Joining Molly Merryman, Ava Aviva Avnisan, Molly Merryman, Dana Middleton, & Dan Paz in a roundtable on our recent trip to a mixed-security carceral facility. Submitted abstract below.

This roundtable will reveal the initial stages of research focused on the development of an open-source tool to help gather and share oral histories of currently and formerly incarcerated transgender and gender diverse people. Our overall project: The Switchboard: an Open-Source Chatbot That Collects Trans* Oral Histories will deploy human-centered design and participatory research to create an open-source, customizable AI chatbot accessible via telephone whose purpose is to aid in the collection of oral histories among the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society. Project members will discuss the varied theoretical and methodological approaches we bring to this inquiry, as well as the unique technical, scholarly, ethical and other challenges faced in initial project design. As transgender and LGBTQ-identifying scholars, activists, artists, creative technologists, and oral historians, we are united by the spirit of mutual-aid and LGBTQ+ solidarity, and in a shared commitment to improving the lives and amplifying the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated transgender and gender diverse folks. Our preliminary research suggests that the extreme isolation faced by incarcerated transgender and gender diverse people could meaningfully be alleviated by sharing their stories and hearing others’, and that recent advances in generative AI technologies, harnessed responsibly, could help address the challenges of scale and access that oral historians are confronted with in their work. Numerous studies document the challenges that transgender and gender diverse prisoners face in overcoming isolation, both within and beyond prison. Within LGBTQ+ communities, oral histories and other storytelling models such as coming out stories have been and continue to be vital to our survival and resilience; we believe that giving incarcerated trans and gender diverse people the opportunity to share and hear each other’s stories will meaningfully alleviate their isolation. In this roundtable, project team members will also discuss our approach, in which generative AI augments and extends oral historians’ capacities, rather than replaces oral historians altogether, and which envisions building connections, trust and consensus from prospective interview subjects in group settings, with the interviews themselves being conducted via telephone by the AI chatbot, thus significantly increasing the number of oral histories that can be collected per person hour compared to traditional oral history collection methods. We will further discuss how, by training the chatbot on domain-specific knowledge including but not limited to, in our test case, prison studies, LGBTQ+ oral histories, transgender studies, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist studies, we hope to create an engaging experience for the interview subject that feels more like a conversation and less like a response to a rote list of predetermined questions. In addition to helping address the problem of scale, our approach also reduces access barriers by empowering interview subjects to share their stories at whatever time is convenient for them, requiring nothing more of them than access to a telephone (an approach especially important for incarcerated folks).