Institutional data is rich, carefully curated and of immense public value, yet it remains difficult to share, connect and reuse at scale. Open knowledge platforms like Wikidata have shown what’s possible when data is structured and collaboratively maintained, but contributing to them remains hard. At the same time, AI-based platforms are rapidly reshaping how knowledge […]
An interview with an academic who has seen their impact up close and personal. Ben Williamson of the University of Edinburgh has been tracking the phenomenon because of a very personal experience with Frankencitations. I asked him some questions about what’s going on and what he thinks we should do about it. See full post.
Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author discusses the rise of a new field called ‘Historical Language Models’ or ‘Vintage LLMs.’ The largest such model to date, Talkie-1930, was released to the public on April 27. He argues that language models should be seen as historical texts themselves, and history is inherent to what LLMs […]
Editors’ Summary: This two-part selection seeks to better understand and categorize the expressions found in the Fatimid Geniza petitions, a rich primary source for historians of the Mediterranean in the 10th century. The study asks: how are emotional registers distributed across the formal parts of Fatimid petitions? Part one provides context and outlines the methodology […]
The Fourth IJCAI Workshop on Computational Fair Division will be co-located with IJCAI 2026 in Bremen, Germany, 15.08.26 – 17.08.26. It will be a full-day workshop. See full post.
This issue was curated by Colleen Nugent McLean, DHNow’s Editor. Our Editors’ Choices this week includes a post calling for historians to make use of emerging technologies and embrace larger scale arguments. We have also included conferences, job announcements, reports, and tools, including a tool for reimagining remote research.
Medieval manuscript research has always required proximity to the object, to the institution, and to the colleagues who share your specialisation. Digital tools can replicate the proximity to the object. The harder problem is replicating the collaborative infrastructure that surrounds archival work: annotation conventions, access management, the handover of notes between researchers, and the long-term […]
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of […]
The Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science at the University of Helsinki invite applications for the position of research fellow (university researcher) or postdoctoral researcher in the area of trustworthy AI across linguistic and cultural diversities for a fixed term period 1 January 2027 – 31 December 2030. The Faculty of Humanities and […]
Editors’ Summary: This post considers how historians can make use of LLMs and NLP without flattening the individual stories that make up history. In the author’s words: “the challenge is how to do that without losing sensitivity to individual lives, how to move from large-scale datasets to arguments about trends like the rise of nonviolence […]
