Theory Four: The Crisis of Border Legitimacy
Machine Translation edited by Mandana Karimi
2026-07-23
Oral history, more than being 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 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 AI based on the experts' responses will be presented in order to open a new chapter in theorizing on the topic of oral history.
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Theory Four: The Crisis of Border Legitimacy
Theoretical sentence:
While traditional historiography has focused on elites, official documents, and dry language, and has excluded non-elite groups, silent voices, and general audiences; oral history has been able to create public acceptance not because of higher scientific accuracy, but because of its "inherent plurality" at three levels - the diversity of narrators (from the lower classes to women and tribes), the diversity of narratives (polyphony instead of monophony), and the diversity of format (living and flowing language instead of dry text); hence, public acceptance is not a testament to epistemic superiority, but a sign of "a response to the needs of those deprived of official history. “Theoretical Background:
This theory is based on the responses of 7 oral history experts (Gholamreza Azari Khakster, Mohammad Mehdi Behdarvand, Hassan Beheshtipour, Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzadeh, Seyyed Mohammad Sadeq Feyz, Hamid Qazvini, and Mohammad Mohsen Mos’hafi) to the question, “What is the reason for the general interest in oral history?” The repetition of concepts such as “the human and living face of history”, “the voice of the inferior and invisible classes against the official narrative”, “the attractiveness of fluent language and simple text against dry official texts”, “participation and agency of different strata in writing history”, “multiplicity of narratives and diversity of format”, “breaking the monopoly of power in traditional historiography”, “identification of the audience with the narrators’ direct narratives”, and “response to the needs of those deprived of official history” in these responses has led artificial intelligence to the model you have studied.
To view the experts’ initial responses to this question, click here.
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http://oral-history.ir/?page=post&id=13407