On Human-AI Collaboration

The Research

This digital exhibition is the product of scholarly research conducted by human researchers. Every historical argument, archival discovery, theoretical framework, and interpretive claim presented here emerged from months of work in archives, libraries, and databases—reading colonial documents, postcolonial scholarship, and the words of those who resisted categorization.

The questions this exhibition asks—and the answers it proposes—belong entirely to its human authors.

The Collaboration

The code that renders this exhibition was generated with the assistance of generative AI (Claude, developed by Anthropic). This was a deliberate choice: to use emerging tools while maintaining transparency about their role.

We view this as a collaboration, not a delegation. The AI served as a technical assistant—translating human vision into functional code—while the intellectual and creative labor remained with the researchers.

Why Transparency Matters

In an exhibition about how colonial regimes produced knowledge—classifying, naming, and categorizing according to imperial logic—we believe it is essential to be transparent about how this exhibition itself was produced.

AI tools are not neutral. They are trained on data that carries historical biases, including colonial ones. By acknowledging AI's role in our workflow while clearly delineating its limits, we aim to model a critical and accountable use of these technologies in digital humanities scholarship.

The archive speaks. The interpretation is ours.