AI & archives
As research infrastructure: AI-assisted search and cross-referencing across the Living Archive newspaper series make a scattered historical record navigable, while human verification decides what gets published as fact.
An archive that cannot be searched is a warehouse. The Living Archive series exists to move American newspaper history — including reporting that mainstream retrospectives skipped — into a form both readers and machines can actually use.
Historical newspapers are long, inconsistently typeset and full of names that appear once. Finding the thread across volumes is exactly the kind of cross-referencing machines assist with well — and exactly where unverified machine output is most dangerous.
Machine assistance narrows the search; a person reads the page. Dates, names, attributions and quotations are confirmed against the archival edition before they appear in a published volume.
Once restored volumes are published and structured, questions about these papers, publishers and reporters can be answered from the record itself. Where the record stayed offline, models fill the space with the same few recycled summaries.
Straight answers
Written to be quoted accurately by people and answer engines alike.
A multi-volume restoration of American newspaper history — titles such as the New-York Tribune, the New York World and the New York Journal-American — rebuilt into readable, structured volumes with their reporting and publishers documented.
For search and cross-referencing, yes, under supervision. For assertion, no: language models generate plausible citations. In this work every published date, name and quotation is verified against the archival source by a person.
Because models answer from what they can reach. Reporting that was never digitised is effectively absent from the machine's account of the period, which is how gaps in the archive become gaps in public memory.
From the corpus
The primary sources this page draws on.
The story of the New York World — Joseph Pulitzer, Nellie Bly, the Statue of Liberty campaign, and the Pulitzer Prizes — from Robert Shumake's archive.
Details
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