Archive Fever & AI
About this Event
Archive Fever & AI
A convening on generative AI, archival practice, and found text
Archives built the large language models that are now reshaping how the past gets read, and generative AI is in turn changing how archives themselves get built, accessed, and used.
This one-day convening brings together scholars, artists, poets, and archivists working at the intersection of generative AI and archival humanities to ask: who builds the infrastructure, who controls access, what's preserved, and what gets lost or irrevocably altered in the process?
The day includes two moderated panel sessions and closes with a live sound performance by artist Victoria Keddie, built from archival and transmission-based material.
Schedule — Saturday, November 7, 2026
9:30–9:45 am — Welcome and announcements
9:45 am–12:15 pm — Session 1, The Archive Under Pressure
1:45–4:15 pm — Session 2, Found Text as Method
4:15–4:30 pm — Break
4:30–5:30 pm — Articulations, a live sound performance, Victoria Keddie
Session 1 — The Archive Under Pressure
Archivists and computational researchers on what machine learning does to historical collections: what’s gained, what’s lost, and who decides.
Computer Science and English, Johns Hopkins University His research focuses on how machine learning, particularly interpretable, unsupervised models, can support and inform traditional scholarship in the humanities, including literature, history, and archaeology. In 2025 he received a Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award.
College of Information, University of Maryland He helped define the field of Computational Archival Science, applying AI and big-data methods to make institutional archives accessible at scale.
Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder Maria Antoniak is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Information Science and is a member of the Boulder NLP Group. Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. Her research is in natural language processing and cultural analytics.
Deep Keep She is co-founder and CEO of Deep Keep, which builds infrastructure and community to preserve the world’s recent digital past. She was part of the original Flickr team, and in 2022 founded the Flickr Foundation (Flickr.org), where she created Data Lifeboat.
Moderator: Film and Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University Kyle Stine is Associate Program Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Film and Media Studies, and an Associate Teaching Professor, at Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of cinema and technology, he researches the limits of imaging. His writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, October, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and he is coeditor, with Axel Volmar, of Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
Session 2 — Found Text as Method
Poets and artists on using AI tools to surface archival and found voices rather than replace them, work that treats the machine's output, and its noise, as raw material for creation and investigation.
English, University of Maryland Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), a book of computational poetry longlisted for the National Book Award, and of Negative Money (Soft Skull, 2023). Their chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, written with a large language model, won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest.
Gates Scholar, Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge He is a researcher and artist working on the cultural and political questions of generative AI. His research reads the technical mechanisms of AI systems as cultural texts, with a particular focus on image-generation models. His films, such as Human Movie and Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise, have won awards and been exhibited internationally. He writes the newsletter Cybernetic Forests.
Architecture; AI and Society, University at Buffalo He is an artist, architect, and researcher whose work addresses contemporary entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power. His publications include There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2022) and Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press, 2011).
Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania / Spatial Sound Union She is an artist working with the instability of communication across sound, video, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on how meaning fractures and reconstitutes through noise, gesture, and interference. For over a decade she co-directed E.S.P. TV, a nomadic television studio for broadcast-based performance.
Moderator: Film and Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University Liz Flyntz is a designer, curator, and writer, and an Instructor in Film and Media Studies and the Program for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches media art and design. She is principal of Program, a Baltimore design practice. Her current research is on archives and generative AI; her project Rhythms of Inflation is a documentary libretto built entirely from the scattered archive of the Antioch-Columbia Pneumatic Campus (1970–1973), the first (and so far only) air-supported college building in the United States.
Location
Parkway Theatre
5 West North Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201
Hosted by the Film and Media Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University
Funded by the JHU Sesquicentennial Awards Program, Envisioning the Future Award
Agenda
🕑: 09:45 AM - 12:15 PM
Session 1: The Archive Under Pressure
Info: Archivists and computational researchers on what machine learning does to historical collections: what’s gained, what’s lost, and who decides.
🕑: 01:45 PM - 04:15 PM
Session 2: Found Text as Method
Info: Poets and artists on using AI tools to surface archival and found voices rather than replace them, work that treats the machine's output, and its noise, as raw material for creation and investigation.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:30 PM
Articulations, a live sound performance by Victoria Keddie
Info: “Articulations” is part of an ongoing series of live works examining how voice, machine, and architecture shape the material and temporal experience of sound. … Across its iterations, the series treats utterance as both a sonic and spatial event—an act that resonates within and beyond the boundaries of language, duration, and the architectures that contain it.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
