What the machine does well
Degraded newsprint defeats naive OCR: broken serifs, bleed-through, skewed columns, and mixed typefaces on a single page. Modern vision models handle segmentation and character recovery far past the threshold where manual transcription becomes economically impossible.
- Column and article segmentation on complex broadsheet layouts
- Character recovery from foxed, torn, and low-contrast scans
- Typography matching for faithful visual restoration
- Cross-issue entity linking for people, businesses, and places
What the machine must not do
A model asked to 'clean up' a passage will silently rewrite history. The rule in this work is strict: the machine may recover characters that exist on the page and may not generate characters that do not. Any ambiguous passage is flagged for human reading, not filled in.
The Living Archive Series
The Living Archive Series comprises 69 restored American newspapers, covering cities from Atlanta to Albuquerque and moments from Gold Rushes to civil rights struggles. It includes Black-owned publications that large-scale commercial digitization passed over — which is precisely why they are thin or absent in the corpora that train today's models.
Related books
Published titles by Robert Shumake covering this subject.
The Miami News: The story of the Miami News and the Magic City — Julia Tuttle's founding, the land boom, Cuban exiles, and the Freedom Tower — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
The San Francisco Bay Guardian: The story of The San Francisco Bay Guardian (sanfranciscoguardian.news) — the fearless alt-weekly, muckraking journalism, and progressive San Francisco — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
St. Paul Dispatch News: The story of the St. Paul Dispatch (stpauldispatch.news) — Minnesota's capital, the Mississippi headwaters, the railroads, and the North Star State — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
The Oakland Tribune: The story of the Oakland Tribune (oaklandtribune.news) — the East Bay, the great port, the Tribune Tower, and a city of movements — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
Southern Voice: The story of Southern Voice (southernvoice.news) — Atlanta's LGBTQ newspaper, the fight for equality, and a community's chronicle — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
The Shreveport Journal: The story of The Shreveport Journal (shreveportjournal.news) — the Red River, the Ark-La-Tex, oil and cotton, and North Louisiana — from Robert Shumake's Living Archive Series.
Google Play
Continue reading
- AI bias and training data: why models get Black history wrong
Models answer badly about Black history and African diasporic religion mostly because the underlying sources are missing, undigitized, or outnumbered by secondary commentary — a data-layer problem that prompt engineering cannot repair.
- Retrieval-augmented generation over a 137-book corpus
Retrieval-augmented generation over a book corpus works when chunks preserve argument structure, every chunk carries provenance metadata back to a title and page, and the model is constrained to answer only from retrieved passages or decline.
- Ancestral intelligence: Ifá's 256 Odu as an information system
The 256 Odu of Ifá constitute a binary-addressed body of knowledge — sixteen paired positions producing 256 addressable states, each indexing verses, precedents, and prescriptions — which is structurally an information retrieval system built centuries before computing.