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Princeton postdoc Happy Buzaaba. Photo by Matthew Raspanti, Office of Communications.
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Millions on the African continent can’t fully benefit from the AI revolution. This Princeton course aims to change that.
In a new story by Jamie Saxon, Princeton's Office of Communications features "Teaching Computers to Understand African Languages," a new Freshman Seminar taught by CDH/African Language Technologies Postdoctoral Research Associate Happy Buzaaba.
As the AI revolution transforms the digital world, millions of people on the African continent cannot tap its full promise because the languages they speak aren’t built into the large language models that drive services like ChatGPT. A Princeton postdoc and a new course he devised is focused on how to change that.
Happy Buzaaba's research as a data engineer is centered on introducing more African languages into LLMs. There are over 7,000 languages in the world today, he said, and around 2,000 of these are spoken on the African continent. Yet not more than 20 African languages are currently represented in commercial LLMs, and there are efforts from both academia and industry to increase this number.
“People shouldn’t need to switch to another language for them to interact with technology,” Buzaaba said. "For these African communities, it's not just about the lack of daily convenience. It's also a barrier for them to enter and interact with the digital world.”
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Douglass Day is Friday, February 14! Celebrated on Frederick Douglass's chosen birthday, Douglass Day is an annual event where volunteers transcribe important documents in Black history to make them more accessible online to researchers, students, and interested people everywhere. This year's event features the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress.
We are proud to co-sponsor two Douglass Day events:
- Stop by a Transcribe-a-Thon from noon to 3 p.m. at one of two locations: the Community Room at Princeton Public Library (registration requested); or the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Skillman, NJ (registration required). A limited number of computers will be available at the library, so please bring a laptop if possible. Those attending at the museum will need to bring a laptop as none are available on site.
- Drop by the Lobby of Firestone Library at Princeton University from 2 to 4 p.m. for a pop-up Special Collections Showcase featuring objects by and about Frederick Douglass and other significant works featuring African American perspectives.
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February 19 at 1:00 p.m.
Annual CDH Graduate Colloquium
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February 22 from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Envision 2025 Conference
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February 25 at 5:00 p.m.
Textpocalypse, or the Culture Logic of Slop
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SAVE THE DATES
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March 18 at 5:00 p.m.
Ted Chiang: The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art
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April 3 at 5:00 p.m.
Nnedi Okorafor
Science fiction and fantasy novelist
📚 Read About the Event
🗓️ Add to Calendar
→ Register Now
Supported by the Belknap Fund in the Humanities Council and co-sponsored by The Africa World Initiative, the Program in African Studies, the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium, and Princeton Public Library.
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Opportunities:
For Graduate Students
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📢 Call for Grad Fellows! The CDH Graduate Fellowship welcomes PhD students into the community of Princeton digital humanities researchers and provides the mentorship and support necessary to begin employing computational and data-driven methods in their work. Over the course of one semester, fellows will articulate research questions and identify goals for small-scale, standalone projects or for components of larger projects (e.g. a dissertation). As a cohort, fellows will explore tools, methods, and best practices that will benefit them throughout their careers. No prior technical skills are required, but a familiarity with the landscape of digital humanities, cultural analytics, media theory, or data science is a plus. Applications for the CDH Graduate Fellowship are open through March 31, 2025. Apply now. |
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Have you considered our Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities? Through coursework, original research, and engagement in a colloquium series, certificate students will expand their methodological toolkit and build a community of praxis as they learn about cutting-edge theories, methods, and computational approaches transforming fields from medieval history to media studies.
Want to know more? Contact Grant Wythoff with questions. You're also invited to the Annual CDH Graduate Colloquium on February 19 at 1 p.m. at the CDH (B Floor, Firestone Library). Three graduate students pursuing the certificate will present their work.
About to defend or a recent Ph.D.? ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships "place recent humanities PhDs with nonprofit organizations committed to promoting social justice in their communities." The deadline is March 12.
If you want to learn about DH beyond Princeton, apply for a Graduate Training Grant to support your endeavors.
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For Our Broader Community
Do you work for a U.S. nonprofit academic, research, or cultural heritage organization? Are you concerned about vulnerable collections? "Recordings at Risk is a national regranting program administered by CLIR to support the preservation of rare and unique audio, audiovisual, and other time-based media of high scholarly value through digital reformatting." Apply by April 14.
This summer, the University of Utah College of Humanities and Marriott Library are hosting a three-week summer institute on AI and the Humanities. Both graduate students and higher education professionals are eligible to participate. Apply by March 5!
As always, CDH staff are available to consult with Princeton faculty, staff and students on a variety of DH research and professional development questions. Sign up!
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Links We're Digging Lately:
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Congratulations to the recent recipients of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Digital Advancement Grants! So proud to see former CDH Postgraduate Research Associate Sean Fraga (USC) among the awardees!
Lead RSE Rebecca Koeser shared this survey from DHTech, an ADHO interest group. If you do technical DH work, DHTech would love to hear from you!
Faculty Director Meredith Martin directed us to this post by Eryk Salvaggio on AI and recent government developments. "It's clear to me that Musk and DOGE will embrace a shift in how we use AI outputs," Salvaggio writes. "This will move AI outputs from prescriptive—recommending a course of action, based on an analysis of data, such as flagging an insurance claim for review—to autocratic: a singular source of authority, where the text it generates becomes directly actionable as a decision without human intervention."
In other concerning news, datasets from Data.gov are being deleted. Affected departments and agencies include: the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you need something lighter after reading those, here's SNL's take on AI from a few weeks ago.
And as we approach Valentine's Day, a recommendation from Meredith: "Is the love song dying?"
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The CDH Newsletter template was designed by Kate Carpenter, Princeton PhD student in the History of Science.
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