Category: Fellows
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A Python Tool for Restoring Spatial Search to VLM Transcriptions
When Large Language Models (LLMs) began cleaning up optical character recognition (OCR) output, or when Vision Language Models (VLMs) bypassed OCR and transcribed page images directly, something improved for researchers but something else broke. The text itself became dramatically cleaner: proper reading order, accurate spelling, no hyphens fracturing words across line breaks (example: “Pythagoras” rendered…
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KULA Postdoctoral Fellow Awarded Hannah Arendt Fellowship
Kula: Library Futures Academy is pleased to announce that Nathaniel Brunt, VPRI Aspiration 2030 & Kula Postdoctoral Fellow, has received the prestigious 2026 Hannah Arendt Fellowship awarded by the German state of Lower Saxony and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The grant application was sponsored by German librarian Lambert Heller, Head of the Open Science…
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Josh Sendall
Josh Sendall promotes open knowledge, freely accessible libraries, talent development and empowerment, and equity, diversity, and inclusion as essential elements of healthy, resilient cultures and communities. He holds several national and regional leadership roles, including with Jisc (the UK’s digital, data, and technology agency for HE and FE), Academic Libraries North (ALN), and UKSG, where…
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Linnea Thorson
Young Canada Works Digital Heritage Research Assistant (2026) Linnea Thorson is a second year student in the Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies (MASLIS) program at the University of British Columbia School of Information. She is especially interested in archival studies and practice as they relate to human rights work,…
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Lambert Heller
International Visiting Research Fellow (2025) Lambert Heller is the head of the Open Science Lab at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in Hannover, Germany, which serves as the German National Library of Science and Technology. His work bridges traditional librarian and archival topics around preserving and distributing knowledge and other cultural heritage with advanced information…
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Nathaniel Brunt
VPRI Aspiration 2030 & Kula Postdoctoral Fellow Nathaniel Brunt (PhD) is a Canadian interdisciplinary scholar, documentarian, and educator whose work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. He is the Aspiration 2030 / UVic Libraries postdoctoral fellow and co-leads the Sersal Project as part of Kula’s Conflict Aftermath Digital Archives…
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Chloë Farr
Graduate Fellow in AI (2025- ) Chloë Farr is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Victoria and a graduate fellow with Kula: Library Futures Academy, where she develops open-source AI tools for optical character recognition and handwritten text recognition in GLAM institutions. Her work sits at the intersection of computational linguistics,…