Can AI Collect Oral Histories? Probing a Community-Based Conversational Storytelling Agent to Document Digital Stories of Housing Insecurity with Brett Halperin
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s Covid-19 Housing Story Map: Oral Hxstories of Tenant Resistance & Eviction Information tab. Online at: covid19.antievictionmap.com.
About this event
Stories play a central role in social movement-building, but doing oral history sustainably in grassroots organizations is challenging. Community-based conversational storytelling agents (CSAs)—computational systems that facilitate dialogue with human narrators to automatically collect digital stories—have the potential to address some of the challenges associated with oral history for social change, including language justice, human capacity, and mental health. Yet, encounters with a CSA also surface perils of machine bias, as well as reduced possibilities of human connections and relations.
In this event, Brett Halperin will share how a study in partnership with the grassroots Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which was initially focused on CSA-support, opened a broader investigation into the role that artificial intelligence may play in housing justice movements. Drawing from 17 interviews with narrators and collectors of housing insecurity experiences, Halperin will describe how they perceive the risks and benefits of these tools.
Brett Halperin is pursuing a PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering with a graduate certificate in Cinema & Media Studies at University of Washington—Seattle. His research has been supported by multiple awards and published in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Design Research. He is a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Halperin's work has been awarded Best Paper at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premiere international venue for peer-reviewed HCI research. He holds an MS from the University of Washington and a BA from Brown University, where he also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is an adjunct faculty member of the Technology, Culture, & Society department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering.