Racing to save history
The Archival Intelligence project develops AI techniques to preserve and analyze endangered cultural archives before they are permanently lost, focusing on the emergence of jazz in New Orleans.
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From fragile object to usable archive
Newspapers, sheet music, letters, photographs, and recordings carry different forms of damage and different kinds of knowledge. The research asks how a source can be captured, recognized, contextualized, and made accessible without separating it from provenance, language, rights, and community authority.
This sheet-music cover is evidence of the problem: image, typography, publication history, place, and musical content must remain connected. A transcription alone is not the archive.
From source to governed access
Source
historical document · image · recording
Capture
digitization · scanning · audio transfer
Recover
image enhancement · layout recognition · restoration
Recognize
OCR · handwriting recognition · speech and audio processing
Contextualize
metadata · provenance · language · dialect · historical usage
Analyze
multimodal search · cultural analysis
Govern & Access
permissions · community input · preservation · reuse
What technology struggles with
Language is part of the archive
Preserving a document is not enough if the language inside it is misread, normalized away, or stripped of local context. Archival Intelligence is studying Louisiana French and other Francophone materials, Kouri-Vini/Louisiana Creole where relevant, historical spelling and orthography, dialect variation, and code-switching.
The project examines the uneven performance of OCR, handwriting recognition (HTR), and speech recognition (ASR) on underrepresented language varieties. Preservation is not merely transcription or translation: language must remain connected to metadata, search, interpretation, and cultural context. This work is developing with Nous Foundation in New Orleans.
Making a document legible is not the same as making history intelligible.
What the machine sees
scan
enhanced image
OCR / HTR / ASR output
What the archive knows
date · creator · place · language · collection · provenance · rights · historical context · relationships
Access is a research question
Permissions, community input, preservation, and responsible reuse are part of the pipeline rather than an afterthought. The people whose histories are contained in an archive should help determine the terms of access and representation. Archival Intelligence is a signatory to the Open Heritage Statement.
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.
This approach grows out of broader work at the Human-Centered AI Lab on how AI systems interact with language, culture, judgment, and human values.