Kenyon College has received a substantial gift to expand its interdisciplinary work bridging artificial intelligence and the humanities.
The award from Schmidt Sciences — a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating scientific knowledge and breakthroughs — will provide up to $330,000 over the next 18 months for Kenyon to develop a free, open-access AI system to help rescue endangered archives in small and underrepresented communities.
The project — led by faculty members Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun — will focus on historical repositories in New Orleans that are home to aging, one-of-a-kind materials like multilingual newspapers, videos, handwritten documents, sound recordings and musical scores related to the Creole and Cajun communities as well as the history of jazz. They will lead an interdisciplinary team of scholars in jazz studies, musicology and computer science from Columbia University, Berklee College of Music and Louisiana State University, near the birthplace of New Orleans jazz.
“Each day that passes, we are losing valuable cultural materials that are disintegrating, and they are distributed across small archives that lack the resources to save them before they disappear,” said Elkins, professor of comparative literature and humanities. “Part of our goal is to create an AI system that small archives can use, not only in the U.S. but all over the world.”
Kenyon is home to one of 23 research teams across the globe that were invited to join Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), the nonprofit announced Thursday. Its goal is to apply AI to illuminate the human record and draw on humanistic questions, methods and values to advance how AI itself is designed and used.
Elkins and Chun, visiting instructor of humanities and affiliated scholar in scientific computing, cofounded a human-centered AI curriculum and Colab at Kenyon in 2016. Their current project for HAVI is titled: “Racing to Save History: Can AI Rescue Endangered Archives?” To answer that question, their team aims to find an inexpensive way to use commonplace smartphones to photograph and digitize archives, using AI to restore damaged materials and address time-consuming issues like privacy and copyrights.
In addition to preserving these important historical materials, the team will use AI to connect information across documents, languages and formats so researchers and descendants can find what they’re looking for and facilitate new discoveries.
Part of HAVI’s mission is to address the limitations of current AI models when it comes to multilingual contexts and the nuances of historical and cultural diversity.
“Most of the training data for AI systems right now is scraped from the internet, and AI doesn’t have a true historical understanding of under-resourced languages like Cajun and Creole,” Elkins said.
The nonprofit’s hope, then, is that AI can be used to advance the humanities in a multitude of ways through this work.
“Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths, on all that makes us human — from the origins of civilization to the peaks of philosophical thought to contemporary art and film,” said Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences. “Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is poised to change not only the course of scholarship, but also the way we see ourselves and our role in the world.”
The work on Kenyon’s project will be assisted in part by Hannah Sussman, an AI Lab fellow from the Kenyon Class of 2025, and Elkins hopes to get current students involved as well. They’re already conducting exciting, original research as part of the lab that has been shared on the web and downloaded more than 90,000 times worldwide. Past projects have touched on everything from reproductive rights to Venezuelan politics to Sri Lanka’s financial crisis in recent years.
“Our students are doing amazing original work, both investigating generative AI and leveraging AI for humanities and social science research,” Elkins said.
Elkins, who was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Professorship for curriculum innovation, frequently speaks about the risks and opportunities of generative AI. Chun has co-founded startups in Japan, Brazil and Silicon Valley. Both were members of Meta's Open Innovation AI Research Community and have led teams receiving funding from the IBM/Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab.
Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that supports research in areas poised for impact, including AI and advanced computing; astrophysics; biosciences; climate; and space — as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program.