Kenyon College has secured a significant financial contribution from Schmidt Sciences to support its interdisciplinary efforts in merging artificial intelligence with the humanities. The nonprofit organization, which focuses on accelerating scientific advancements, will provide up to $330,000 over 18 months. This funding is aimed at developing an open-access AI system designed to preserve endangered archives in small and underrepresented communities.
The project is led by Kenyon faculty members Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun. It will target historical repositories in New Orleans that contain unique materials such as multilingual newspapers, videos, handwritten documents, sound recordings, and musical scores related to Creole and Cajun communities and jazz history. The team includes scholars from Columbia University, Berklee College of Music, and Louisiana State University.
Elkins emphasized the urgency of preserving cultural materials that are deteriorating across small archives lacking resources. "Each day that passes, we are losing valuable cultural materials that are disintegrating," she said. The goal is to create an AI system accessible globally for small archives.
Kenyon is among 23 research teams invited to join Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), which aims to apply AI in understanding human records while integrating humanistic methods into AI design. Elkins and Chun have been involved in human-centered AI curriculum development at Kenyon since 2016.
Their current project seeks affordable methods using smartphones for photographing and digitizing archives while addressing privacy and copyright issues through AI. The initiative also aims to connect information across various formats for researchers and descendants.
HAVI's mission includes addressing current AI models' limitations concerning multilingual contexts and historical diversity nuances. "Most of the training data for AI systems right now is scraped from the internet," Elkins noted regarding under-resourced languages like Cajun and Creole.
Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, expressed hope that this work would advance humanities significantly: "Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths."
The project involves Hannah Sussman, an AI Lab fellow from Kenyon's Class of 2025, with plans to engage more students in ongoing research shared widely online. Elkins highlighted students' original work in generative AI investigations.
Elkins holds a National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Professorship for curriculum innovation and often discusses generative AI's risks and opportunities. Chun has co-founded startups globally and participated in Meta's Open Innovation AI Research Community.
Schmidt Sciences was founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in 2024 to support impactful research areas including AI, astrophysics, biosciences, climate change, space exploration, and more through its science systems program.
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