Lighthouse: On Building a Trustworthy Digital Assistant for Exploring History with Civil Rights Archives

Artificial intelligence (AI), as a decision-support aid, provides new tools for studying history effectively using multimodal data, including text, images, and audio. We present, to our knowledge, the first digital assistant named Lighthouse–commonly called a chatbot–for exploring the Civil Rights period of the United States using data from South Carolina. From an AI perspective, the system’s novelty lies in its guiding design principles of (a) focusing on trustworthiness of content and (b) by modeling and reducing potential harm to users from generated answers.