Location: Sarratt Cinema, Sarratt Student Center, 2301 Vanderbilt Pl, Nashville, TN 37240|
Quantum Potential is a collection of wild but precise portraits of the scholars, scientists and students at Vanderbilt University who are finding new ways to understand the world—and through understanding, change it.
Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, has built the Slave Societies Digital Archive, the world’s most extensive collection of historical records that document the lives of Africans in the Atlantic World. Landers and her team are using data science and machine learning to extract detailed information from more than 700,000 digital images of documents, some dating back as early as the 16th century. The result? The singular repository for historical and genealogical records of an estimated four to six million individuals that until now have been lost to history.
Watch Landers’ Quantum Potential portrait and partake in a deeper discussion with Landers and Jad Abumrad, the VU faculty member, NPR’s Radiolab and Dolly Parton’s America podcast creator, MacArthur genius and Peabody award winner behind the series.