CrossAsia Blog

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.…

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…

The 2026 European Network of Korean Resources Specialists Workshop, June 3–6

29. May 2026

Dear users, From June 3–6, 2026, CrossAsia and…

CrossAsia Talks: Patrick Hällzon 28. Mai 2026

23. May 2026

(See English below) Freuen Sie sich mit uns auf Dr. Patrick…

CrossAsia Talks: Joshua Fogel 3.12.2026

22. May 2026

(See English below) Am 3. Dezember 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner…

Fremdenführer durch das Kriegsgefangenenlager Bando, Japan : herausgegeben von der Lagerdruckerei Bando gelegentlich der Ankunft der von Kurume nach Bando verlegten Kameraden, August 1918. Krieg 1914/25024. Public Domain 1.0

Im Fokus: Materialien aus dem Kriegsgefangenenlager Bandō (Japan)

20. May 2026

Wir freuen uns, am Mittwoch, 10. Juni 2026 von 16-17 Uhr im Rahmen…

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas

24. April 2026

Dear users, On May 21st at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased…