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W e d n e s d ay, M a r c h 26, 2025
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1GN
Jan Risher LONG STORY SHORT
Balancing the mental load
STAFF PHOTOS BY CHRIS GRANGER
Archivist Joseph Makkos recently sorts through his extensive collection of old Times-Picayune newspapers.
AI ARCHIVIST
Creating digital database that is ‘a boon for public domain’ BY POET WOLFE
Staff writer
Joseph Makkos will tell you himself — he’s not a rich man. At first glance, his studio in New Orleans’ Central City is inconspicuous. It’s slender and two stories high with an auburn façade, squeezed between other flat-roofed buildings on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. Two window displays leading to the front door bear the patina of a collector’s space, showcasing rows of typewriters. Makkos, in a navy blazer and pigtails topped with a beige Tom Waitsstyle pork pie hat, opened the door to his studio on a recent, sunny Tuesday morning. During the tour, he walked past a printing press and tables littered with intaglio stamps. Manila papers are buried in red-capped tubes and garbage bags are scattered everywhere. Since 2013, Makkos has preserved tens of thousands of New Orleans newspapers, including The TimesPicayune — papers that date from 1888 to 1929. The papers were at one point owned by the British Museum, where they survived a Nazi bombing. After a shift in ownership, Makkos found the archives being offered on Craigslist for free. The enigmatic Ohio native has a long-standing kinship with print media and history. On YouTube, Makkos, 16 years younger, reads a poem assembled from a 1963 article while standing by a Royal typewriter at an open mic. For five years, he’s made use of his collection of over 20,000 records by DJ-ing throughout the U.S. and the United Kingdom. His stage name, “The Archivist,” comes as no surprise. Makkos is rich — rich with historic knowledge that the rest of New Orleans lacks. But he isn’t gatekeeping it. For years, he and his team of creatives, including collaborator Beau Ross and technology advisory Chris Galliano, have been working on an ambitious project that involves using artificial intelligence to create accurate depictions of New Orleans’ past. Makkos says the interactive database in the works is expected to be available in an app format that allows users to experience the city’s history,
Carnival coverage headlines on original Times-Picayune newspapers from 1925 are kept in an archive.
“There’s all these insane things that essentially just have been kept from us due to technological degradation.” JOSEPH MAKKOS, archivist including tours, AI videos and highresolution photos. The archivist believes the general ways history is taught limits the subject matter’s possibilities. “We read books. We hear podcasts. We watch YouTube videos. We watch movies, and you can go on a tour,” Makkos said. In fact, tourists stagger through the French Quarter every day, searching for a tour guide to chronicle the Lalaurie Mansion, Pirate’s Alley and Hotel Monteleone. Makkos noted that these walking tours can at times be in pursuit of entertaining visitors rather than sharing accurate accounts of the famous neighborhood’s past. His project will offer interactive tours based on archives and historical books. Without giving away too much detail before its launch, with certain features slated to come out by the end of the year, Makkos characterized the tour as a Pokémon Goesque feature in the immersive database. Searching through other websites that provide online archives, like NewsBank and Newspapers by Ancestry, involves inputting keywords, dates and locations that match the descriptions of an article. Makkos’ says
this database will work at a more rapid pace, answering users’ questions about New Orleans history with a model that’s similar to AI chatbots Grok and ChatGBT. Finding the answers to questions relating to history wasn’t always this easy. Creative works, including newspapers, published between 1923 and 1977 were not in the public domain after Congress extended its copyright protection in 1998, according to Duke University. They became accessible in the public domain again in 2019. “We are scanning at high res, and that’s like a boon for public domain,” Makkos said. “Because it’s like a whole new paradigm to that old information.” Makkos owns a German-made scanner that produces crisp and ornate photographs of newspapers compared to the pixelated, microfilmed ones that appear on NewsBank. In the 1950s and 60s, microfilm companies rose to fame, offering to take collections from institutions and capture microphotographs of the archives. But some of history was erased during this process, with microfilmers unintentionally cutting off sections of articles. They also used 50 ISO, a black-and-white film, Makkos said, even though color started appearing in newspapers in 1913. “There’s all these insane things that essentially just have been kept from us due to technological degradation,”
ä See DATABASE, page 3G
In the last few months, both of my 20-something daughters have initiated conversations that included the four magic words a mother waits for: “You were right, Mom.” They are in the early throes of figuring out adulting — and the energy it requires. They’ve discovered and discussed the shock of paying bills and making sure their cupboards and cabinets are stocked with all the things: enough food vs. too much food, clean sheets, a working vacuum, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, shampoo, salt and the list goes on and on. One thing that they will both admit is that their grocery shopping experiences go a little differently now that they are paying the tab. Our older daughter is rather quiet. At 23, Piper, our youngest, is the opposite of quiet. She is processing her adulthood transition by talking it through. Piper graduated from LSU last spring and joined Teach for America. She accepted a position teaching 11th grade math in Denver and moved there last summer. She calls me almost every afternoon on her 25-minute drive home, and I get a synopsis of her day. I consider the fact that we are having the conversations as a win. In those daily calls, I’ve listened to her process her move across the country, the responsibilities of starting a new job, figuring out health care, paying rent and making a car payment. So much new stuff at once has been a shock to her system — not to mention her teaching 70 17-year-old students about trigonometric functions, quadratics, statistics/probability and more. She and I have talked about what it means to “bear the mental load” of life in general and in a classroom — to be the one who has to recognize and initiate all the things need to happen, along with the energy required to keep track of it all. At 23, she is working to keep things in perspective, but she says “struggle” is a good word to describe some of her life these days. Getting to know her students and learning details of their lives has been humbling. Most days on her drive home she admits that she’s so worn out that all she wants to do is stay home and rest. She has realized the need to find a balance between pouring into her students, emotionally and academically, versus taking care of herself — a tricky tightrope walk, to be sure. “The process of recognizing the comfort my own life has been interesting,” she said. “Even with the difficulties I face, I’ve just never had to go through the challenges that a lot of the students I’m working with experience on a daily basis.” As she’s approaching the last few months of her first year of teaching, she recommends that all adults try teaching, even if it’s only a year. “Being humbled is a good thing,” she said. “One year of teaching really does the trick. This is an experience that sticks.” She remembers that I tried to warn her. “You told me that I wasn’t going to understand how difficult teaching is,” she said. “You
ä See RISHER, page 3G