Assoc. Prof. Cary Gabriel Costello is part of team that won Mellon Grant for “LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project”

Tri-Cable Tonight

The UWM Libraries house one of the largest collections of historical and contemporary LGBTQ+ materials in Wisconsin and the Midwest, including a rich record of Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ communities. The LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project will use machine learning tools and data analysis and visualization to build and process text datasets extracted from a variety of AV materials in these collections, including collections of oral histories, local television news and radio broadcasts, and early LGBTQ+ community cable programming. The LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project will aid in better understanding the contents of these collections, and enhance discoverability of previously unrecognized topics, relationships, and patterns that shed light on the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Milwaukee and the Midwest.

Besides Prof. Costello, the team leaders include Dan Siercks, director of academic computing services in the College of Letters & Science, Ann Hanlon, senior academic librarian in the Golda Meir Library, and Marcy Bidney, assistant director of the Golda Meir Library.