Project leadership

Katherine Elkins, Co-Principal Investigator

Katherine Elkins

Co-Principal Investigator

Professor at Kenyon College and Co-Founder of the Human-Centered AI Lab. Works on AI, narrative, cultural preservation, and questions of judgment and human values.

Jon Chun, Co-Principal Investigator

Jon Chun

Co-Principal Investigator

Co-Founder and Director of the Human-Centered AI Lab. Works on AI systems, computational methods, technical infrastructure, and project research design.

Senior research collaborators

Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Co-Investigator

Supratik Mukhopadhyay

Co-Investigator · Louisiana State University

Works on multimodal machine learning, pattern recognition, and scalable systems for diverse archival formats.

Lori Landay, Co-Investigator

Lori Landay

Co-Investigator · Berklee College of Music

Studies digital media, museum interfaces, and how technology represents musical and cultural materials.

Brent Hayes Edwards, Consultant

Brent Hayes Edwards

Consultant · Columbia University

Works on jazz history, African American cultural production, translation, and archival theory.

Ongoing research team

Dataset Research · Kenyon College

Ty Kushi

Maps archival datasets, historical context, provenance, metadata structures, and relationships across collections.

Museum & Archive Systems Research

Adrian Mangine

Studies collection-management systems, metadata, taxonomies, permissions, audit trails, provenance, and interface workflows.

Summer 2026 research cohort

Dataset Research

Jessica Daugherty

Surveyed candidate archival datasets, researched historical context and provenance, and contributed to metadata architecture and cross-dataset research possibilities.

OCR Benchmarking Research

Ayesha Aslam

Developed benchmarking research for degraded historical documents and newspapers, including damaged pages, difficult layouts, degraded scans, typography, calibration, sample collection, and performance/cost comparisons.

Language Preservation Research

Nic Pechon-Elkins

Began research on language preservation and orthographic normalization for oral-history material in under-resourced languages, connecting technical work with linguistic preservation.

OCR Benchmarking Contributor

Ashwin Krishnan

Contributed to the project's OCR benchmarking work on difficult historical documents and newspapers.

Cultural-heritage & project contributors

Project Management

Anne-Duncan Enright

Coordinates project infrastructure, working meetings, research connections, and partner relationships, including the developing work with Nous Foundation.

Cultural Heritage Systems

Jenna Nolt

Studies digital collections, metadata, provenance, digitization, archival infrastructure, and data stewardship.

Museum Systems

Abigail Foster '23

Studies museum workflows, digital collections, metadata, interfaces, interpretation, discovery, and public access.

Museums & Archives

Cat Ashley Fairchild Perloff '20

Works on museum studies, collections, material culture, digitization, interpretation, and user experience.

Project partners

Research partners

Kenyon College
Louisiana State University
Berklee College of Music
Columbia University

Research collaboration across humanities, computing, media, and jazz studies.

Cultural & community partners

Nous Foundation / Open Heritage
New Orleans Jazz Museum

Community knowledge, stewardship, collections, and responsible access.

Funder / network

Schmidt Sciences HAVI

Support through the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute.