Devon Okafor

PhD student · University of Michigan

Research

I build tools that help historians trace how terms for race shifted across colonial newspapers. I am currently evaluating retrieval methods on OCR-noisy archives from the Caribbean.

Before CS research

I studied history and worked in a public library digitization lab before starting my PhD.

Current fields

• Digital humanities
• Information retrieval

Other fields

• History
• Library science

The value of these perspectives

Digitization work taught me how much of archival meaning is lost before any model sees the text.