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“Breathing Emotions & Stories: A different way of navigating Oral History Archives”- an open lecture by Dr. Almila Akdag Salah on 16 December

The video recording of the video is available online via the following link.


Last “Voices Unbound” Seminar for 2024: on 16 December Dr. Almila Akdag Salah will give an open lecture on Breathing Emotions & Stories: A different way of navigating Oral History Archives. This event is a part of a lecture series co-organised by TU Darmstadt, University College London, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. The series is convened by Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt), Andrew Flinn, Andreas Vlachidis, and Marco Humbel (UCL), Shih-Pei Chen (Max Planck Institute), and Gerben Zaagsma (C²DH), offering an important way of keeping up to date with the methodological and theoretical state of the art in digital oral history.

The event accommodates online format via Zoom platform. Don’t miss the final open lecture of the year! To secure your spot please navigate to Evenbrite page.

Dr. Almila Akdag Salah. Image courtesy: https://www.uu.nl/staff/AAAkdag

Dr. Almila Akdag Salah (Utrecht University, GE) is an assist prof. at the Utrecht University, Dept. of Information and Computational Sciences; she works as part of the UU Human Centered Computing group. Her research interests combine qualitative and quantitative methods to study mainly humanities and social data. She is a Digital Humanities Scholar with a diverse expertise from new media analysis, bibliometrics, information visualization and human computer interaction with AI, and has more then 50 publications in related fields. Her recent project analyses the oral history archives of trauma survivors. She was part of ‘Tools for the Analysis and Visualization of Large Image and Video Collections for the Humanities’, and an NWO VENI laureate with the ‘deviantArt: Mapping the Alternative Art World’ project. Her current interests investigates the impact of AI tools on creative industries, focusing on AI-designer collaborations, and the challenges of using creative and curios interfaces of hybrid collaborative environments.

The abstract of the talk is as follows:

The history of oral history tradition records the influence of technology both in collecting, archiving, and navigating the oral history collections. The recent years have witnessed how computational technologies have transformed the field of archival sciences further, especially tools like automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing offer distinct opportunities for transcribing and analyzing oral history (OH) interviews. However, many oral historians emphasize the loss of auditory information when speech is converted to text, highlighting the importance of subjective cues for a complete understanding of the interviewee’s narrative. In this talk, we will bring in questions, challenges and ways of navigating interview collections that focuses on the personal and emotional, by looking at the potential of paralinguistic cues such as breathing, fillers, and pauses.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (December 2, 2024). “Breathing Emotions & Stories: A different way of navigating Oral History Archives”- an open lecture by Dr. Almila Akdag Salah on 16 December. HDSM. Retrieved February 14, 2026 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/4387


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