Readings & Further Resources

A selection of articles, books, projects, and organizations at the intersection of history and artificial intelligence. Organized by category for easy browsing.

Books

Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.” FAccT, 2021. — Foundational critique of large language models and their societal implications.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020. — Framework for thinking about power, bias, and justice in data-driven work.
Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge UP, 2014. — Argues for longue durée approaches; relevant to AI-driven big-data history.
Hitchcock, Tim. The Voices of the Old Bailey. (Digital project) — Pioneering work in computational analysis of historical court records.
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. — Influential argument for computational approaches to literary and historical analysis.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press, 2018. — How search algorithms reinforce racial bias; directly relevant to AI-generated historical content.
Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds. Northwestern UP, 2018. — Postcolonial perspectives on digital humanities, including computational text analysis.
Underwood, Ted. Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. U of Chicago Press, 2019. — Demonstrates computational methods for studying cultural change over time.

Articles and Essays

Fickers, Andreas. “Update für die Hermeneutik: Geschichtswissenschaft auf dem Weg zur digitalen Forensik?” Zeithistorische Forschungen, 2020. — On digital hermeneutics and AI in historical research.
Fyfe, Paul. “How to Cheat on Your Final Paper: Assigning AI for Student Writing.” AI & Society, 2023. — Practical and provocative essay on AI in the history classroom.
Handelman, Matthew. “The Humanities After AI.” Public Books, 2023. — Broad reflection on what AI means for humanistic scholarship.
Luo, Michael. “What Happens When AI Writes History?” The New Yorker, 2024. — Accessible journalistic overview of AI’s impact on historical writing.
Nyhan, Julianne, and Andrew Flinn. Computation and the Humanities. Springer, 2016. — History and theory of computational approaches in the humanities.

Digital Projects and Platforms

Project	Description
Slave Voyages	Database of transatlantic slave trade voyages; increasingly incorporating computational analysis
Old Bailey Online	Searchable corpus of London criminal court proceedings, 1674–1913
Chronicling America	Library of Congress digitized historic newspapers; useful for AI text analysis
Europeana	European digital cultural heritage platform with millions of searchable items
HathiTrust Digital Library	Massive digital library with research tools for text mining and computational analysis
Machines Reading Maps	AI-driven extraction of text from historical maps
AI Pedagogy Project	Harvard metaLAB resource on teaching with AI
Programming Historian	Peer-reviewed tutorials on digital tools and methods for historians

Professional Organizations and Initiatives

American Historical Association (AHA) — Ongoing coverage of AI and the historical profession, including policy statements and conference sessions.
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) — International umbrella organization for digital humanities scholarship.
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) — George Mason University center developing open-source digital history tools including Omeka and Zotero.
The Turing Institute — UK national institute for AI and data science, with active humanities research programs.
Humanities Commons — Open-access platform for sharing humanities scholarship, including work on AI.

Podcasts and Media

Digital Campus (RRCHNM) — Covers technology and its impact on learning and scholarship in the humanities.
The Digital Orientalist — Blog and community focused on digital methods in Asian, Middle Eastern, and African studies.
Ben’s Bites — AI industry newsletter; useful for tracking new tools relevant to research.

Courses and Tutorials

Programming Historian — Step-by-step tutorials on text mining, NLP, mapping, and other computational methods. Peer-reviewed and beginner-friendly.
Introduction to Digital Humanities (UCLA) — Open course materials covering computational methods in the humanities.
Hugging Face NLP Course — Free course on natural language processing, useful for historians who want to build custom text analysis pipelines.

How to Stay Current

AI tools and scholarship evolve rapidly. To keep up:

Follow the AHA’s technology coverage.
Subscribe to digital humanities mailing lists such as Humanist and DH Slack.
Attend DH conference sessions (ADHO’s annual conference, AHA panels on digital methods).
Experiment regularly with new tools—hands-on experience is the best way to assess relevance.

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