We are not alone - Incite at Columbia University

Archives are having a moment.

Might they provide a future revenue stream for journalism in an AI age? Perhaps — there’s certainly a lot of talk about their potential. But why they’ve suddenly become all the rage may be more telling about the future and how the journalism industry should see our role in it. And who we should be — metaphorically — getting in bed with.

Researching an archive used to involve time and tedium: a basic search interface on top, mountains of un-optimized and undigitized material underneath, sometimes requiring in-person visits to rifle through actual, physical boxes. Archives are dense, dusty (sometimes literally), and often challenging to navigate.

But archives hold immense value; the challenge was always finding the exact information you needed within a vast repository of unstructured sources. It just wasn’t economically feasible to build the systems to sift through that data.

Now it is.

Read more at (Re)Structured News.