Past to the Future: Intersections of Digitization, AI, and the Digital Humanities

Artificial Intelligence (AI) would not exist without digitization. Machine Learning requires massive amounts of training material with more data creating higher intelligence. Digital Humanities has reenergized historical research. Decades-long digitization programs continue to build a vast and forever growing digital corpus. Materials collected and digitized by libraries are the core of these new technologies and disciplines.

Bryan Benilous, Chief Consultant, Paperboy Digital Consulting, will discuss how digitization of material collected by libraries, feed AI and how AI is being used to improve digitization. He will explore challenges with the existing ecosystem (silos, paywalls, biases, copyright, etc.) and dig deeper into how Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is utilized and how it is being improved by AI. Various digital humanities resources, both open access and commercial, will be highlighted. Attendees will better understand their role in the Digital Humanities and learn about resources to participate. They will be inspired to consider how their content might contribute to the broader digital corpus in support of the Digital Humanities.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this webinar, attendees will:

• Understand the digitization landscape;
• Understand the impact of digitization strategies on the digital humanities;
• Understand how AI has developed using digitized collections; and
• Be inspired to contribute to the broad digital corpus.

Who Should Attend: Librarians and archivists interested in digitization; academic librarians and researchers will also benefit.

Presenter:

Bryan Benilous is an award-winning publishing leader supporting research and education for over 25 years. He is core innovator of noted programs including East View Global Press Archive, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, SIRS Issues Researcher, and more. Bryan has an M.A. in History from Florida Atlantic University and was named a 2021 Library Journal Mover and Shaker – Digital Developer. He is a certified PMP (Project Management Professional), certified in Pragmatic Marketing and trained in Design Thinking, Agile, and other business processes. He designs groundbreaking programs that aim to diversify content and broaden access, making for a more equitable research environment. Bryan is an advocate for Open Access initiatives and works to diversify the breadth of digital research content.