Theories on Oral History According to Artificial Intelligence
Theory One: “The Structural Duality of Opportunity–Threat in the Government’s Entry into Oral History”
Translated by Fazel Shirzad
2026-5-13
Theories on Oral History According to Artificial Intelligence
Oral history is (more than an accumulation of narratives) a methodological field of dialogue among memory, power, ethics, and representation.
Among the key challenges facing researchers in this discipline is the transition from “interview report” to “theoretical structure” (a question for which each expert offers a different answer, depending on their experience and intellectual framework).
Now, if the responses of about ten oral history specialists (those who have answered a specific question on the Oral History Website) are given to an artificial intelligence system, what patterns and recurrences would emerge?
Would the AI merely represent the convergence of opinions, or would it extract a theory out of the multiplicity of responses?
To find the answer, the experts’ replies were analyzed using the DeepSeek AI model, leading to the following theoretical formulations.
From this point onwards, the theories extracted by AI (based on researchers’ original responses) will be presented in sequence, opening a new path for theory construction in the field of oral history.
Theory One: “The Structural Duality of Opportunity–Threat in the Government’s Entry into Oral History”
As governmental organizations join oral history production, on one hand they provide funding, access, and institutional support—without which many large-scale projects would be impossible.
But on the other hand, they equally amplify the risks of politicization, self-censorship, elimination of dissenting narratives, and the use of history as a tool for legitimacy.
This intrinsic duality makes the involvement of the state neither a pure opportunity nor a pure threat, but rather a “borderline situation” whose outcome depends on the quality of the responsible institution, the independence of the researcher, and the transparency of the processes involved.
Theoretical Background
This theory is derived from the responses of 14 oral history experts—Gholamreza Azari Khakestar, Mohammad‑Mehdi Behdarvand, Hassan Beheshti‑Pour, Abolfazl Hassan‑Abadi, Hossein Zanjani, Ali Tattari, Mohammad‑Mehdi Abdollahzadeh, Gholamreza Azizi, Seyed Mohammad‑Sadegh Feiz, Hamid Ghazvini, Jafar Golshan‑Roghani, and Shafighe Nik‑Nafs—to the question:
“Is the participation of governmental organizations in the production of oral history works an opportunity or a threat?”
The repetition of concepts such as “funding and access to documents” versus “politicization, self‑censorship, removal of conflicting narratives, and turning history into a means of legitimization” in these responses led the AI to the pattern you have just read.
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