The Historian's Craft & AI (Part I)

In this week’s post, I’m going to step back and take a broader look at the research process. The purpose of this move is to identify those points where AI-enabled tools might add value to the historian’s work.

The starting point of any project is to answer the question, “What am I interested in?” The scholar's level of interest is an important consideration as projects can last for days, weeks, or even years. One therefore needs to be passionate about what they are studying. Many a project has been started and then abandoned during those long stretches of time devoted to humdrum research activities. Only a strong inner desire and curiosity will get one through those inevitable research deserts.

With a research focus established, the background reading and bibliographic work now begins. The first order of business is to find quality sources on the topic of interest. Of course, the nature of those sources should reflect one’s level of analysis. Am I working at the macro, meso, or micro level? A civilizational inquiry will differ dramatically from the study of a nation or a single individual / community.

The library’s online public access catalog (OPAC) still plays a vital role in the discovery process. Even so, AI-enabled search and summary tools have become extremely useful. Google recently announced Deep Research, a new research tool that solves a vexing AI problem. The problem is that ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) often pull citations out of thin air. In a word, they hallucinate. That’s not the case with this new generation of AI-powered search tools. Nothing’s made up. The tools list the sources used to generate a response. And with a single click, the scholar can jump straight to them.

My favorite AI search tool is Liner. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned my growing interest in Venetian history. Last week, for instance, I talked about my experience prompting ChatGPT to generate a thesis statement about sumptuary law in Renaissance Venice. I did not ask it to cite sources because that has never worked out well in the past. Instead, I turned to Liner, prompting it as follows:

What has been written about sumptuary laws in Renaissance Venice?

Liner responded with many excellent academic resources, one of the best being Sumptuary Law in Italy: 1200 – 1500 by Catherine Killerby. It also found a set of great articles in English, a few in Italian, and some specific to Venice. I was pleased with the results, though it was clear that many had already researched this topic. That’s the problem with Venice. Everybody loves her, including the hundreds of historians who’ve studied almost every facet of the city’s existence. My background reading, though, suggested that there might be topics that have not yet been investigated. While reading Samuel Huntington’s excellent book – The Clash of Civilizations – I asked myself, “Has anyone ever studied how Venice managed its relationships with its Mediterranean and European competitors? Has anyone written a diplomatic history of the Venetian republic?” Venice was and is unique in that almost its entire livelihood was based on trade. Might the story of how it negotiated its way to trading success, first with the Byzantine and then the Ottoman civilizations, be of any value today? Given the current talk about global trade and tariffs, this seemed to be a thread worth exploring. I headed off to Liner and prompted it as follows:

Has anything been written about the Venetian empire's diplomatic history?

Once again, I was pleased with the model’s response. However, this response was qualitatively different from the earlier sumptuary conversation. The resources, in this case, were primarily websites. Only a single item, a book written in 1944 by Mary Shay, was diplomatic in nature, a study of the dispatches from the Venetian Baili (ambassadors) to the Ottoman court from 1720 to 1734. This was good news in that it indicated that Venetian diplomacy and its international relations with the known world at that time had yet to be studied in depth. Of course, I need to investigate this further to verify that this is indeed the case.

I end today with a graphic of the historical research process. We talked about Liner, Google Deep Research, and the library when doing background reading, bibliography development, and thesis formation – the first three blocks of our diagram. In future posts, I’ll discuss the other supporting tools (Grammarly, EndNote, etc.), including a close look at AI support for the work a scholar does in the archive.