A team from the University of Washington has received a $403,833 Schmidt Sciences research grant to develop AI models that help contextualize how we remember historical figures.
“Toward a Multimodal Understanding of 250 Years of U.S. Government Documents,” is a three-year project with a research team from computer science, information science, literary studies and the history of science working together to take our understanding of cultural figures beyond the limitations of text searches. Using multimodal AI models to help process more than one type of information at a time, scholars will not only be able to find information through keywords, semantics and visual searches with this tool, but will also be able to identify visual content and textual mentions across 250 years of documents.
Access to these documents and data could help scholars connect specific examples to larger patterns previously too large to examine on their own.