On Building a Gaza Social Media Archive

The AI, Teaching, and Scholarship series creates a forum for sharing ideas and exploring questions about the ways faculty are engaging with AI in their courses, scholarship, and creative work. The sessions are intended to highlight a range of experiences and perspectives, while generating dialogue that broadens awareness and understanding. The series aims to create opportunities for faculty to learn from one another as they navigate a rapidly changing educational and scholarly landscape.

The rapid disappearance of social media documenting the Gaza conflict presented an urgent challenge for preserving a record of an historically significant event. This session examines how one Colgate social scientist, working collaboratively with ITS and Library colleagues, is creating the Gaza Visual Social Media Archive (G-VSMA) through an iterative process of research, design, and software development. Together, the project brought AI into the development of the archive’s software, editorial workflow, and multilingual content analysis. The discussion will reflect on what this work suggests about the evolving role of AI in scholarly inquiry, research design, collaboration, and knowledge creation.

Lunch will be available for this session. Please register, so we can plan for an appropriate amount of food.