AI, holograms help museums tackle Holocaust, slavery

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https://www.axios.com/2023/08/27/ai-holograms-vr-museums-racism-slavery-antisemitism

AI, holograms help museums tackle Holocaust, slavery​

• Russell Contreras, author of Axios Latino

Holocaust witness Aaron Elster's hologram is displayed at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Illinois. An interactive exhibition allows Holocaust witnesses to share their stories via hologram and AI. Photo: Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Museums that focus on racial violence and antisemitism have begun using holograms, artificial intelligence and virtual reality to allow visitors to have simulated "conversations" with Holocaust survivors and hear the words of enslaved people.

Why it matters: The use of technology such as generative AI to create immersive displays is aimed at fighting bigotry — and comes amid rising concern that AI also can fuel racism by amplifying bias from human-generated content on the internet.

Zoom in: The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, Ill., and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Ala., are among the institutions aggressively deploying new technology to vividly tell harrowing aspects of history.

How it works: At the Illinois museum, holograms of actual Holocaust survivors and witnesses can respond to questions from visitors.

• A museum employee feeds the questions into a computer, which then uses a tailored AI system that develops an answer, generates audio sounding like the survivor's voice, and creates a video of them image "speaking."
• The holograms can answer questions ranging from whether they believe in God to what they think about genocide, said Kelley Szany, the museum's senior VP of education and exhibitions.
• If a visitor asks a question the system can't answer, it might have the hologram acknowledge that it doesn't know — but then eventually it "learns" an answer after gathering more information from the cloud.
• "The system gets smarter with each question," Szany said. "If they might not have an answer at the moment, they're going to find it."

A period barbershop comes to life with holographic barbers at the Greenwood Rising History Center, a museum dedicated to telling the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Photo: Russell Contreras/Axios

Alabama's Legacy Museum — located on a site where enslaved people once were sold — takes a different approach.

• It features holograms of actors portraying enslaved people, using their words from saved writings or testimonies in oral histories.
• The holograms are activated when visitors get close to a reconstructed holding cell.
• The holograms sing, ask for missing children or describe the horrors of captivity. They don't respond to questions.

What they're saying: "The concept is to get closer to history, get closer to the people, get closer to the stories, get closer to the experience," said Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI runs the Legacy Museum.

• Stevenson said the museum plans to open a site later this year to engage people with some of the "artifactual aspects of enslavement" through technology.

• "(The) technology transports the viewer, or the individual, into that kind of power of place, of presence to the sites where these atrocities occurred," Szany said. "It's a different level of understanding."

Also: The Greenwood Rising History Center, a museum that tells the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, uses holographic barbers in a re-created period barbershop.

• The holographic barbers mimic cutting hair while a visitor sits in a period barber chair as the holograms talk about the politics of the day and racism in Tulsa.
• In the middle of the "haircut," smoke appears in the room to give a feeling to the visitor about the riot outside, where the exhibit about the massacre continues.

A scene from the VD film, "Escape to Shanghai," from the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Photo: Courtesy of the museum.
What's next: The Illinois museum just launched three new VR films, which will screen through October.

• One of them, "Letters from Drancy," is making its world debut at the Venice International Film Festival.
• The films used computational GPS and AI to superimpose historic photos on present-day VR footage as survivors tell their stories.

 

[DEAD7]

Thats dope...

 

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for those who don't know there are audio recordings of former slaves speaking about their experiences.

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Stories, Songs and Memories | Podcasts | Library of Congress

Oral histories and interviews with African Americans who endured the hardships of slavery. These recordings document the first-person accounts of several individuals whose life experiences spanned the period during and after slavery. The podcasts are drawn from several collections in the...

www.loc.gov

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/afc/afc1940003/afc1940003_afs03974/afc1940003_afs03974a.pdf

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About this Collection | Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-two interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing...

www.loc.gov

About this Collection​

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-two interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.

All known recordings of former slaves in the American Folklife Center are included in this presentation. Some are being made publicly available for the first time. Unfortunately, not all the recordings are clearly audible. Although the original tapes and discs are generally in good physical condition, background noise and poorly positioned microphones make it extremely difficult to follow many of the interviews. It is important to note, that an additional 2300 non-audio interviews with ex-slaves are available online: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. The contextual and interpretive material accompanying those interviews are often equally useful for understanding the recordings in this presentation.

Three of the recordings presented here were made for the Commonwealth of Virginia between 1937 and 1940 by Roscoe E. Lewis in affiliation with the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Another ten recordings are part of a 1300-disc collection donated to the Library by the American Dialect Society in 1984. Five of these interviews were recorded by Lorenzo Dow Turner in 1932 and 1933 in the Gullah areas of South Carolina and Georgia. The remainder were recorded by Archibald A. Hill and Guy S. Lowman in Virginia from 1934 to 1935.The remaining thirteen recordings were made by a number of different fieldworkers. The earliest came from a 1935 recording expedition to Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas by Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle. Their goal was to collect stories and music from African Americans in these areas. In 1940, John A. Lomax, who had recently been appointed honorary curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song, and his wife Ruby T. Lomax conducted interviews in Texas. These were followed by recordings made in 1941 by Robert Sonkin (in Alabama), and by John H. Faulk (in Texas) with support from a Rosenwald scholarship and the Library of Congress. In 1941, as part of a joint venture between the Library of Congress and Fisk University, Charles S. Johnson, Lewis W. Jones, John W. Work, and Alan and Elizabeth Lomax conducted interviews in Mississippi. Hermond Norwood, a Library of Congress engineer at the time, recorded an interview in 1949 in Maryland. The most recent interviews were conducted by Elmer E. Sparks in 1974 (in Texas) and 1975 (in Florida).

Efforts were made to collect biographical information about the interviewees and interviewers. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, only a small amount of information was found about the former slaves. A book and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were written about Charlie Smith, who lived to be 137. Fountain Hughes was interviewed by the Towson, Maryland, Jeffersonian in 1952 when he was 101. Transcripts of WPA interviews with Samuel Polite and Dave White and with Billy McCrea's brother are available, as are photographs and field notes related to several former slaves. However, for most of the ex-slaves, it is their interviews that provide the most complete information about them. More information is available about the people who conducted the interviews; summaries are found in Biographies of the Interviewers.

The recordings in this online collection provide an opportunity for linguists to examine the development of Black English and the transformation of language over time. Transcriptions of recordings received from the American Dialect Society are available for the first time in this presentation as are transcriptions of several other previously published interviews, including those made for the book The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary, edited by Guy Bailey, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1991) and appear with slight modifications in this presentation. American Folklife Center staff transcribed the remaining recordings. The transcripts, for the most part, are presented in standard English; however, as the audio tracks attest, the speakers all render their stories in a variety of dialects that reflect their heritage. Recordings that suffer from poor audio quality have gaps in their transcriptions, but even in those cases, the transcriptions are a useful tool for following and understanding the interviews.
Twenty-four songs (or song fragments) are included in the recordings. Many of the songs are difficult to identify because folk melodies and lyrics tend to change over time. Please note that this presentation was formerly called Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories.

 

[Secure Da Bag]

Now we're using AI the proper way.

This is amazing. Seeing a near-real person and interacting with them is gonna be

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

People are going to verbally abuse them.

 

[inndaskKy]

This is just a shiny downgrade of real education. People reading less and less and critical thinking is at an all time low. B-b-b-but the kids can talk to a hologram now.