A new blog post by Dr Bronagh Ann McShane, titled “At the Precipice of Possibility: Reflections on the Generative AI and Historical Research Workshop,” offers an insider’s view of a recent landmark event held at Trinity College Dublin. The workshop, which took place earlier this month, brought together over fifty participants, including historians, archivists, digital humanists, and computer scientists, to examine the implications of generative AI for historical research.
The event was convened as part of the European Research Council-funded VOICES project and supported by Trinity’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. The workshop opened with remarks from Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, Principal Investigator of the VOICES project, who highlighted the potential and limitations of digital tools in recovering the histories of early modern women. She stressed the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to overcome the barriers of digital silos.
A keynote by Professor John Kelleher, Director at Research Ireland’s ADAPT Centre, offered attendees a jargon-free explanation of how Large Language Models (LLMs) work. His demonstration of AI-powered entity extraction from historical texts illustrated the technology’s potential, while also warning of its pitfalls, in particular the risk of inaccurate or misleading outputs.
Dr McShane’s blog post provides a thoughtful and accessible account of the day’s discussions, capturing the workshop’s central themes and posing important questions about the responsibilities of scholars engaging with AI. The full post is now available to read online.
