ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Artificial intelligence, historical research and the importance of considering non-Anglo-American perspectives

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-4

English Abstract

Artificial Intelligence has been hailed as both the greatest achievement of our time and a potential death knell for the humanities—often within the same sentence. The implications of recent advances in AI and in Large Language Models (LLMs) are only beginning to be discussed among historians in general and historians of science in particular. Yet, these discussions have been shaped predominantly by Anglo-American perspectives, which implicitly assume specific academic structures and the primacy of the English language. As a result, the role of AI and LLMs in historical research involving non-Latin languages, such as Greek, remains largely unexplored. This paper seeks to address these issues by examining the use of AI tools in editing, large-scale text processing, and translation. Furthermore, it argues that activities often dismissed as peripheral—such as communicative and editorial practices—are being fundamentally transformed by recent technological developments.

Author

• Kostas Tampakis, National Hellenic Research Foundation