Lydia Neuroth
Project Manager for Virginia Untold
Library of Virginia
Sonya Coleman
Digital Engagement Coordinator
Library of Virginia
The Library of Virginia (LVA) has expanded its crowdsourcing program by asking volunteers to index specific information from archival records into spreadsheets or forms, which are then made available on the Virginia Open Data portal as datasets. Virginia Untold: the African American Narrative, a digital project providing access of records of enslaved and free Black people in LVA’s collections, has been a focus for crowdsourced transcription, utilizing both full text and indexing approaches. While indexing supports discoverability, offering exported “data” has presented new challenges, principally around recognizing the humanity of marginalized people, both free and enslaved. What is our responsibility in creating and presenting datasets that are isolated from their primary source context? How do we ensure that the individuals represented in the datasets are not stripped of their humanity when represented as numbers? By thoughtfully engaging with volunteers and community members during transcribe-a-thons, we uncover the humanity within historical records as well as the data we create from them. Leveraging recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI), staff created a hands-on workshop for participants to experiment with AI image-generating tools using descriptions from historic documents including records digitized through the Virginia Untold project. LVA staff continue to look for ways to humanize data by working with scholars, genealogists, digital humanists, and educators to tell stories from our collections.
https://lva.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=01LVA_INST:VU
https://fromthepage.com/lva
https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2024/06/17/ai-ancestors/
https://data.virginia.gov/