Our take: In “Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.,” published on Active History, Jacob Polay, with Chloë Farr and Jessica Jack, argues that historians no longer need to rely on software built for other fields. Polay tested fifteen named entity recognition systems on early modern texts and found that common tools missed most entities or invented false ones. With help from an AI coding assistant, he then fine-tuned a small open model on data he tagged by hand. The result, EarlyModernNER, scored 82 percent against 67 percent for Gemini 3 Pro and runs on an ordinary computer. The post shows how individual historians can now build and share open tools shaped by their own historical judgment.
Editors’ Choice: Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.
