Conference of the Regesta Imperii: Are you still searching, or has it already been found? Artificial intelligence and the shift in historical questions

The questions posed to traditional sources are essential to the work of historians. They do not arise by chance, but are fed by individual expertise, personal reading history, existing theoretical tools, the respective time constraints, and much more. But what happens when questions are no longer developed solely by human researchers, but also emerge from patterns recognized by artificial intelligence (AI)? What happens when AI makes suggestions for questions to historians based on the source material it has evaluated? Does it help to uncover things that would have remained hidden from human researchers? Or is it an executive tool for answering questions that have already been formulated? In the age of AI, who develops historical questions and how are they developed? We would like to discuss this together in Mainz.

Organization:
Christina Abel (Saarland University), Andreas Kuczera (THM Giessen) and Miriam Weiss (Saarland University)

Please register (in-person or online participation) by January 15, 2026: https://events.adwmainz.de/KI-hist/

The conference is sponsored by the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz and is being held in cooperation with Saarland University and the Technical University of Central Hesse. The Regesta Imperii research project is funded as part of the Academies' Programme of the Union of German Academies.

Conference program