk, a list of speaker(s), and the preferred length of your presentation (15 minute presentation, 30 minute presentation, etc.). You do not have to be a member of TCART to submit a proposal.

Is there something you want to say, but you’re not sure how to shape it into a proposal or a presentation? The TCART officers are always happy to brainstorm with you. Just send us an email!

I’m looking for archivists and librarians who have a background in Medieval Studies to join a hybrid roundtable discussion at next year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 9-11, 2024). If you held a technical services role (considered broadly) at any point in your career, and you studied any aspect of the Middle Ages, please consider participating! You can reach out to me directly (allie.mccormack@utah.edu) for more information.

Official session blurb: “Library technical services – including collection development, cataloging, and processing – is not well understood by the public. However, teaching, research, and other services offered by libraries would not be possible without this behind-the-scenes work. Presenters will shine a light on technical services roles, explain the skills needed for success in these positions, and share how their medievalist backgrounds influence their work.”

If you know anyone else who may be interested, please share this widely. Proposals to join the roundtable must be submitted through the official conference portal: icms.confex.com/icms/2024/cfp.cgi.

——————————
Allie McCormack
Salt Lake City UT

June 20-22, 2024
The John Carter Brown Library
at Brown University

As we approach a series of 250th anniversaries, the histories of the American Founding have never been more hotly contested. In the United States, historians regard 2026 with some trepidation and a lot of determination to educate a wary public about the importance of evidence to the interpretation of the past. With nationalist movements—who tend to appropriate founding narratives for their own political purposes—on the rise around the world, histories of the international revolutionary era are equally fragile and fraught elsewhere. Indeed, the difficulty of addressing these pasts might lead to avoiding history altogether in a lot of the 250th commemorations.

In this challenging context, the archives of revolution pose both opportunity and imperative for 2026. Creating, exploring, promoting, preserving and most of all critically engaging with the nature and process of archives and archiving helps us to understand the past that we’re making. As archivists, literary scholars, librarians, historians, and more, we all interact with and help shape the past through its material and textual remains. Sharing more about the process of making archives of revolution, of using them, and of their changing nature in the twenty-first century, prompts new conversations about the past.It is also a way, we hope, of engaging scholars, archivists, and the public in a civil conversation about who owns it, has owned it, and who shapes it.

Just as the bicentennial of 1976 set in motion an array of documentary editing projects, we now find ourselves in a new and dramatically different evidential landscape, one shaped by the digital humanities, a more capacious Atlantic context for the American Revolution, and a half century of fresh scholarship. Archives of Revolution—a hybrid gathering of historians, curators, archivists, and educators—will be a forum for a major reconsideration of the foundation of Revolutionary history.

A collaboration between the John Carter Brown Library on the campus at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts this conference will be a forum for scholars, archivists, and educators from around the Atlantic to address the state of the archive, its interpretation, its preservation, and its dissemination.

We invite proposals for papers and roundtables, and panel discussions around the following three themes:

1. Collecting and privilege: What is an archive and how do archives come to be?  How do archival priorities shape Revolutionary histories? How do the unequal resources of institutions around the Atlantic affect our ability to write global Revolutionary histories? 
2. Interpreting the archive: How has the nature of the archive or our understanding of what constitutes an archive shaped histories of Atlantic Revolutions? How does any archives’ focus relate to effort to write transnational or global Revolutionary histories? What has been the impact of scholars’ “archival turn”?
3. Access and discovery: How has the expansion of archives, especially digitally, impacted our understanding of the Atlantic’s age of revolution? What are future directions for expansion—transnationally, multi-lingually, intercontinentally—as archives become more accessible and as archival datasets yield new insights? What strategies can we use to improve access and discovery beyond the Global North? What were the historic barriers for diverse scholars trying to access archives and in what ways is access still unequal?

SUBMIT A PAPER OR SESSION
Deadline: August 15, 2023.

The conference is chaired jointly by Emma Hart of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Sean Quimby of UPenn Libraries, and Karin Wulf of the John Carter Brown Library.

For more about Archives of Revolution:
https://ageofrevolutions.com/2023/03/20/archives-of-revolution/