The roles of Generative AI in enabling or disabling inclusive research and accessible cultural heritage

This PhD project combines unique expertise at The National Archives, Kew ('TNA') and the University of Roehampton to address the lack of diversity in AI-generated cultural narratives - particularly within 19th-century Black history - and the challenges for the discovery, cataloguing, and representation of diverse histories in an AI world. It will develop advice for effective and ethical AI use when researching, cataloguing, and presenting diverse histories, through an interdisciplinary methodology, and respond to key TNA strategic goals of access, impact and inclusive research practice. The focus will be on critically prompting mainstream commercial Generative AI tools and analysing how they answer questions on diverse histories and on how those histories are represented in answers more generally. It will draw on TNA collections, or materials that have cited/used them. Focussing on the ADM records and in particular evidence of Black British sailors, it will explore the extent of racial and geographical diversity within the 19th-century lower-decks, and consider new ways of approaching, accessing and highlighting global and diverse histories at TNA.