CrossAsia Blog

Early Access Launch: The Newspaper Research Companion

23. June 2026

(Deutsche Version: siehe unten) Dear CrossAsia users, We…

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

22. June 2026

Dear users, On June 23rd at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased…

CrossAsia Talks: Philipp Kohl 26.10.2026

22. June 2026

(See English below) Am 26. Oktober 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner…

CrossAsia Talks: Bolormaa Boldbaatar 28.01.2027

22. June 2026

(See English below) Am 28. Januar 2027 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner…

Stipendienprogramm - Scholarship program

Wartungsarbeiten 24. Juni 2026 – Einschränkungen bei CrossAsia Blog, Digitale Sammlungen, Themenportale

19. June 2026

Liebe CrossAsia Nutzer:innen, am 24 Juni kommt es von ca.…

Einschränkungen bei Forschungsabteilungen | Limitations in Research Departments

19. June 2026

Liebe Nutzer:innen, in den kommenden Sommermonaten sind die…

CrossAsia Talks: Eric Schluessel 18.06.2026

12. June 2026

(See English below) Wir freuen uns sehr, Dr. Eric Schluessel…

image source provided by Dr. What does it mean to be a historian in the age of AI? AI is not the first such shift. The digital turn quietly reshaped how historians work. It raised accessibility. A historian today starts a project at a search engine, pulls sources from a digital archive, and turns archive photographs into research data at home. As Ian Milligan puts it, “we are all digital now.” If the digital turn brought accessibility, AI brings something accessibility alone could not: machine reading at the scale of the archive itself. Why scale? Historical research moves through stages: reading, extracting, structuring, analyzing, visualizing, asking new questions. Each works on a single document but breaks at archive scale. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty hold roughly 384,000 articles across five centuries. Reconstructing the careers of even one generation of officials requires linking and reasoning across more material than a single researcher can manage. In this talk I draw on several ongoing projects, including a vision-language model fine-tuned for Manchu and an agent-based record-linkage system across the Annals and the Bangmok (civil-examination rosters), to argue that AI does not replace any step in this sequence; it changes the scale at which each becomes possible. The Manchu model does not read more carefully than a Manchu specialist, but it makes an entire archive legible. The linkage system does not match identities more carefully than a historian by hand, but it tracks the same person across sources that no individual could reconcile end to end. Once reading, linkage, and structuring scale up, questions of a different order become askable: not one official’s career, but a generation’s; not one local pattern, but the structure of bureaucratic mobility across five centuries. The historian’s craft is unchanged; what changes is what becomes askable. To be a historian in the age of AI is to treat discovery, when the data itself begins to suggest the questions, as a stage of the craft.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts

5. June 2026

Dear users, On June 9th at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased…

Neue Lizenzen: Korea Pro

4. June 2026

(English below) Liebe Nutzer:innen, Wir freuen uns, Ihnen…