Press coverage, project milestones, and announcements from the Archival Intelligence project.
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This Kenyon conversation takes the project’s central question into public discussion: how preservation choices shape cultural memory, what AI can and cannot reconstruct, and how access and interpretation should be governed.
Archival Intelligence team member Abigail Foster will participate as a volunteer at AI4LAM Fantastic Futures 2026: Trust in the Loop, the international conference for Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives & Museums. Foster is active in AI4LAM’s Washington, DC chapter and has participated in its ongoing community meetings.
Held September 15–17 in Washington, DC and co-hosted by the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian Institution, Fantastic Futures brings together researchers, technologists, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals working at the intersection of AI and cultural heritage.
Katherine Elkins contributes “The Dual Edge: AI’s Impact on Cultural Production and Preservation” to the forthcoming UNESCO volume Artificial Intelligence and Culture: A Global Perspective from Cairo. The chapter grew out of an invited UNESCO Cairo Office presentation and examines how generative AI is reshaping cultural production while also creating new possibilities for preserving endangered cultural heritage.
The chapter includes early Archival Intelligence work on restoring poorly digitized New Orleans cultural materials and argues for greater investment in identifying, prioritizing, and preserving cultural heritage at greatest risk of loss.
This summer, Archival Intelligence moved from project design into a broad program of research, prototyping, and partnership-building.
Led by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun, Co-Principal Investigators, the project brings together artificial intelligence, archival research, cultural history, language preservation, museum and library systems, and human-centered design. Archival Intelligence is supported by Schmidt Sciences through the Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute.
Much of that foundation was built by an extraordinary summer team, and we are deeply grateful for their work.
Anne-Duncan Enright, Project Manager, coordinated the expanding research team, organized weekly working meetings, developed our internal project infrastructure, and helped connect the project's technical, archival, and community-facing work. She also initiated the relationship with the Nous Foundation that developed over the summer into a formal collaboration.
Jessica Daugherty and Ty Kushi led foundational dataset research, surveying candidate archival collections, investigating their historical contexts and provenance, and helping develop the metadata structures and cross-dataset relationships needed for future research.
Ayesha Aslam, joined in the OCR research by Ashwin Krishnan, contributed to the development of benchmarking work on difficult historical documents and newspapers. This research examines how current AI systems perform when confronted with damaged pages, complex layouts, degraded scans, unusual typography, and other conditions common in archival collections.
Abigail Foster '23, Museum Systems & Workflow Advisor, brought experience at the intersection of museums, cultural heritage, digital interpretation, and emerging technology. Her work helped shape research into museum and archive systems, digital collections, metadata, public-facing interfaces, and institutional workflows.
Cat Ashley Fairchild Perloff '20, Museum & Archives Specialist, contributed complementary expertise in museum studies, collections, interpretation, material culture, and user experience. Her work helped us think about how archival materials move from preservation and digitization into interfaces and interpretive environments.
Jenna Nolt, Cultural Heritage Systems Adviser, brought expertise in digital collections, metadata, provenance, digitization, and archival infrastructure. Her work helped shape our approach to FAIR and CARE principles, data stewardship, provenance, and the technical systems required to preserve archival objects and their context.
Adrian Mangine conducted competitive and technical research into museum and archive collection-management systems, examining metadata and taxonomy structures, permissions, audit trails, provenance workflows, and the capabilities and limitations of existing platforms.
Nic Pechon-Elkins began work on language preservation and orthographic normalization for oral-history materials in under-resourced languages, connecting technical research to the challenge of preserving linguistic knowledge that can disappear when digital archives and AI systems privilege dominant languages.
Lori Landay, Co-Investigator, contributed museum and interface research and developed early interface concepts and wireframes, helping translate the team's archival and technical requirements into user-centered design.
Together, this work began to establish the project's core architecture: not simply a system for digitizing archives, but an environment for preserving provenance, cultural context, uncertainty, transformation histories, and the relationships among heterogeneous cultural materials.
Archival Intelligence became a signatory to the Open Heritage Statement, an international initiative developed through the Creative Commons-convened Open Heritage Coalition.
The Statement calls for more equitable access to public-domain cultural heritage in the digital environment while recognizing that openness must be accompanied by responsible stewardship, community participation, cultural sensitivity, and respect for data sovereignty.
These principles closely align with Archival Intelligence's approach. Our goal is not simply to make more cultural material computationally accessible, but to build systems capable of preserving the provenance, cultural relationships, community knowledge, and access conditions that give archival materials meaning. The Statement also supports international action through UNESCO toward stronger frameworks for digital access to cultural heritage.
Archival Intelligence and Nous Foundation Inc., doing business as the New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures, signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding establishing Nous as a Community and Cultural Partner for the Francophone and Creolophone dimensions of Archival Intelligence.
The collaboration grew directly out of the summer's research. Anne-Duncan Enright first identified the connection between the organizations and opened conversations with Nous. Those discussions revealed shared concerns about preserving Louisiana French, Louisiana Creole (Kouri-Vini), and the cultural records of the communities that sustain them.
Archival Intelligence intends to lead technical preservation and analysis of relevant materials, using methods that may include computer vision, optical character recognition, handwritten text recognition, automatic speech recognition, and multimodal analysis. Nous intends to contribute cultural, historical, and linguistic knowledge and help connect the project with institutions, families, communities, teachers, and tradition-bearers.
Initial areas of shared interest include endangered newspapers, sheet music, personal letters, photographs, early recordings, oral histories, and other materials connected to the Francophone and Creolophone cultures of New Orleans and Louisiana.
Central to the collaboration is a commitment to community data sovereignty: the people and communities whose heritage is being preserved should retain a meaningful voice in how their materials are represented, accessed, analyzed, and used, including in the development of artificial intelligence.
How can new forms of AI help preserve cultural knowledge without separating that knowledge from the communities, histories, languages, and relationships that give it meaning?
Lead feature in the Kenyon Alumni Magazine on the College's human-centered AI program, including the Archival Intelligence team's work rescuing endangered New Orleans cultural archives.
NPR/WOSU coverage of the Schmidt Sciences archival intelligence project and the race to preserve New Orleans' cultural heritage. Features Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun discussing the project's approach to using AI for cultural preservation.
Katherine Elkins quoted on AI safety research and the role of humanities in AI governance — work that informs the Archival Intelligence project's approach to community-centered AI.
Forbes feature on the human-centered AI program at Kenyon College, including the research methodology that underlies the Archival Intelligence project.
The official announcement of Kenyon's $330,000 award from Schmidt Sciences to develop a free, open-access AI system for rescuing endangered archives in underrepresented communities.
Local coverage highlighting how this globally recognized project originates from rural Knox County, Ohio — and its potential impact on archives around the world.
Archival Intelligence selected as one of 23 teams worldwide for the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI). $330,000 grant for 18-month project to rescue endangered New Orleans cultural archives using AI.
Formal partnership with the New Orleans Jazz Museum to develop AI tools for processing and preserving fragile archival collections documenting the birth of jazz.
Katherine Elkins selected as one of six faculty speakers — from more than 1,000 applicants — at OpenAI's Education Guild Higher Education Forum in San Francisco, presenting computational humanities research including the archival intelligence methodology.