Tag: Chloe Farr
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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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From Field Notes to Metadata: Exploring OCR and Chandra for MLP Workflows
By Chloë Farr and Kate Fryer The Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) is a group of passionate researchers who work with historic and modern mountain photographs to document landscape change over time. Repeat photography is central to this work. By returning to the same locations where historic survey photographs were taken MLP researchers can create visual…
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Community Archives & Scholarship Commons: Notes from A Summer At UVic Libraries
By Lambert Heller, for the Kula Blog In 2025 I had the honor to be the first International Visiting Fellow at Kula: Library Futures Academy, a new initiative launched at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries. UVic sits on the beautiful south coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, with the Mearns Centre for Learning…
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AI Project of Kula Fellow and UVic Librarian featured in EurekAlert!
A new feature story in EurekAlert! — a nonprofit platform focusing on scientific news run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — highlights a joint research project of Kula Fellow Chloë Farr and UVic’s Digital Preservation Librarian Corey Davis, focusing on the use of AI to unlock historical newspaper archives held…
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Notes from a Library AI Research Visit at the University of Alberta
I spent the first two weeks of 2026 visiting the University of Alberta (UofA) Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC) for an informal exploratory period focused on knowledge exchange and relationship-building. The goal was to share Kula & UVic Libraries’ work integrating and teaching GenAI in academic library/archive contexts, learn from UofA’s staff, researchers, and students, and…
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Making Scanned Data Tables Usable with AI
Back in October 2025, Nick Rochlin, our Science and Data Librarian, sent me a folder of scans of data tables typed in the 1980s. A student had contacted Nick asking if there was an automated way to convert their paper data tables into a format that would allow for computational analysis. There didn’t seem to be…
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Exploring AI integrations in Libraries & Archives
I’m Chloë Farr, the Kula: Library Futures Academy Graduate Student Fellow in AI. I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Linguistics, and I am currently a PhD student in Computer Science at UVic. My background in humanities sometimes gives me some unique perspectives in Computer Science. Over the last few months, I’ve been deeply…
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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,…