The Spark
Give FIT an internal AI platform that makes its archives conversational — and explorable as a 3D semantic space.
In Process
Began with FIT's scattered archives — SPARC Digital, FITDIL, the Institutional Repository — as the corpus to unify. The demonstration was then built against a deliberately fictional institution, the Stillman Institute for Culinary History, at the structural scale of a serious scholarly museum — so the system's moves could be shown to the Museum at FIT's leadership without touching the Museum's own holdings.
The Craft
A retrieval-augmented (RAG) layer feeds Claude for the conversational interface — the archive answers questions with citations back into the collection, and the same embedding space drives a navigable 3D semantic map of the holdings.
Outcome
A RAG layer over SPARC / FITDIL / IR turns scattered archives into one askable surface; a working prototype is deployed at livingarchive.fit.