This article was originally published in UCSB's ' The Current '.
As much of the early Black press remains scattered or difficult to access, UC Santa Barbara English assistant professor Jim Casey is leading a project to recover and share 19th-century African American newspapers using artificial intelligence. He will head a national research team awarded $750,000 from Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute for “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives,” a project that brings together technology, scholarship and community participation to make early African American newspapers more broadly and freely accessible to the public.
Under Casey’s leadership, the interdisciplinary team brings together expertise from 10 universities and the Adler Planetarium to develop new AI tools that will help unlock fragmented archives of 19th-century Black newspapers. The project represents a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence — one that centers community participation and historical justice rather than corporate extraction and “black box” algorithms trained on biased data.