In UC Berkeley's Social Sciences Building, the voice and likeness of Black slave poet George Moses Horton is being recreated with augmented reality. Meanwhile, the history of Latinx sexuality and gender is the subject of a podcast by ethnic studies students. And a new narrative nonfiction book for Gen Zers by a history professor and his daughter is retelling the story of the Black Panther Party.
As policies backed by U.S. legislators across the country seek to erase the histories of marginalized communities through the banning of books and the falsification of historical events, Berkeley faculty and researchers are pioneering innovative projects to bring those accounts — often hidden and misunderstood — into the limelight.
And they're doing so to engage a new generation of Berkeley students, and in changemaking ways.
"Berkeley research that centers students and their diverse experiences aligns with our mission as a public-serving institution," said Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Dania Matos. "This is innovative scholarship that transforms campus for our students and transcends the greater public discourse as to what histories should be acknowledged and valued."
Reclamation through augmentation
Courtesy of Cecil Brown
Hip-hop artists like Jay-Z and Too Short may have something else in common besides being rap music legends, said Berkeley alumnus Cecil Brown, a senior lecturer. They're also lyricists indirectly impacted by a trailblazing Black writer, George Moses Horton, who was the first Black enslaved poet ever to be published.
Brown is now using artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) to painstakingly bring Horton, born into slavery in 1798 in North Carolina, back to life so others can know him and his talent.
In 2022, while he was a lecturer at Stanford University, Brown began delving into AR and AI technologies to understand their instructional possibilities. An accomplished writer in his own right, Brown said he turned to using the technology to center Horton, whose brilliance had been lost in the annals of history.
"I wanted to transport people back to the Antebellum South, when Horton was alive, and to reclaim that era of Black history by retelling it in his own words," said Brown.
Illustration by Midjourney
Aided by Southern author and playwright Caroline Lee Hentz, Horton's poems were first published in local newspapers in the late 1820s, and later, he produced a book of poems, The Hope of Liberty, in 1829. Horton hoped in vain that book sales would buy his freedom; but he was eventually freed after the Civil War. He continued to write poetry about the mistreatment of Black people in America until his death sometime after 1867.
Brown first collected all of Horton's poetry and archival images of him. To replicate Horton's appearance and voice, Brown researched Horton's bloodline and reached out to his living descendants to model an AI version of him, using the faces and voices of his living relatives.
Brown received funding for the project through a grant from Professor Cecil Giscombe, the Robert Hass Chair in English, and in collaboration with the UC Berkeley XR (Extended Reality) Community of Practice, which is sponsored by Berkeley's chief technology officer. The campus group supports Berkeleyans interested in using XR technologies for research and instruction.
UC Berkeley/ Sofia Liashcheva
Chris Hoffman, operations director at the Forum for Collaborative Research at the Berkeley School of Public Health, worked with Brown to assemble a small team of Berkeley design students and staff who eventually crafted an immersive exhibit about Horton.
Using new media storytelling tools, users can scan their smartphone devices over QR codes that narrate American history in the time of Horton via audio recordings that are enhanced by images of historical archives, events and figures. Users also can ask Horton questions about his life and listen to him recite his poetry.
"We are reclaiming our stories through his words and this digital manifestation of Horton," said Brown, "a man who should be remembered for his contributions to Black people and our history."
For Brown, the project is also about giving Black students access to these innovative technologies and to inspire them to pursue work in the STEM fields, which lack Black representation.
Graduate student Maria-Teresa Carmier, who is majoring in design innovation, helped Brown with an on-campus exhibit of the project last fall. She also created an immersive interactive storytelling experience for the audience by integrating voice-cloning technology with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for dynamic character interactions.
UC Berkeley/ Sofia Liashcheva
While Carmier no longer works on the project, she said she hopes to see an iteration of Brown's creation displayed in museums across the country, "especially where Black creativity thrives."
"This project really gave folks a way to interact with history in new ways and learn how technology could support that effort," Carmier said. "As a parent of two Black sons, at the event it was an especially proud mama moment to see my children learn about early Black creativity and find pride in being creatives themselves."
History's personal touch
For Berkeley faculty members Pablo Gonzalez and Harvey Dong, history can only be fully appreciated through a facilitation of visual and oral stories and experiences.
Their students, throughout the years, have benefitted from learning through that historical lens, producing engaging projects ranging from digital magazines that explore the hidden histories of Chinese American immigrants in California to in-depth podcasts that delve into vulnerable subjects, like Latino masculinity, to augmented reality tours that captured images of Black Lives Matter murals in Oakland before they were destroyed during the pandemic.
Courtesy of Pablo Gonzalez
Gonzalez, an ethnic studies lecturer, has schooled himself and his students since 2018 in the use of new and emerging digital tools to use for podcasts and AR. In 2020, after receiving a Berkeley Changemaker Curriculum Grant, he put those funds to use and created the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Scaffolding and Building Communities project, a student-led collaborative that uses podcasting and AR to amplify the voices and histories of marginalized communities.
The project also has been funded by a 2023 Berkeley Collegium Grant, given annually to campus projects that produce innovative research.
As part of the project, and in his Mexican and Central American history courses, Gonzalez asks students to record interviews with their parents about their families' histories in the U.S. Students then digitize family photos, letters, texts and audio recordings and thread them together to create augmented reality packages that narrate the stories of their lives — oral histories to pass down to future generations.
