Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Latest papers

• Retrieving Biblical Intertextual References in Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales

  Andr\'as Kov\'acs, Alexander Conroy, Daniel Hershcovich, Jens Bjerring-Hansen · 30 September 2026

  Identifying intertextual references is central to literary scholarship, but computationally difficult when source material is transformed through paraphrase, allusion, historical language, and translation. We investigate this problem through biblical intertextuality in Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Ta…

• "AI is (not) the new...": A Diagnostic Analogy Framework for Generative AI's Cultural Impacts

  Rida Qadri, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Remi Denton · 28 September 2026

  Generative AI is reshaping the cultural infrastructures through which knowledge is found, synthesized, and held accountable. To make sense of this shift, scholars and policymakers reach for historical analogies of technologies such as the printing press, steam power or electricity. But these compari…

• Incipit: Axiom-Grounded Scaffolding for Human-AI Literary Creation

  Qiang Liu, Chunyi Zhao · 28 September 2026

  Large language models can produce fluent prose from short prompts, but direct prompt-to-text interaction gives writers limited access to the assumptions that shape a long narrative. We present Incipit, an implemented research prototype that introduces an explicit planning layer between a writer's in…

• Incipit: Axiom-Grounded Scaffolding for Human-AI Literary Creation

  Qiang Liu, Chunyi Zhao · 23 September 2026

  Large language models can produce fluent prose from short prompts, but a direct interaction gives writers little access to the assumptions that shape a long narrative. We present Incipit, an implemented research prototype that inserts an explicit planning layer between writer intent and generated pr…

• Viveka-Insight: a cross-lingual concept graph and citation-grounded retrieval resource over the complete works of Swami Vivekananda in English and Bengali

  Tamal Maharaj · 18 September 2026

  Classical philosophical corpora pose three compounding challenges for language resources: they exist in several languages without parallel alignment, their vocabulary is remote from that of contemporary readers, and generated text over culturally sensitive material must be verifiably grounded. We pr…

• The Living Library: Transforming Archival Collections into Conversational Knowledge Systems -- Lessons from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

  Pengce Wang, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Matt Briney, Michaell Bakalars, Dan Rutkowski, Ursula Hardy, David Wolf, Laura Hoffman, Allen Kim, Shawn Wright, Juan Lavista Ferres · 10 September 2026

  We present the Living Library, an end-to-end framework for transforming fragmented digital archives into governed, conversational, in-person exhibit experiences. Developed and deployed at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, the framework comprises four layers: digitization and corpus creati…

• Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Digital Inventory of Cultural Heritage & Traditional Knowledge: Case for Indonesian Open Digital Library of Culture

  Hokky Situngkir · 9 September 2026

  The Indonesian Digital Library of Culture (Perpustakaan Digital Budaya Indonesia, PDBI; budaya-indonesia.org) is a participatory platform that has collected tens of thousands of entries on Nusantara cultural heritage through public contribution since 2007. Manual contribution faces three structural …

• When Does an Interpretation Count as Established? The Formation, Evaluation, and Responsibility of Interpretation in Generative AI

  Deyu Jing · 7 September 2026

  Generative AI research has increasingly evaluated factuality, citation, coverage, and report structure. Yet passing such local checks does not by itself show that a humanistic interpretation has been established. This paper asks how an interpretation comes to be recognized within sociotechnical proc…

• Pad\=artha: Ontology-Grounded Fine-Grained NER Benchmark for Classical Sanskrit

  Sujoy Sarkar, Pretam Ray, Paramhans Shah, Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan, Akash Gairola, Arjuna S R, Pawan Goyal · 1 September 2026

  Annotation schemas are not neutral. When applied to classical literature, tag sets developed for modern journalistic texts impose source-culture definitions on texts they were never designed to describe. We instead ground a schema in the tradition of the text itself introducing \textit{Pad\=artha}, …

• AI Historian: Helping historians organize and verify person-centred temporal clues from dispersed historical narratives

  Yifeng Lu, Zijie Yang, Jie Li, Qingkai Min, Yue Zhang · 1 September 2026

  History is not preserved in complete, continuous form. Accounts of a person's activities, relationships and historical contexts are scattered across texts, chapters and narrative perspectives; historians must retrieve, identify and compare these materials to reconstruct temporal sequences and verify…

• Pair-Level Essay-Scale Republication and Reuse from Fragmented Historical Text Reuse: A Workflow Study on Eighteenth-Century Books and Newspapers

  Ke Shu, Kira Hinderks, Eetu M\"akel\"a, Mikko Tolonen · 28 August 2026

  This paper addresses the recovery of essay-scale republication and reuse from fragmented text-reuse evidence, a setting whose central challenge is pair-level evidence consolidation and not fragment retrieval alone. The study focuses on a candidate set centered on essays by eighteenth-century Scottis…

• When Names Cross Scripts: A Source-Grounded Benchmark for Historical Entity Reconciliation in the Mongol World

  Xiang Chen, Zeyu Zhang · 25 August 2026

  Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or even identical names. This makes historical identity reconciliation more than a problem of string matching or transliteration. We introduce MHER, a pr…

• Institutional Books - Enriched Text: A customizable multilingual open-source pipeline for denoising, deduplicating, and annotating OCR text at scale

  David Lowry-Duda, Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan Zittrain · 20 August 2026

  Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged b…

• Institutional Newspapers Pipeline: Deriving billions of high quality tokens from historical newspapers

  Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Eben English, Jake Sadow, Kacie Bailey, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jessica Chapel, Jonathan Zittrain · 20 August 2026

  Historical newspapers are an abundant record of public life, but their dense, irregular and sometimes noisy layouts make computational access to these materials both challenging and limited. We present the Institutional Newspapers Pipeline, a modular system we jointly designed with Boston Public Lib…

• Institutional Books - Visual Elements: An open-source pipeline for extracting, classifying, deduplicating, and captioning visual elements from digital book collections

  Jimmy Mendez, Matteo Cargnelutti, David Lowry-Duda, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan Zittrain · 20 August 2026

  Historical book collections contain rich visual elements - such as illustrations, photographs, engravings, and decorative art - that are frequently under-explored in large-scale digitization projects. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has standardized the extraction of textual content, these…

• Mapping Armenian Paris: Extracting and Geocoding Commercial Advertisements from the 20th-Century Diaspora Press

  Chahan Vidal-Gorène, Seda Kirakosyan, Edita Matevosyan · 7 August 2026

  This paper presents an end-to-end, IIIF-based pipeline that turns the digitised Armenian press of France into an interactive map of the 20th-century Parisian Armenian commercial community. On each page, commercial advertisements are located, read, and parsed into structured records, which are then g…

• From Inline Notes to Collected Commentaries: Toward Context-Preserving Organization of Exegetical Knowledge in Classical Chinese Texts

  Ke Liang, Qi Su, Churen Huang · 3 August 2026

  Inline notes and collected commentaries are important forms of scholarly communication that evolved within the Confucian exegetical tradition, yet have received little computational attention. Drawing on traditional Chinese exegetics and philology, this paper formulates collected commentary compilat…

• HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs

  Ru Peng, Tianyu Zhao, Xijun Gu, Zhiting Fan, Haokai Xu, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Yihong Zhuang, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao · 31 July 2026

  High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. Data synthesis is a viable alternative and succeeds on closed tasks, yet the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are overlooked, and their open-ended nature makes synthesis challenging. Moving beyond…

• Theatre Chapbooks At Scale: A Statistical Comparative Analysis of Typography

  Diego Belzarena, Seginus Mowlavi, Paula Casariego Castiñeira, Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo, Gregory Randall, Jean-Michel Morel · 30 July 2026

  We propose a statistical methodology that quantifies the similarity of typefaces between printed historical books. This provides a tool that accelerates philological analysis. Using character prototypes derived from clustering and aligning automatically extracted character images, the method defines…

• Where Quality Breaks in Compressed Short-Text Generation: Staged Bottleneck Localization

  Alexey Gavrilov, Alan-Barsag Gazzaev, Sergey Muravyov · 28 July 2026

  Compressed short-text generators can fail in two different places: the codec may discard information before generation starts, or the latent generator may produce weak codes. Without separating these failure modes, researchers can spend compute improving the wrong component. We study this problem in…

• Optimization Is Not All You Need

  Minh Hua, Rita Raley · 16 July 2026

  In 2019, OpenAI released two million GPT-2 outputs-ungrammatical, half broken-to aid the detection of machine-generated text. The alignment that produced their more fluent successors is usually regarded as an engineering achievement; we read it instead as the newest expression of optimization cultur…

• Compos3D: Interactive Part-Based Composition for Creative Control in Generative 3D Models

  Faraz Faruqi, Sean J. Liu, George Fitzmaurice, Justin Matejka · 15 July 2026

  While generative AI has unlocked new opportunities for 3D content creation, current workflows often rely on multiple regenerations, which provides limited control and unpredictable outcomes. We present Compos3D, a system that introduces a compositional workflow for generative 3D modeling through rem…

• Publishing Without Journals: An Open, Forkable Archive with Attributed Review

  Matthew Lorig · 8 July 2026

  The journal is a seventeenth-century technology asked to do four modern jobs at once: disseminate results, certify their quality, allocate scholarly attention, and confer career credit. It does none of them well. Pre-publication peer review is slow, only weakly reliable, demonstrably biased toward e…

• Chronos: The AI Co-Historian

  Lorenz Hufe, Niclas Griesshaber, Gavin Greif, Sebastian Oliver Eck, Philip Torr · 7 July 2026

  AI is increasingly supporting, accelerating, and automating scientific discovery across subjects. Yet, the adoption of AI in historical research remains limited due to the lack of specialised solutions for historians. To change this, we introduce Chronos, an AI Co-Historian designed to support histo…

• World Wide Models: Literary Tools for Cultural AI

  Nina Begus · 3 July 2026

  LLMs stage a new form of cultural encounter that is massive, automated, and monolingual. Literary disciplines have always negotiated cultural struggles with comparative reading of literature, narratological and poetic analysis, critical theory, world literature, and translation. These tools have now…