Ben Brumfield and Sara Carlstead Brumfield: AI, Accessibility, and Library Archives
- Cecelia Stokes
- Sep 16
- 2 min read
Season 3 Episode 1
Guest Names: Ben Brumfield and Sara Carlstead Brumfield
Interviewer Names: Joshua Calhoun and Sarah Marty
Recorded on Date: June 3, 2025
“Archives are the antidote to large language models because the individual items that are in archives…haven't been smoothed over by the statistical sampling that you get with AI.”
- Sara Carlstead Brumfield
In this first episode of our third season, we talk to software engineers and old-book-enthusiasts Ben Brumfield and Sara Carlstead Brumfield, the power-couple duo who founded From the Page, a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents. Prior to FromThePage, Sara spent 17 years as a software engineer with IBM. She holds eight technical patents. She has a BA in Computer Science and the Study of Women and Gender from Rice University. Ben spent eleven years leading software development teams building fundraising and constituent engagement solutions for non-profit clients at Convio, Inc. He has presented on the intersection of technology, crowd-sourcing, and digital editions at the American Historical Association, Society of Southwestern Archivists, Digital Humanities, the American Library Association and SXSW. He has a BA in Computer Science and Linguistics from Rice University.
We spoke with them about the idiosyncrasies of working with archival documents, the technological challenges of making metadata accessible while staving off poorly behaved bots that crash library sites in their quest for more training data, how technology changes the ways we interact with and engage archival work, and how AI can increase accessibility to these documents.
After listening, check out some of the museums and From the Page collaborators mentioned in this episode: the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Tennessee and the US Holocaust Museum. For a deeper dive into “seductive plausibility” and larger conversations about archives, libraries, and AI, listen to the keynote address from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Program Officer for Public Knowledge Dr. Patricia Hwse at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, “Reigniting to Reimagine: Memory Work, Stewardship, and Social Justice.”
To learn more about some of the researching tools mentioned in this episode, check out Transkribus (a software utilizing AI to enable greater accessibility to archival documents), and Whisper (an AI software which transcribes audio).
Finally, learn more about Holding History’s own intergenerational work with historic handwritten documents at our Transcribathon event, where we took part in the National Park Service's citizen archivist initiative to transcribe thousands of Revolutionary War pension documents.
You can find a transcript of the episode here:
Wherever you find the Holding History Podcast, please like, subscribe, and provide feedback. Use the comment section below, or contact us at holdinghistory@wisc.edu with questions or suggestions. Thanks for listening!
Comments