Unlocking 18th-Century Playbills with AI (30 January 2026, скачать в хорошем качестве

Unlocking 18th-Century Playbills with AI (30 January 2026,

How can innovative AI methods for information retrieval aid the digitization of large historical datasets? Equally, how can the intricacies of 18th- and 19th-century print corpora help to reveal the shortcomings and implicit cultural biases embedded in AI models? In this talk, we’ll discuss our attempts to use large language models to analyse performance data from British theatre playbills from between 1750 and 1850. We’ll reveal how AI helped us to analyze textual traces of performance in new and unexpected ways. We’ll also reflect on the challenges and benefits of STEM and English collaborations, especially in regards to interpreting results and co-authoring publications. Deven Parker is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Glasgow. Joemon Jose is Professor of Information Retrieval in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.