Amalia S. Levi, PhD

"the essence of AI colonialism — the extraction of difficult, low-paid labor from the Global South for profit in the West."

📚Publication day!📚 Today, @routledgebooks.bsky.social published my PhD book. It's available to order, and it is also open access thanks to NWO. So, you can read or download it for free! Interested? See: www.routledge.com/Silver-Spice...

📢 Now out in the world: Immaterial and Material Archives in the Caribbean: New Sources and Approaches, co-edited by yours truly together with and Raphael Dohardt and @teresagoeltl.bsky.social Offered open access thanks to funding from @dependencybonn.de . www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Chris Kelty's new book, now available (!!!) is stellar and unconventional. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Just published! New co-authored article in the edited collection Libraries, Archives and Collective Grief. Its title: "The Past(s) We Access Online: Ethical Challenges of Digital Archives." Editors: @kpalex91.bsky.social & @librarianchef.bsky.social bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/libraries-ar...

Just published! New co-authored article in the edited collection Libraries, Archives and Collective Grief. Its title: "The Past(s) We Access Online: Ethical Challenges of Digital Archives." Editors: @kpalex91.bsky.social & @librarianchef.bsky.social bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/libraries-ar...

Which was the premise of Jurassic Park 🙃

We've been getting a lot of questions about how the Internet Archive digitizes books. The short answer: page by page, by hand. You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it. Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/m...

Really worthwhile CFP f/ Computational Humanities Research on "Peripheries," inviting work that uses data-driven approaches to recovering marginalized, lost voices in the cultural record/archive & what's been lost through processes of mass corpus digitization: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Archival research is rarely about what you really seek. It's about all those lives that you encounter along the way, some as simple mentions in mundane records, others whose name resists the enclosure of neat tables and is scribbled outside, and yet others who resist capture on paper thrgh silence.

We have published a new collection of advertisements about apothecaries and medicines in 18th c. Bridgetown, Barbados. dloc.com/collections/... More information in the thread. 1/

📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.

The worst depiction of an archivist in media is the archivist in Minas Tirith who brings FIRE into the record store. The best depiction of an archivist in media is Brother Armbruster in A Canticle for Leibowitz, who absolutely Gets It™

🤬 You do not "fill the gap" in archives. You ask *why* the gap is there in the first place. That is where the real information resides. Also: LLMs train on digitized materials. Do you have any idea how little has been digitized? LLMs train on a *sliver* of the human past and human knowledge.

On this #InternationalArchivesWeek I'd like to repost this absolute gem by the @bucksarchives.bsky.social!

For #InternationalArchivesWeek, consider how digitized copies of manuscripts can preserve access to a manuscript's contents, provide a record of ownership if the object is removed, and provide access to cultural heritage if a community is displaced. Learn more: hmml.org/stories/reversal-of-fates

The more things change, the more they stay the same... Nice study that essentially corroborates Michel Rolph Trouillot's silencing framework. The diagram embodies all silencing processes (fact creation/assembly/retrieval/retrospective significance), a bleak reminder on how power operates today.

This data article about fugitive adverisements in eastern #Caribbean newspapers is the result of years of work by the team at @inthesamesea.bsky.social Read it at scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/jsdp/ar... and find the dataset at enslaved.org - an open-access research resource!

I'm excited this is out! We spent countless hours building the database in a way that will hopefully be usable for other scholars and students of fugitivity in the Caribbean. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/msup/jsdp/ar...

Beautiful essay, and...recordkeeping galore in the thread. 😍 It took a lot of effort (and intention) for information to 'travel' to us today. #histarchives

🔥🔥🔥

⬇️ I can't repost this 🔥 thread about the fragility of humanity's digital memory enough.

an incredibly important project by Connie Walker — most Canadians don't know that the government has an archive of 38,000 residential school survivor testimonies, which are slated to be destroyed next year www.cbc.ca/news/indigen...

"Microscopy in PRTD allows us to investigate materiality on a new scale, shifting our perspective so that we can continue to check our assumptions, help preserve the collections, and answer questions about materiality."

We need more historians because history is one of the most powerful forms of knowledge. Just ask any autocrat why they want to control it! #TalkAboutHumanities

"AI research assistant" researching data that is incomplete biased skewed missing excluded obscured extracted from collections that were already a partial, skewed view of the past (unless one really interrogates the sources of the data). What could go wrong...

The University of Virginia Archival AI Protocol governs "how artificial intelligence systems may access + use arch collections." Core rules: - item-level provenance + attribution - institutional control - donor + community responsibilities #ai #archives libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...