Teaching and Scholarship Hub

The past year brought archives both AI-powered breakdowns and breakthroughs. At the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the breakdowns included server crashes from LLM bots crawling its websites, and federal funding terminations tied to ChatGPT-assisted review of projects. The breakthroughs were equally significant: accurate text recognition, structured data extraction, and the ability to segment page scans into headlines, news stories, and advertisements — advances that have surfaced new patterns in the histories of film and theatre. Hoyt, who directs the Center and the Media History Digital Library, shares examples from both columns and what they mean for cultural heritage organizations.