June 15, 2026 – June 16, 2026 | University of Luxembourg
The Eighth Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History will revolve around Artificial Intelligence in the historical disciplines. Generative AI has emerged as a transformative tool in historical research, serving as a method to answer historical questions, a means to streamline historians’ workflows, or even a subject of methodological and epistemological reflection itself. Even though its roots stretch back decades, generative AI only recently passed a critical threshold, bursting into a widespread applicability just a few years ago. Since the mid-20th century, the history of AI has been marked by cycles of advancement and stagnation. These fluctuations have often stemmed from tensions between symbolic (rule-based) and statistical (data-driven) approaches – two paradigms that, though historically antagonistic, are increasingly synthesized in contemporary AI systems. Since 2017 and the emergence of transformer-based systems, generative AI, although constantly “under construction,” has become an integral part of research practices. It brings profound opportunities and challenges. New capabilities come with fragility and new layers of vulnerabilities, accessibility with opacity, and widespread adoption with ethical, legal and power-related questions. Different tendencies, cultures, and attitudes have shaped how historians respond to artificial intelligence in their work. While many historians quietly integrate AI into their workflows, others engage in methodological development and innovation or critical reflection on its capabilities and limitations, and still others voice profound concerns, particularly about its impact on interpretative and reflective dimensions of qualitative research.