Report: “Could Artificial Intelligence Save Endangered Archives? A Kenyon College Cohort Aims to Find Out”

From The Ohio Newsroom:

“[Archives] are crumbling and disappearing and we are losing our history,” said Katharine Elkins, humanities professor at Kenyon College.

Deteriorating archives are endangering historical documents across the country. A group of students and faculty at Kenyon College, in rural north central Ohio, believes artificial intelligence could be the key to rescuing them.

Kenyon is one of 23 research teams being funded by the Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) to advance humanities research. Their goal is to build an open AI system that can save endangered archives in small and underrepresented communities, like the collection at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

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In Elkins’ vision, what used to take researchers years to comb through would now take minutes. They could trace how a melody traveled from a handwritten score to a recording years later with just a couple keystrokes.

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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, News