CAFe Speaker Series: Archives as Data and Data as Archives: Archival Intelligence for the age of GenAI

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UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the CAFe Speaker Series. (Registration Required)

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Abstract:

This presentation reports on two recent projects that consider the relationships between data and archives. The first project studying “Archives as Data” involved a series of workshops held at the University of Toronto and University of Illinois with archives practitioners and researchers who engaged in guided conversations on the need to incorporate critical and social justice lenses when using computational approaches with archival collections. These dialogues aimed to surface the disconnects and misunderstandings between computational methods for archival materials. Conversations highlighted hesitancies in trusting AI’s abilities to manage the (messy) forms of knowledge organization unique to archives, as well as de-centering the people whose lives, labour, and communities are inscribed in records.

The second project considers “Data as Archives” through the same lens of archival intelligence. It considers how properties that have historically set archival aggregations apart from other kinds of resource – authenticity, interrelatedness, provenance, and uniqueness – also apply to datasets used in training AI models. Findings from both projects are analyzed through the lens of Yakel and Torres’ (2003) ‘Archival Intelligence.’ Their conceptualization emphasizes three kinds of ‘intelligence’ which scholars employ when working with archives: a knowledge of archival theory and practices; strategies for reducing uncertainty; and the ability to understand connections between objects and their archival representations. Both projects reinforce the increasing need for archivists to advocate for the unique contributions that archival collections provide to the public record, and the role of ‘archival intelligences’ in AI mediated interactions and interfaces.

Bio:

Emily Maemura is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She studies how web materials are selected and curated in web archives that preserve the web’s history, with a focus on the socio-technical infrastructures that support the use of these collections as data. Her research sits at the forefront of the emerging field of critical web archives studies, engaging with the related fields of critical data studies and critical archival studies. More broadly, her work explores information organization on the internet and the categorical work necessary to make information usable and available for life in an online world. Her research has been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the International Journal of Digital Humanities, Big Data & Society, Internet Histories and Archival Science.

She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, with a dissertation exploring the practices of collecting and curating web pages and websites for future use by researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

 

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Additional Information:
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