IN PERSON: This hands-on learning course connects 18th-century handwritten documents with 21st-century "machine-learning" tools. We will be examining selections from the High Court of Admiralty (HCA) records at the British National Archives, specifically, the Prize Papers (1700-1845). These are documents seized from captured ships during wartime, offering a previously unexamined look at North Carolina’s Colonial and postrevolutionary maritime history. This course will include workshops in reading historic documents, preparing descriptive commentary, and identifying areas for further research. Students will learn to read manuscripts while leveraging and training artificial intelligence models to automate transcription. Each class will involve working as a group to discover the meaning of documents. We will start with Google Gemini to do the AI transcription. We will visit the Rubenstein Library's special collections to get an introduction to archival practice in the context of this course. | Facilitated discussion, Active Skill Learning.
Max enrollment: 10.
Location: Judea Reform Congregation, 1933 W. Cornwallis Rd, Durham NC 27705
