In February, the latest digital collection at the University of Michigan Library was released and it features a partnership between UM-Flint and the Flint community. The Vehicle City Voices project was developed with the goal of creating a corpus of the varieties of English spoken in Flint, Michigan while also serving as a repository of resident reflections on life in Flint throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (3rd ed.), a corpus is "any systematic collection of speech or writing in a language or variety of a language. Thus, in particular, of large on‐line collections, tagged and searchable for research purposes."
This collection contains 71 oral history interviews with residents of Flint that were collected between 2012 and 2020. The project was led by Dr. Erica Britt, now at Emory University, and was the backing of her research published in The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. This project was attached to several UM-Flint linguistics courses with a civic engagement focus, giving undergraduate and graduate student researchers opportunities to conduct oral history interviews. "This collection was created with goal of capturing changes in the pronunciation of American English that are occurring in larger cities like Detroit, but that may or may not also be happening in smaller cities like Flint. But beyond its pure linguistic significance, this archive captures the lived-experiences of Flint residents as they tell the story of their own city in their own words. We were lucky to feature the stories of a number of local residents including storytellers, community leaders, activists, former GM workers, and educators (among many others) and they give us a window into places that may no longer exist and a vision of a community that has transformed rapidly over the years," said Britt.
On the historical importance of these oral histories, archivist Callum Carr remarked, "Oral histories are deeply important to communities as they can add context and even challenge accepted official narratives of events in our history. Dr. Britt's work is especially important as it covers time before and during the Water Crisis."
This project also highlights the integration of generative AI in the realm of preservation. "Because of the quality of the transcripts associated with Vehicle City Voices, we were able to generate and include automated summaries of those transcripts using U-M GPT, making the content in the digital collection more easily searchable. We look forward to using AI tools, as appropriate, moving forward," said Kat Hagedorn, Director of the Digital Content and Collections Department at the University Library.
Vehicle City Voices can be accessed and searched through the UM Library website by anyone and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, meaning you are free to share and adapt the digital objects for any non-commercial purpose, so long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
University of Michigan-Flint
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