Nous Foundation
Archival Intelligence is developing work with Nous Foundation around the Francophone and Creolophone dimensions of the project, including Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini, community knowledge, stewardship, and cultural context.
Schmidt Sciences HAVI · 1 of 23 Worldwide
Archival Intelligence
Rescuing New Orleans' Endangered Cultural Legacy
New Orleans' cultural archives — newspapers, sheet music, personal letters, photographs, and early recordings documenting the birth of jazz — are deteriorating in under-resourced institutions. Many exist only in fragile physical form. Without intervention, this irreplaceable record of one of America's most significant cultural contributions will be permanently lost.
Archival Intelligence is an independent research initiative supported by Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, with research conducted in collaboration with Kenyon College, Berklee College of Music, Louisiana State University, and other partners.
Led by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun, Co-Principal Investigators, the interdisciplinary initiative brings together artificial intelligence, archival research, cultural history, language preservation, museum and library systems, and human-centered design. It was one of 23 teams selected worldwide. The Human-Centered AI Lab, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization co-founded by Elkins and Chun, is the broader research organization connected to the work.
Current work includes Louisiana French and other multilingual materials from New Orleans archives, with attention to language preservation, recognition, and cultural context.
Photo: Louisiana State Museum.
Project facts
$330K HAVI award
18 months
1 of 23 teams worldwide
New Orleans archives · Multimodal AI · Language preservation · Community governance
The archive is more than an image
A page like this carries the material problems the project studies: uneven printing, dense layouts, aging paper, historical vocabulary, and relationships that cannot be recovered through OCR alone.
Research
Our approach
Preservation moves from material recovery to decisions about context, authority, and reuse. See the full preservation pipeline →
Recover the material
Damaged newspapers, letters, sheet music, photographs, and recordings.
Recover the language
Louisiana French, Kouri-Vini, historical spelling, code-switching, and underrepresented language varieties.
Recover the context
Provenance, metadata, historical relationships, and cultural meaning.
Decide what happens next
Access, permissions, community authority, and responsible reuse.
Stewardship
Preservation is not only a technical problem
Open Heritage
Archival Intelligence has signed onto the Open Heritage framework, aligning the project with principles of access, cultural sensitivity, community participation, stewardship, and data sovereignty.
News
Latest updates
What Do We Save? AI, Archives & Cultural Memory
A public conversation about preservation choices, archival reconstruction, access, and interpretation.
The Dual Edge: AI’s Impact on Cultural Production and Preservation
Katherine Elkins’s forthcoming chapter includes early Archival Intelligence work with New Orleans cultural materials.
Nous Foundation and Open Heritage
Community knowledge, Francophone and Creolophone materials, responsible access, and data sovereignty move to the center of the project.
Join Us
Get involved
Have an archive at risk?
Talk with us about preservation challenges.
Work on archives, museums, or cultural AI?
We welcome research and institutional conversations.
Interested in research?
Learn about student and collaborative research opportunities.