Prof. Shankar Raman, professor of Literature, is leading a new MITHIC project, “Futures of the Digital Past: Artificial Shakespeares.” The project is funded through MITHIC’s Humanities Cultivation Fund.
In this Q&A, Raman discusses his motivation for pursuing this project with his collaborators and the next steps for their initiative.
Describe your MITHIC project
Generative AI pushes us to re-imagine our interactions with existing archives: What kinds of new information can we retrieve from these data collections? In what ways do these spur new research questions and creative possibilities? How is our relationship to archives changing? Artificial Shakespeares explores addressing such questions through a set of AI interventions into arguably the most famous domain of literary, cultural, and historical study worldwide: Shakespeare.
Artificial Shakespeares is grounded in a rare convergence: an internationally recognized humanities initiative devoted to Shakespeare and the intellectual environment of one of the world’s leading STEM institutions, MIT. The project brings together a broad archival and research ecosystem that includes the editorship of the field‑defining journal Shakespeare Studies, performance‑focused pedagogical modules, and Global Shakespeares, an open‑access digital archive of texts, films, theatrical recordings, and visual adaptations.
We seek to build a Shakespeare-specific LLM that can search and summarize texts, images, and video content from the archives; carry out richly contextualised analyses of films and performances captured on video; and connect with multilingual LLMs for both closed captioning and for moving seamlessly from one language to another.
Read more here: https://mithic.mit.edu/inside-mithic-artificial-shakespeares-with-shankar-raman/