AI-assisted research across multilingual corpora
Practical workshop · 3 hours
Dr. Jakub Sypiański · Ca' Foscari University of Venice
About the workshop
This workshop shows how large language models (LLMs) can genuinely accelerate and enrich research — with no programming experience required. I focus on concrete applications: analysing and translating historical sources, automatically extracting structured data from large corpora, and intelligently searching literature. The session combines short presentations with live demonstrations on real research materials — including, where possible, text fragments submitted by participants in advance.
What you will learn:
- how to write effective prompts so that AI gives you useful answers
- how to analyse and translate historical sources (Latin, modern languages) with language models
- how to extract structured data from hundreds of documents — automatically, with quality control
- what RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is and how to use it with your own notes or literature
- how projects like EUROpest, plago and Watson extract tens of thousands of records from historical sources
Case study
As the main case study I present my ongoing research project on the medieval agricultural history of the Mediterranean, in which I use LLMs to process multilingual historical corpora at a scale previously out of reach. The workshop illustrates how this kind of AI-assisted reading can open up historical questions that are otherwise blocked by the sheer volume of sources.
Programme
Introduction and LLMs in practice
How models work, how they differ, how to write good prompts; exercise: analysing a historical source or a linguistics article.
AI in the humanities and linguistics
OCR and work with historical manuscripts, named-entity recognition, corpus processing, laboratory data analysis.
RAG and knowledge management
NotebookLM, Obsidian with local AI, LightRAG.
Exercise and discussion
Extracting structured data from your own sources; the role of AI in academic teaching.
Instructor
Dr. Jakub Sypiański is a historian and arabist, PhD in History (Sorbonne, 2024). Postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC SSE1K project at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He examines intellectual exchanges between Byzantium and the Islamic world (7th–11th c.), environmental history of the medieval Mediterranean, and AI in humanities research — he taught a course on this at the Sorbonne.