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AI for Humanities
As part of our blog series, “Stories from the Research Trenches,” we often invite researchers and colleagues to share their personal experiences and opinions. In this blogpost our colleague Miara Fraikin, AI specialist at KU Leuven Libraries and lecturer in architectural history, shares her perspective on the role of AI in the humanities.
With the launch and rapid adoption of ChatGPT, (Generative) Artificial Intelligence is quite abruptly changing the ways we study, research, and work. Based on the research paper ‘Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI’ from Microsoft, media coverage quickly concluded that translators and historians were most likely to be replaced by AI, with respectively 98% and 91% of their tasks able to be taken over by (generative) artificial intelligence. In a blog published on historici.nl, I argued that AI can do a lot, but it can never replace a historian. Why? Read it for yourself here!
While historians won’t be replaced, the research from Microsoft does suggest that the work of historians will change. For those willing to embrace the new possibilities, this could well be a change for the better. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) are already well established, and their impact should not be underestimated. Instead of having to read all the published building accounts of Louis XIV searching for mentions of the word ‘chambre,’ a simple search of the document saved me at least a week’s worth of time during my own PhD research. While preparing an article, I used Transkribus and Copilot Chat to decipher an illegible word in a handwritten manuscript, which put the document in a completely new light. AI is also helping librarians, archivists, and museum professionals describe their collections more quickly and extensively, which in turn makes the historian’s research data more accessible. And look at the Studium.ai and NIKAW project to see the wealth of possibilities that researchers at KU Leuven are currently exploring for AI and humanities research.
In the future, long days spent in the archive – reviewing document after document, sometimes with no result – might not be as common. And while I understand that this is part of the charm of being a historian, imagine a future where AI enables us to delve into vast collections of historical data, uncovering historical phenomena on grander scales and in greater detail, with new techniques opening up new lines of inquiry. This is something to be excited about!
