Transcription as Intellectual Labour: Transkribus, Slavery, and Archival Justice

We are transcribing documents relating to a Church of England-owned slave plantation on Barbados, which has become the subject of a reparative justice initiative. In this context, descendant communities in Barbados have called for better access to the relevant archival material. Our transcription project responds to these calls. This presentation focuses on the invisible labour performed by human transcribers who generate training data for AI models. Working in a reparative justice context, we have been confronted with the need to develop labour practices for our RAs that are reparative rather than extractive. Scholars of slavery have shown that enslaved people's intellectual labour was appropriated and rendered invisible by the plantation complex. We use this concept to acknowledge and credit the intellectual contributions made by our RAs. In this way, we address the troubling phenomenon described by Mary Gray and Siddharth Sidhu, whereby a narrative of "machine intelligence" disguises AI systems' reliance upon exploitative labour practices.