UC Santa Barbara English assistant professor Jim Casey is spearheading a project to recover 19th-century African American newspapers using artificial intelligence, with a $750,000 grant from Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute. This initiative, titled “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives,” aims to enhance accessibility to fragmented historical archives, combining technology, scholarship, and community engagement. The interdisciplinary team, comprising experts from 10 universities and the Adler Planetarium, focuses on developing AI tools specifically designed to interpret the complex layouts of Black newspapers. This approach emphasizes community participation and historical justice, diverging from standard corporate AI applications. Casey highlights the importance of learning from early Black editors and journalists who innovated under oppressive conditions. The project seeks not only to recover vital history but also to pioneer ethical, non-extractive technology in alignment with the values of the Black press tradition, showcasing UCSB’s leadership in community-focused research.
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