Seventh Theory: The evolutionary duality of document and narrative
Machine Translation Edited by Mandana Karimi
2026-9-17
Oral history, more than an accumulation of narratives, 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 their own experience and intellectual framework, give a different answer.
If we provide the answers of 12 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 or will it arrive at a theory from the plurality of answers?
To find out the result, we analyzed the experts’ answers with the help of Deepseek artificial intelligence and arrived at some theories.
From now on, theories extracted by artificial intelligence will be presented in order based on the experts' responses, opening a new chapter in theorizing on the topic of oral history.
Seventh Theory: The Evolutionary Duality of Document and Narrative
Theoretical Sentence:
Documents and oral history are not competitors, but rather an “evolutionary duality” that play a different and complementary role at each stage of research: at the beginning, documents form the “skeleton” of the event and provide the interviewer with a sense of order; during the interview, they act as a “memory trigger” for the narrator and prevent generalizations and temporal errors; during the compilation stage, they become a “criterion for verifying” and documenting the statements. In contrast, oral history reflects the “spirit” and “feeling” of the event and can reveal the flaws, biases, or gaps in official documents. Hence, the true value of each lies in the “presence of the other”; neither a document without a narrative is dry nor a narrative without a document is fluid. Theoretical Background:
This theory is based on the responses of 13 oral history experts (Gholamreza Azari Khakster, Mohammad Mehdi Behdarvand, Hassan Beheshtipour, Abolfazl Hassanabadi, Fatemeh Dostkami, Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzadeh, Gholamreza Azizi, Seyyed Mohammad Sadeq Feyz, Hamid Qazvini, Mohammad Mohsen Moshafi, Abolfat’h Mo’men, Shafighe Niknafs, and Seyyed Vali Hashemi) to the question, “What contribution do documents make to oral history in the stages of oral history research, from interviewing to compilation?” The repetition of concepts such as "documents as the backbone and skeleton of the event", "stimulating the narrator's memory during the interview and revealing temporal errors", "criterion for verifying and validating statements during the compilation stage", "mutual completion of the document and the narrative (spirit and skeleton)", "revealing the defects, orientation, and gaps of official documents through oral narration", "the role of documents in designing questions and identifying suitable people for the interview", "increasing the interviewer's knowledge of the subject", and "presenting the document in a footnote or appendix to document the narrative" in these responses has led artificial intelligence to the model you studied.
Click here to see the experts' initial answers to this question.
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