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Yang Xiangyin

As an ancient discipline, the vigorous vitality of history comes from its openness. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "Artificial intelligence is an important driving force for the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and will have a profound impact on global economic and social development and the progress of human civilization." At present, the breakthroughs and applications of artificial intelligence in speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, knowledge graphs, machine translation, and big data mining have not only profoundly changed all aspects of human society, but also given digital wings to the prosperity and development of history, injecting new vitality and vitality. As a branch of history, oral history has also ushered in unprecedented opportunities and challenges brought by artificial intelligence. We must actively embrace new technologies, use innovative vision and an open mind to explore the specific application paths of artificial intelligence in oral history research, and grasp the enabling role of artificial intelligence in the collection, organization, preservation, analysis, and dissemination of oral history research.

In the collection process, artificial intelligence is expected to completely change the traditional interview mode and realize the intelligent collection of oral history. Collecting, organizing and preserving the historical memory of the narrator in the form of interviews, and presenting the historical reality experienced by the narrator, is an important purpose of oral history research. With the advancement of technologies such as natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and emotional computing, a number of artificial intelligence systems such as virtual interview assistants and conversational assistants have been developed. These artificial intelligence systems interact with interviewees in the form of human-computer dialogue, automatically generate personalized interview outlines based on the characteristics of the interviewees, and adjust the content and order of questions in real time according to the progress of the interview. In addition, immersive technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality allow interviewees to "travel" back to a specific time and space situation, relive the people and events of the year in person, create an immersive atmosphere for oral history collection, and stimulate more memories and emotional resonance among interviewees.

In the collation process, artificial intelligence significantly improves efficiency and quality in transcription, cataloging and indexing, and realizes the automation of oral history collation. In oral history research, the collation of interview content is crucial. Whether it is document collation, text collation or audio and video collation, there is a set of strict operating procedures. With the development of technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and knowledge graphs, the automation of the entire process of oral history collation is becoming increasingly possible. In terms of transcription, intelligent speech recognition programs can automatically convert oral audio into text, and perform intelligent punctuation, segmentation, generate timestamps and speaker tags, greatly improving transcription efficiency, while also reducing the cost and error rate of manual transcription. In terms of cataloging and indexing, natural language processing and knowledge graph technologies can automatically identify and extract important information such as themes, keywords, names, places, and time in oral history materials through algorithms such as named entity recognition, keyword extraction, and topic clustering, generate metadata according to predefined rules and standards, and establish material catalogs and indexes.

In the preservation process, artificial intelligence changes the preservation and management mode of oral history, thereby improving its safety factor, management efficiency and utilization level. The digital preservation of massive oral history materials faces many challenges, such as insufficient storage space, low retrieval efficiency and data security risks. Artificial intelligence provides new ideas and methods to solve these problems. For example, intelligent data compression and storage technology can greatly reduce the storage cost of oral history materials, and blockchain technology can provide a more secure and reliable storage environment for related materials; artificial intelligence can automatically extract the semantic features of oral history materials, build multi-dimensional and fine-grained indexes, and realize intelligent retrieval, thereby significantly improving its utilization efficiency. The effective application of artificial intelligence makes the long-term preservation and intelligent management of massive oral history materials more convenient and feasible, and prolongs the vitality of oral history from a technical level.

In the analysis phase, artificial intelligence provides new research tools and methods, which helps to open up new paradigms and new paths for oral history research. Traditional oral history research mainly relies on the subjective interpretation and historical imagination of researchers in the analysis phase, and emphasizes the description and interpretation of individual experience. The introduction of artificial intelligence provides more quantitative analysis and data-driven research tools and methods for oral history analysis. These research tools and methods include: natural language processing technology that can realize intelligent analysis of oral history materials, knowledge graphs and semantic network technologies that can help researchers discover implicit knowledge and deep relationships in oral history materials, data mining and machine learning technologies that can help researchers discover valuable patterns and trends from massive oral history materials, and so on. Artificial intelligence is not only a tool and method for oral history analysis, but also a catalyst for paradigm shift and innovation in oral history research. It will promote the transformation of oral history research from the traditional humanistic hermeneutics paradigm to a new paradigm that is data-intensive and technology-driven.

In the communication link, artificial intelligence has opened up a series of new presentation modes and channels, which helps to create a more popular, interactive and immersive oral history experience. The combination of artificial intelligence and digital humanities has opened up new paths, new methods and new patterns for the dissemination of oral history. For example, intelligent display technology can innovate presentation methods, and the development of immersive reality, virtual humans, somatosensory interaction and other technologies can help create an immersive oral history experience; for example, intelligent recommendation technology can achieve accurate dissemination, and artificial intelligence systems can collect data such as users' browsing behavior, interest preferences, etc., and use collaborative filtering, content filtering and other algorithms to automatically push matching oral history content to them, thereby improving the accuracy and conversion rate of dissemination; and so on.

It can be foreseen that in the near future, the integration of artificial intelligence and oral history will be more in-depth, promoting all-round innovation in the concepts, methods, paths and models of oral history research, and giving oral history unprecedented vitality and vigor. However, we must also be aware that artificial intelligence is not a "panacea" for the development of oral history. While it brings major opportunities, it also brings many challenges, such as how to ensure the authenticity and representativeness of oral history materials, how to avoid risks such as copyright infringement, privacy leakage, and data abuse, how to avoid bias and misinterpretation of algorithm models, how to balance technology application and humanistic care, and how to deal with the inequality caused by the digital divide, etc. These are all issues that oral history research must treat with caution while embracing artificial intelligence. Looking to the future, we must not only use artificial intelligence to improve our research level and innovation capabilities, but also adhere to humanistic feelings and academic ethics, lead the application of technology with the academic consciousness of history, realize human-machine collaboration and complementary advantages, expand the intelligent practice of research, and create a broad prospect and new realm for research and application.

(The author is a professor at the School of History, Renmin University of China)

People's Daily (Page 9, July 29, 2024)