The latest blog post from the VOICES project offers a fascinating look into how cutting-edge artificial intelligence is being used to illuminate women’s experiences during one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history.
In “Giving Voice to the Past: How AI Helps Us Listen”, Dr. Diego Rincon Yanez, ADAPT at Trinity College Dublin Research Fellow on the VOICES team, explains how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI are being harnessed to analyse scattered, inconsistent, and often overlooked historical texts. These documents, many written in early modern English, include court records, wills, and land ownership disputes. These sources offer critical insight into women’s roles in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland.
Led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity’s School of Histories and Humanities and funded by the European Research Council, VOICES is a trailblazing initiative that blends historical scholarship with technological innovation. As Dr. Rincon Yanez outlines, the team uses a “human-in-the-loop” approach, combining AI tools like OCR and NLP with expert historical analysis, to responsibly and accurately uncover the voices of women long silenced by history.
From using OCR technology on handwritten manuscripts to training language models specifically on early modern English, the blog highlights the challenges and rewards of digitising and decoding these vital records. It also underscores the project’s commitment to reproducibility, transparency, and ethical research practices.
This groundbreaking work not only revolutionises our understanding of Ireland’s past, it sets a new standard for the role of AI in the humanities.
Read the full blog here: Giving Voice to the Past: How AI Helps Us Listen by Dr. Diego Rincon Yanez.
