University of North Texas College of Information

The Department of Data Science in the College of Information at the University of North Texas will enhance access to and public engagement with oral history collections through the development of ORAL-Artificial Intelligence (AI), a responsible and privacy aware framework for navigating multimodal oral digital archives. This project will evaluate the limitations of emerging multimodal AI systems in oral history contexts and develop a structured benchmark dataset and modular, open-source framework that supports cross-modal retrieval, evidence-grounded question answering, and narrative summarization while preserving archival integrity. By centering ethical stewardship and human-centered design, ORAL-AI hopes to expand meaningful public access to oral histories nationwide.