Adler Zooniverse Awarded Schmidt Sciences Humanities And AI Virtual Institute Grant

Header Image: The Zooniverse team gathered at The University of Minnisota for the 2025 Zooniverse Team Meeting.

Written by Dr. Samantha Blickhan

This blog was originally posted on daily.zooniverse.org

We are excited to announce that Adler Zooniverse has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. HAVI supports groundbreaking work at the intersection of AI and the humanities, and you can read the announcement here, and learn more about the 23 projects awarded here. 

The Zooniverse team, led by project co-PI Dr. Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse Co-Director and Digital Humanities Lead), will work with researchers from University of California Santa Barbara (Dr. Jim Casey, PI), Penn State University (Dr. Chris Dancy, co-PI), University of Washington (Dr. Ben Lee, co-PI), and Lincoln University of PA (Dr. Tiffanie Smith, co-PI). Our project, “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives,” will focus on using crowdsourcing together with novel AI systems to unlock access to the early Black press, helping to create a searchable, digitized corpus of 19th-century newspapers published by historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, as well as developing new critical approaches for computing and interpreting the past.

As part of this work, we will create new, bespoke features for our Zooniverse mobile app, creating opportunities and tools for the public to engage with historical texts in a mobile environment. Until now, tools and workflows for historical transcription on Zooniverse have mainly been limited to participants working from a desktop or laptop computer, and we’re excited to bring these projects to a wider audience through our mobile app.

We will launch a public crowdsourcing project on the occasion of Douglass Day 2027. Douglass Day is an annual global transcribe-a-thon we run to celebrate the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass on February 14. In 2027, we will host our largest Douglass Day ever, inviting tens of thousands of volunteers of all ages to engage with these new mobile features, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the first Black newspaper.

This project will herald a new era of data-informed scholarly research on the Black press and Black history, thought, and culture. We’re so excited to get started, and hope you’ll join us for Douglass Day 2027! 

Learn More About Adler Zooniverse

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