The National Register of Historic Places (NR) is a structured artifact of meaning-making that encodes disciplinary values linking architectural and cultural significance to wealth and stylistic distinction. In doing so, it systematically underrepresents vernacular, working-class, and the built environments of racially and ethnically marginalized communities. This paper uses artificial intelligence (AI) to examine how that meaning is constructed. We analyze the preservation record across three scales: a national dataset of 100,117 NR listings (1966–2025), a state-level profile of Illinois’s 1997 NR listings, and a close analysis of Lake Forest, Illinois, a community whose exceptional concentration of NR-listed estate architecture makes it an ideal site for examining how preservation significance has been defined and what it excludes. Two parallel AI methods are applied to eighteen Lake Forest nomination documents and their associated photographs. Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes nomination text to trace how preservation professionals connect buildings to cultural value; blind AI image analysis examines the same properties to assess how a model trained on cultural imagery constructs visual meaning independently. NLP analysis reveals a corpus dominated by architectural description, with social history, landscape, and labor systematically underrepresented. The visual analysis confirms and amplifies the nomination record’s class-based assumptions while reproducing the same omissions regarding labor, diversity, and community context. These findings inform debates about AI’s potential to audit existing listings and support nominations for underrepresented property types, while showing that without deliberate corrective design and policy reform, such tools are as likely to replicate the preservation system’s inequities as to repair them.
Rovner et al. (2026) studied this question.