Theory Five: The borderline status of the source in oral history
Machine Translation Edited by Mandana Karimi
2026-08-13
Oral history, more than being an accumulation of narrative, is a field of methodical dialogue between memory, power, ethics, and representation. In the meantime, one of the challenges for researchers in this field is to move from “interview report” to “theoretical structure”; a question to which each expert, based on his or her experience and intellectual framework, gives a different answer.
If we provide the answers of 7 oral history experts - who have answered a specific question on the oral history website - to artificial intelligence, what patterns and repetitions will be obtained? Is artificial intelligence simply reflecting the consensus of opinions or will it arrive at a theory from the plurality of answers?
To find the result, we analyzed the experts’ answers with the help of DeepSeek artificial intelligence and came up with some theories. From now on, the theories extracted by artificial intelligence based on the experts' responses will be presented in order to open a new chapter in theorizing on the subject of oral history.
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Theory Five: The Borderline Status of the Source in Oral History
Theoretical sentence:
Oral history is neither absolutely a first-hand source nor absolutely a second-hand one, but rather is in a "borderline status" between the two. On the one hand, due to the narrator's contemporaneity with the event and direct access to lived experience, it has the potential to be a first-hand source; on the other hand, the interference of memory, time distance, the narrator's bias, and the interviewer's role in producing the narrative push it towards a "second-hand source" dependent on the conditions of production. Therefore, the primary or secondary value of oral history depends on three variables: "temporal proximity to the event", "interview methodology", and "compatibility with independent written sources”. Theoretical Background:
This theory is based on the responses of 7 oral history experts (Gholamreza Azari Khakestar, Mohammad Mehdi Behdarvand, Hassan Beheshtipour, Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzadeh, Seyyed Mohammad Sadeq Feyz, Hamid Qazvini, and Shafiqeh Niknafs) to the question “Is oral history a primary source in historical research?” The repetition of concepts such as “the presence or absence of the narrator’s direct presence in the event”, “the role of memory and time distance in reducing credibility”, “the need for verification and comparison with written documents”, “the difference between the first and second source based on the interview method and temporal proximity to the event”, “the effect of the interviewer’s intervention in the production of the narrative”, and “the dependence of the source’s position on the conditions of production” in these responses has led artificial intelligence to the model you studied.
To view the experts’ initial responses to this question, click here.
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