Colonial North America: Event Series

Tuesday, April 6: 11:00am-12:30pm
Welcome and Keynote address: Digital Access and Making Early America Vast

Welcome

Martha Whitehead, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian; Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Keynote Speaker

Karin Wulf, Director, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History, William & Mary

The Genesis and Impact of an Idea

Claire DeMarco, Interim Head of Information and Technical Services; Associate Director for UX and Strategy

Franziska Frey, Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor for University Library Strategy, Planning and Assessment, Harvard Library

Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, University Archivist, Harvard University Archives

Suzanne Wones, Associate University Librarian for Discovery and Access

Wednesday, April 7: 11:00am-12:30pm
Panel discussion: Beyond the Reading Room — Using Digitized Manuscript Collections in New Contexts

One central effect of digitization has been to effectively remove the walls of reading rooms in archives and libraries. Researchers anywhere in the world can have incredible volumes of cultural heritage materials delivered to them instantaneously, without the need to travel or negotiate access. The unprecedented expansion in access has been heralded as one of digitization’s great triumphs—but who is using this access?

• What aims and objectives of individuals and institutions are supported by this accessibility?
• What communities do these materials serve?
• How are issues of ownership and stewardship challenged or changed by digitization?
• What new contexts for encountering these materials are created by digitization?
• Can digitized manuscript collections drive innovative research methods?
• Can we learn anything new about colonial America from this project?
• How is the experience of doing digital research different?
• Can there be too much available content?

Panelists

• Stephen Curley,
  Director of Digital Archives, The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
• Zachary Nowak,
  Lecturer on History, Harvard University
• Christopher Parsons,
  Associate Professor of History, Northeastern University
• Peter Pellizzari,
  Managing Director and Co-Founder, Threadable Books
• Karin Wulf,
  Director, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History, William & Mary

Moderator 

Vincent Brown,
Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Thursday, April 8: 11:00am-12:30pm
Panel discussion: Seeing at Scale — Artificial Intelligence and Access to Manuscript Materials

The Colonial North America at Harvard Library project alone makes available for research nearly 700,000 pages of manuscript material. Understanding and engaging with the content of that much material is beyond the scope of any individual person, but there are at least two ways to engage with these collections at scale: crowds and computers. Crowdsourcing efforts focused on transcription and analysis have proven effective but require significant management and oversight. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) offers another way to see and analyze large volumes of materials. While our technology for machine-reading printed text is well established, handwritten materials—especially from different eras, in different languages, and in varying hands—are at the center of cutting-edge projects that are looking to allow us access to the contents of large collections at scale. While these projects promise to open up our digitized collections to new research questions and methodologies, AI/ML brings with it potential pitfalls as well and questions to address.

• What is the state of the art of using Al and machine learning to organize, interpret, transcribe, and interact with manuscript material?
• What issues—technical, ethical, practical—are unique to computational approaches to the problem of access and description at scale?
• Manuscripts from the colonial era are marked by their inconsistency of hand and multilingual nature. How are these features being addressed?
• What are the potential points of convergence with crowdsourcing methods and computational methods?

Panelists

• Noelani Arista,
  Associate Professor and Director of Indigenous Studies Dept. of History and Classics (Kanaka Maoli), McGill University
• Tom Blake,
  Content Discovery Manager, Boston Public Library
• Samantha Blickhan,
  Humanities Lead, Zooniverse and Co-Director Zooniverse team, Adler Planetarium, Chicago
• Matt Cook,
  Digital Scholarship Program Manager, Harvard Library
• Donatella Firmani,
  Assistant Professor Engineering Department, Computer Science and Automation, Roma Tre University
• Maxime Gohier,
  Professeur Département des lettres et humanités, Université du Québec à Rimouski (Professor of History, Dept. of Letters and Humanities, University of Quebec at Rimouski)
• Jean-Francois Palomino,
  Direction de la recherche et de la diffusion des collections patrimoniales, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (Map Librarian and Coordinator, Dept. of Research and Dissemination of Heritage Collections, National Library and Archives of Canada)

Moderator

Stu Snydman,
Associate University Librarian and Managing Director, Library Technology, Harvard Library

A Special Close from American Repertory Theater

We’ll close out our symposium with Diane Paulus and Jeffrey Page, Co-Directors of an upcoming American Repertory Theater production, a bold, new, re-envisioning of the Tony-Award-winning musical that premiered in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, 1776. Diane and Jeffrey will speak briefly about what 1776 the show is communicating to its audience and what 1776 the year and the event continues to communicate to us hundreds of years later. They will introduce a clip from the multi-media conversation 1776: The Audacity to Exist.