Project Status: In Progress

The Center for Digital Scholarship is committed to exploring the use of AI for digital scholarship and digital humanities. Our project on "Experiments in Artificial Intelligence & Digital Scholarship" documents a few of the smaller projects and work our team is developing with researchers at Brown University to utilize advancements in AI for digital scholarship.

Contributors to this project include Patrick Rashleigh, Tarika Sankar, Khanh Vo, and Ashley Champagne

Fall 2026-Spring 2027 Experiment:

Building a conversational search tool for digital scholarship projects.

We are working with Michael Satlow on his Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine Project to design and build a conversational search tool for the site. The tool will let users ask natural-language questions (e.g., "show me Byzantine-period inscriptions that seem to mention a mother and her daughter") that go beyond the project's existing faceted/keyword search, combining structured metadata queries with LLM-assisted analysis of inscription texts and translations.

Fall 2025-Fall 2026 Experiment: 

AI and Handwriting Recognition

We are working to use AI to transcribe three different corpora from three different researchers (Professor of Archeology, Laurel Bestock; PhD Candidate in History, Haley Price; and Postdoctoral Fellow, Anya Lewis-Meeks). Our corpora encompasses multilingual handwritten sources from a variety of geographic areas, time periods, and scholarly disciplines. We are working on documents from 17th century Florence to 20th and 21st century Egypt and the Caribbean, from modern English-language handwriting, some with field-specific annotation conventions, to paleographic manuscripts ranging from Tuscan Italian to Latin and German to French and Spanish. It’s a rich set of data to test how AI works.

Fall 2024-Spring 2025 Experiment: 

Could AI take a PDF of an ancient inscription and generate a high-quality XML file? If not all, what about part?

Read Michael Satlow's write up on the experiment (February 2025)

Project team: Patrick Rashleigh, Daniel Kang (undergraduate majoring in Math, CS, and Linguistics), Justin Uhr, Tarika Sankar, Michael Satlow (Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies)

Spring 2024 Experiment: 

Could AI help recreate and help preserve the work of David Jhave Johnson’s AI poetry that relied on broken code with dependency problems?

Read our paper: Gone in an Adobe Flash: Five new frameworks to preserve born-computational literary art for the future. Journal of Digital Media Management (13, 2 158-175). 2025.

Project team: Ashley Champagne, Cody Carvel, Patrick Rashleigh, Khanh Vo, Hilary Wang, John Cayley (Professor Literary Arts, Brown University)