My final project is on the representation of Black athletes but more specifically, the digital humanities question is “How accurately do LLMs represent the Black athletes who integrated University of Alabama sports, and are lesser-known figures more likely to be erased or distorted than the famous narratives around them?” The digital method that I am going use is data analysis. However, to elaborate more, I am going to look up well-known Black Alabama athletes and lesser-known ones from 1954- 1968, then ask three LLMs to give me information on their careers and the events they attended. Then fact checking the information that it gives me by going through Alabama digital archives. I am evaluated which LLMs give me fake information, or what we refer to in class as hallucinations.

I chose to focus on the period from 1954 to 1968 because it spans the heart of the civil rights movement, from the Brown v. Board of Education decision to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the passage of the Fair Housing Act. I wanted to explore whether representation shifted during these years as a result of the struggle for civil rights. Did growing public pressure, protest, and legal victories lead to more frequent or more respectful portrayals of Black Americans? Or did backlash and resistance to change cause that representation to diminish?

For four years, I stepped onto the wrestling mat and looked around at a sport where I rarely saw anyone who looked like me. Wrestling has long been dominated by white athletes, and match after match, tournament after tournament, the absence of Black wrestlers was impossible to ignore. It hurt to feel like an exception in a sport I loved. That feeling is what drew me to this topic. It also made me wonder whether this imbalance was new or had deep roots in a history most people never talk about.