Research Guides: History: Digital Tools and AI

Digital Methods in History

Historians have been exploring how to use computers and digital tools to analyze data and extend their reach for decades. On this page, we highlight some of the tools available, and some inspiration for using them.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Alfred Wallace, the librarian for History and Digital Humanities.

"Traditional" Digital Tools

Text Mining and Analysis

Historians work extensively with texts--books, diaries, letters, ledgers, laws, and more. Digital tools have evolved to either study large amounts of text at once, or examine texts to find patterns that aren't obvious to humans.

HathiTrust
Hathi Trust is a repository of millions of digitized texts in hundreds of languages, primarily in the public domain (i.e., more than 100 years old). These can be valuable primary sources for many projects.

Voyant Tools
Voyant is a suite of free tools that allows people to upload texts (as PDF, text, or many other formats) to study word distributions, sentiment analysis, and more.
Voyant Example: Secession
In this example, the "Declaration of Causes" for four states (South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas) to attempt to secede from the United States in 1860-61 are analyzed.

Digital Mapping

Historians, and their readers, love maps--and a number of tools allow them to be created and shared online as interactive experiences rather than static images. The software can sometimes be pretty complex, but you can start with just making pins on something like Google Earth.

Mapping Past Societies
A Harvard University project allowing users to load layers of data from a wide swath of world history. (Note: this site takes a minute or two to load at first; wait for an instructions screen.)
North Dakota Digital Atlas
A collaborative project by faculty and students at the University of North Dakota's department of Geography. An ever-growing resource on the history and geography of North Dakota.

Digital Simulations

Historians propose models of human behavior all the time--it's what historical analysis is often all about--but how to test them? Scholars use agent-based simulations to model social structures and dynamics. Oftentimes the key aspects of complex behavior can be expressed with simple rules, and this allows scholars to both test and present their ideas in an interactive way.

"Agent Based Modeling and Historical Simulation"
A 2014 article by Michael Gavin in Digital Humanities Quarterly introducing the goals and means of historical simulation.
Netlogo
Netlogo is a popular and user-friendly programming language for agent-based modeling. Includes many models to experiment with and modify.
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute is dedicated to the study of complex systems, which includes ABM and other tools. Includes classes, seminars, and open textbooks.
Simulating the Evolution of Empires
A YouTube video from the channel Fractal Philosophy, showing how one might explore Peter Turchin's theories of collective solidarity in a relatively simple digital model.

Generative AI Applications

Generative AI and History

Historians, archivists, and others in the historical profession have begun harnessing the powers of generative AI to augment their powers of text, image, and data analysis. The following are some examples. As AI becomes more capable, and researchers learn to navigate the "jagged frontier" of effective and ethical uses of AI, more approaches are appearing all the time.

AI4Culture
A joint project of several European cultural heritage agencies to develop open source, AI-powered tools for a variety of tasks, including transcriptions, subtitling, translation, and more.
Artificial Intelligence for Transcription and Metadata in Special Collections: Three Projects
A 2025 presentation at a Coalition for Networked Information conference, detailing how three libraries are using AI to make their historical collections more discoverable and useable by the public.
The Living Museum
An experimental AI project that allows users to explore over a million objects at the British Museum, and "chat" with them about their provenance, context, and more--and to create the user's own shareable exhibition.
NotebookLM
NotebookLM is a powerful AI tool to explore large quantities of text. While a more systematic, targeted reading will eventually be required, this can be a great way to try out questions on a large corpus of text. (Requires a Google account, but works on the free tier.)
Transcription Pearl
From a team at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, an LLM-powered tool to transcribe handwritten text, with similar accuracy as humans but can operate at scale and at low cost.

Tips for using Generative AI for historical research

Go into this with a spirit of exploration. Don't expect definitive answers, but useful background, starting points, food for thought, etc.
You get more satisfying answers if you ask the chatbot to help you answer a question, or research a topic, rather than have it do all the work. They're better at proposing reading lists and suggesting avenues to explore than doing it all themselves...and you'll get more satisfaction doing the work with your own human brain.
Would a typical human being give a better answer to a historical research question off the top of their head, or if you gave them time to do research? Make sure, especially if you're using ChatGPT or Claude, that you have either web searching or its "research" mode on, or else it is going to give responses without any sources...and these are the kind of responses that have loads of errors. If you have searching, or especially research mode, enabled you will greatly minimize hallucinations.
Give the chatbot any context you have--not just about the question, but what kind of answer you want. Do you need primary sources? Peer reviewed articles? Books? Web exhibits? Something at a particular grade level?
Don't ask for a specific number of results. If you ask for twenty books to read for background on a subject, but there are only five such books in the world, the chatbots may just invent another fifteen.

Here are some example prompts:

I am beginning advanced, doctoral-level research on the debates surrounding secession in the southern states before the US Civil War. Can you propose a reading list for me, that covers both classic and recent monographs and academic articles on the subject? What are some of the debates that have shaped the discussion, and what are some current trends?

I'm an undergraduate curious about what "digital history" is and how it's changing in the face of AI. Can you suggest some reputable articles and websites that could give me an introduction? Are there some good recent examples of digital history? What all technical skills can I explore to do digital history in the current environment?

I'm an undergraduate sophomore, and I'm curious what it would take to become an archaeologist of the Vikings. What kind of background knowledge would I need? Are there degrees for that? Would it be helpful to learn any kind of languages? If I'm at the University of North Dakota, what resources are available for me?

I'm researching how German-Americans in North Dakota fared during World War 1. Can you propose some background reading? I'm in Grand Forks, ND, but can get to Fargo or Bismarck if I need to; are there any good libraries or archives I could visit to get more information? I don't have an academic history background but I've read a lot of popular history on my own.