Campus Currents

By Dylan Pichnarcik Publications Intern

In the digital age artificial intelligence is being used as a tool by academics such as English Professor Bart Brinkman, who spent a sabbatical working with code, periodicals, and historical records for his project “AI in crisis: Rag for Researching ‘A Record of the Darker Races.’” which he presented in the Center for Inclusive Excellence at a Faculty symposium on Oct. 27.

Brinkman said he used periodicals such as newspapers and magazines to support his work because “they help us to understand cultural history as it was developing day-to-day.”

He added periodicals are used as “vehicles for literary texts. Poems for example, in their moment, they might reflect and even intervene in political moments.”

Brinkman said he uses these materials and connects them with one another to see how historical moments and ideas “fit together.”

He said he used artificial intelligence to sift through these materials. To do so he used a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

RAG is used to improve Large Language Models, which is a category of “deep learning models trained on immense amounts of data, making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other types of content to perform a wide range of tasks,” according to the International Business Machines Corporation website.

Brinkman says RAG makes answers provided by AI more accurate and trustworthy.

To facilitate his research Brinkman used a grant given to him by the University to purchase a Graphics Processing Unit, which is used to facilitate AI’s ability to process information.

He said using a Graphics Processing Unit is often cheaper and more environmentally efficient than cloud-based processors.

Brickman’s lecture was part of a faculty symposium sponsored by DICE titled “Kindling Knowledge: Technology Lighting the Way to Inclusion,” and also featured a presentation from Dr. Rachel Avard on how 3D-printed molecular models bring biology to life, enhancing comprehension for all learners —especially those with learning differences, non-native English speakers, and students with disabilities.