Conference Program

Conference Venue: All sessions take place at the SNF Agora Institute Building, Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus, Baltimore, MD

Room Legend

Main Hall (capacity 180) — Plenary sessions, live demonstrations, opening/closing, receptions Room 242 (capacity 36) — Parallel breakout sessions Room 108 | Room 110 (capacity 25 each) — Parallel breakout sessions Room 107 (capacity 36, Friday only) — Parallel breakout sessions Room 112 (capacity 50) — Parallel breakout sessions Prefunction Room — Coffee breaks Room 200 — "Ask a Historian Anything" office hours (drop-in, runs alongside every coffee break)

Thursday, October 15, 2026

Time	Session	Category	Room
8:00 – 8:30	Registration & Morning Coffee		Prefunction Room
8:30 – 9:00	Breakfast Casual, open seating.		Main Hall
9:00 – 9:30	1 Opening Remarks# Louis Hyman (Johns Hopkins University) & Chris Celenza, Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (Johns Hopkins University) Overview of conference goals and structure.		Main Hall
9:30 – 10:30	2 "AI and the Misrepresentation of History"# Marnie Hughes-Warrington (University of Adelaide) What's at stake when historians and the public look to AI for narratives of the past — drawing on new scholarship theorizing AI as a maker of historical narrative in its own right, not just a tool historians use, including Hughes-Warrington's own book Artificial Historians (Routledge, 2025, open access).	Historiography & Theory	Main Hall
10:30 – 11:30	Coffee Break — Show-and-Tell (Optional) Grab coffee, drop into a themed room to show off what you're working on. Completely optional.		Prefunction Room + Topic Rooms
10:30 – 11:30	Ask a Historian Anything: Office Hours Drop in with a basic question about AI and computational methods. Staffed by rotating volunteer experts. Completely optional.		Room 200
11:30 – 12:30	3 Reading the Machine: What Large Language Models Actually Do to Historical TextDigital Only# Mark Humphries (Wilfrid Laurier University) — presenting remotely A practitioner walkthrough of how large language models handle historical language and handwriting at scale, drawing on Humphries' record-linkage work tracing individuals across massive archives — "Through Veterans' Eyes" (10M+ pages of digitized WWI soldiers' files) and ongoing AI-driven fur-trade record linkage — plus his work through DeepMind's Early Access Program testing Gemini 3 Pro on historical handwriting transcription. Covers the open-source archival research tools he's released, where these models succeed and fail on real, messy historical text, and what that means for record linkage and transcription work at scale.	NLP & Text Analysis	Online
11:30 – 12:30	4 Building Historical Infrastructure at Scale: The World Historical Gazetteer# Ruth Mostern (University of Pittsburgh) Ruth Mostern directs the World Historical Gazetteer, open digital infrastructure linking over 2.2 million historical places across languages and time periods through reconciled records and cross-script phonetic search, and the Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI), Pittsburgh's home for spatial and digital history infrastructure. This session explores how large-scale place-name reconciliation and human-in-the-loop data curation are reshaping historical GIS — and what it takes to build infrastructure the whole field can build on, not just a single project.	GIS & Spatial	Room 108
11:30 – 12:30	5 Build Your First Software: A Historian's Introduction to Writing Code# Jeri Wieringa (Princeton University) A genuinely beginner-friendly hands-on lab. Historians build a small research tool from scratch — picking up the vocabulary of software building along the way (data model, schema, pipeline, version control) so the process demystifies what "building software" actually involves. Taught from a research software engineering (RSE) perspective, with attention to how LLMs are changing what teaching people to code looks like. No prior coding background assumed.	Pedagogy	Main Hall
11:30 – 12:30	6 Teaching AI to Novices: Experiences from Gateway Computing at JHU# Mark Spindler (Johns Hopkins University, Gateway Computing) How to teach technical AI skills to people starting from zero, and what it takes to build a real sequence of courses rather than one-off workshops. Drawing on his experience training Gateway Computing's TAs, Mark Spindler makes the case for cross-department partnerships, arguing that people with deep experience working with true novices, not just graduate students in computer science, may be the better resource for reaching humanities students starting from scratch.	Pedagogy	Room 112
11:30 – 12:30	7 Archives in the Age of AI: What Cultural Heritage Institutions Need Historians to Know# Richard Marciano (University of Maryland), Rajesh Gnanasekaran (University of Maryland), Linde Brocato (University of Arkansas) An archivist and computational-science perspective on AI applied to digitized collections — rights, access constraints, metadata limits, preservation implications, and what productive archive-researcher collaboration actually requires. Drawing on work applying machine learning and data visualization to archival collections including the FDR Presidential Library, part of Marciano's broader Computational Archival Science research program.	Archives	Room 242
11:30 – 12:30	Unconference Presenters present for ten minutes on topics of their choice. Sign up in advance.		Room 110
12:30 – 1:30	Assigned Lunch Structured seating. Table conversation guides provided. Family-style service.		Main Hall
1:30 – 2:30	8 Who Gets to Argue with the Data? Rent Control and Democratic Knowledge# Jo Guldi (Emory University) A preview of Guldi's book The War Over Rent, which applies data methods to a century-long struggle over one of the most controversial interventions in the housing market, drawing on stories from nineteenth-century Ireland. The talk asks why arguments over rent have so often become arguments over evidence itself — which numbers count, who produces them, and whom the public should trust — and connects that history to the present: as increasingly powerful AI systems mediate our encounters with evidence, the challenge isn't just better analysis, but building a public culture where claims remain inspectable and contestable.	Data Methods	Room 242
1:30 – 2:30	9 What Graduate Training in Computational History Should Look Like# Christopher Phillips (Carnegie Mellon University), Jacob Bruggeman (Ohio State University), Amanda Regan (Clemson University), Sarah Weicksel (American Historical Association) A panel reckoning honestly with what skills aren't being taught in graduate programs and what departments can do now — from methods training to advising to hiring. Draws on perspectives from a research university, a small college, and the AHA itself.	Career & Field	Main Hall
1:30 – 2:30	10 Cleaning and Structuring Historical Data: A Working Session# Jim Clifford (University of Saskatchewan) How to extract structured, linked open data from archival materials. Participants bring messy historical datasets — or work with provided examples — and practice cleaning source data, structuring it for reuse, and grounding entities in Wikidata so datasets can be interconnected across projects. Grounded in OCR and data-quality problems in historical archives, and new OCR tools built for a digital edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.	Data Pipelines	Room 110
1:30 – 2:30	11 Trust and Error: AI Hallucination, Bias, and Evidentiary Standards in Historical Research# A conversation with Edward J. K. Gitre (Virginia Tech) & Samuel Backer (University of Maine) AI systems confabulate, amplify biases in training data, and produce fluent-sounding errors that a non-specialist cannot catch. This session addresses the hardest methodological problem computational historians face: how do you verify AI output against historical evidence, build in error-checking, and write about AI-assisted findings in a way that meets the discipline's evidentiary standards? Case studies of failures and recoveries, drawing on Gitre's NEH-funded work on evidentiary reliability in "The American Soldier in WWII" and Backer's own error-rate analysis of AI-extracted historical financial data.	Ethics & Evidence	Room 108
1:30 – 2:30	12 Constructing a Modular Data Pipeline: Cost Tradeoffs at Scale# Robyn Smith (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) A discussion of the practical tradeoffs in building a modular data pipeline for large-scale historical document analysis: evaluating OCR models at scale, weighing frontier against open-weight LLMs, and the cost tradeoffs that determine which pipeline choices hold up across a multi-million-document corpus. Drawing on the presenter's paper, "Combining AI and Established Methods for Historical Document Analysis" (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Consumer Finance Institute Discussion Paper No. 25-2, 2025), which compares extraction strategies using 56 years of Philadelphia property deeds.	Data Pipelines	Room 112
2:30 – 3:30	Coffee Break — Show-and-Tell (Optional) Grab coffee, drop into a themed room to show off what you're working on. Completely optional.		Prefunction Room + Topic Rooms
2:30 – 3:30	Ask a Historian Anything: Office Hours Drop in with a basic question about AI and computational methods. Staffed by rotating volunteer experts. Completely optional.		Room 200
3:30 – 4:30	13 Working with Computer Scientists# Anjalie Field (Johns Hopkins University, Data Science and AI Institute), Daphne Ippolito (Carnegie Mellon University) & Michael Harrower (Johns Hopkins University, Near Eastern Studies) A conversation on how historians can approach and collaborate with computer scientists on historical work — why computer scientists find historical material interesting, why they're often confused by historians' methods and questions, and why historians are interesting to them in turn.	Policy & Funding	Room 108
3:30 – 4:30	14 Teaching History with AI: Classroom Applications and Pedagogical Questions# Nate Sleeter (George Mason University, RRCHNM), Kristin Dutcher Mann (University of Arkansas at Little Rock) & Meghan McGlinn Manfra (North Carolina State University) A conversation across the secondary and higher-ed classroom. Nate Sleeter leads on teaching grades 6-12 with AI. Kristin Dutcher Mann brings the university side, drawing on assignments that use and critique AI in U.S., world, and Latin American history courses as well as social studies education. Meghan McGlinn Manfra adds the teacher-education and AI-literacy angle, drawing on her work as Faculty Director of AI Literacy at NC State's Data Science and AI Academy. Together they take up primary source analysis, student research assistance, essay feedback, and the pedagogical questions AI raises about learning and evidence.	Pedagogy	Main Hall
3:30 – 4:30	15 Network Analysis for Historians: Mapping Social, Political, and Cultural Connections# Song Chen (Bucknell University) Network analysis is a form of data modeling that helps reveal structural patterns in messy and disparate historical evidence — useful for kinship ties and political alliances, but also for subjects like religious cultures and their interactions. Drawing on his work on elite marriage, migration, and temple cults in Tang- and Song-dynasty China, Chen shows how to move from historical sources to network graphs and metrics, what interpretive questions network analysis can and cannot answer, what tools historians can use without advanced programming, and how AI is transforming network data collection, visualization, and analysis.	Data Methods	Room 112
3:30 – 4:30	16 AI in the Archive: Live Demonstration# Loren Moulds (University of Virginia School of Law) A live walkthrough of the multi-pass AI pipeline Moulds has built for a Mellon-funded project (with UNC) developing tools to help archivists and historians process large collections at scale. His case study: tens of thousands of printed Scottish Court of Session documents (17th-18th century), moved from individual manuscripts to a searchable, richly tagged dataset using a chain of OCR and AI passes — traditional OCR for page geometry and bounding boxes, frontier and open-weight models for text correction, document-boundary detection, and case clustering. Every extracted data point carries full provenance: which model produced it, on what date, with what prompt, and how it links back to the original page. Honest about what's changed methodologically in the last decade, not just what's possible now.	Archives	Room 242
3:30 – 4:30	Unconference Presenters present for ten minutes on topics of their choice. Sign up in advance.		Room 110
4:30 – 6:00	Opening Reception & Cocktails		Main Hall
6:00 – 8:00	Conference Dinner Opening remarks: Dean Moyar, Vice Dean for Humanities, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences		Main Hall

Friday, October 16, 2026

Time	Session	Category	Room
8:30 – 9:00	Morning Coffee		Prefunction Room
9:00 – 9:30	Breakfast Casual, open seating.		Main Hall
9:30 – 10:30	17 Plenary: "The Discipline We Need to Build"# Speakers: Christopher Phillips (Carnegie Mellon University), Matthew Connelly (Columbia University), Jo Guldi (Emory University) \| Moderator: Sarah Weicksel (AHA) The second plenary zooms out from methods to structure: what graduate training, hiring practices, publication timelines, and institutional arrangements would allow computational history to become a durable part of the discipline rather than a permanent margin? Drawing on evidence from the conference's own sessions, this plenary catalyzes the move from individual practice to collective infrastructure — including the question of what the AHA can concretely do, and what funding coalitions look like. The session is forward-facing and generative, ending with specific asks of the profession and its institutions. Phillips raised the question of structural change as the defining absence from prior convenings; this session places it at the center.	Career & Field	Main Hall
10:30 – 11:30	Coffee Break — Show-and-Tell (Optional) Grab coffee, drop into a themed room to show off what you're working on. Completely optional.		Prefunction Room + Topic Rooms
10:30 – 11:30	Ask a Historian Anything: Office Hours Drop in with a basic question about AI and computational methods. Staffed by rotating volunteer experts. Completely optional.		Room 200
11:30 – 12:30	18 Building Your Own Tools: Spatial History# S. Wright Kennedy (University of South Carolina) A hands-on session building GIS/spatial-history tools — georeferencing, geocoding, and working with historical place names, boundary changes, and pre-modern and colonial cartography.	GIS & Spatial	Room 108
11:30 – 12:30	19 From Ledger to Query: OCR, Named Entity Recognition, and Machine-Mediated Search# Jacob Polay (University of Saskatchewan), Keith Pemberton (Yale University) & Bob Pasker (CUNY Graduate Center) Three projects tracing one continuum, from the manuscript page through to the query, and the archival questions raised at each step. Jacob Polay presents a tiered OCR workflow for historians: fast open-source tools across whole collections, commercial services only where needed, drawing on a six-system OCR benchmark run on archival documents from 1612-1921. Most of it runs on a good consumer gaming PC, and agentic coding assistants now let historians set up these pipelines without specialized programming. Keith Pemberton takes up named entity recognition and its historical relationship to OCR, how identifying people, places, and organizations depends on first reading the text accurately, and where the two tasks are converging in modern pipelines. Bob Pasker takes up the parallel task of retrieval, drawing on Roscoe, a semantic-retrieval system built over roughly eight million digitized U.S. appellate court decisions and used as the infrastructure for his own corpus-scale study of antebellum opinions. For the nineteenth-century court reporters his case runs from handwritten ledgers through manual transcription to printed volumes, from print to OCR, and from OCR to embeddings, with entity recognition and semantic search as sibling operations on the resulting text. Each transformation is an archival event, which makes the evidentiary questions unavoidable: what is lost at each step, and what a historian is actually searching when the search is machine-mediated.	OCR	Room 242
11:30 – 12:30	20 Playable Pasts: Making Classroom Games with AI# Kwok Leong Tang (Harvard University) & Tore Olsson (University of Tennessee) Basic theories of game design, then a walkthrough of a game Tang vibe-coded to teach the Warring Kingdoms period in China, and how game-based assignments can replace quizzes in the classroom — alongside Olsson's contrasting approach, using an existing commercial game (Grand Theft Auto) as a lens on post-1980 U.S. history rather than building a bespoke one.	Pedagogy	Room 110
11:30 – 12:30	21 What Machines Can't Read: Unicode and the Politics of Open-Ended Character Sets# Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh) A character that Unicode has not encoded cannot be searched, indexed, or reliably passed through an OCR pipeline or an AI model's tokenizer. For the Latin alphabet, which has an effectively stable repertoire, this is a limited concern. For open-ended scripts it is not. The encoding of new Sinographs has been a flashpoint since the Unicode Standard's inception in the early 1990s. Emoji, also an open-ended set, acquired a formal annual proposal process. The marks that never did, such as marginalia, graffiti, and scribbles, remain outside the standard entirely. This talk traces who decides, and what those decisions mean for historians whose sources involve world scripts with open and unsettled repertoires or marks that no machine can read.	OCR	Room 107
11:30 – 12:30	22 Environmental History and AI# Alexander More (University of Massachusetts Boston; Harvard University) Climate change is a slow disease, hard to see with the naked eye. Eyewitnesses remember catastrophes and record gradual change only in passing, yet it is the gradual change that sets the baseline for how climate shapes health and economic fate. This session draws on a geo-database of 56,000 records of pre-modern weather and health events, assembled by scholars at every level over ten years and then standardized and de-duplicated into maps of outbreaks, weather, and climate spanning more than a thousand years. The methods run from OCR through GIS to computational frameworks for testing historical reconstructions, and the argument cuts at historians too: the open secret of big data is that we can only see big changes, until machine learning becomes reliable enough to lend a hand without loosening the grip on the primary sources.	Environmental History	Room 112
11:30 – 12:30	Unconference Presenters present for ten minutes on topics of their choice. Sign up in advance.		Room 108
12:30 – 1:30	Assigned Lunch Fresh seating assignment (second rotation). Table conversation guides provided. Family-style service. Last structured meal of the conference.		Main Hall
1:30 – 2:30	23 Migrant Connections: Building Digital Infrastructure for Migration History# Atiba Pertilla (German Historical Institute Washington) What it takes to link scattered archival collections across institutions and countries into a single, queryable resource. Drawing on Migrant Connections, a digital platform integrating German-American migration sources from archives across the US and Germany, and on Land of Dollars, a Baltimore-grounded study of immigrant financial practices from 1870-1935 built from correspondence, banking records, and legal testimony, Pertilla walks through the curatorial and technical choices behind building shared digital infrastructure for migration history — and where the connections between dispersed sources actually pay off.	Archives	Room 108
1:30 – 2:30	24 Teaching Computational History: History and CS in Conversation# Jeffrey McClurken (University of Mary Washington) & Greg Hager (Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University) A cross-disciplinary conversation on teaching AI and computational methods to historians: what a computer science classroom assumes that a history classroom can't, and where pedagogical translation between the two breaks down and what each field could actually borrow from the other.	Pedagogy	Room 110
1:30 – 2:30	25 Getting Started with MapReader: Historical Maps as Machine-Readable Data# Katie McDonough (Carnegie Mellon University) A facilitated hands-on introduction to the MapReader workflow. Participants will patch, classify, and query a set of historical maps, leaving with a working understanding of how computer vision can be applied to cartographic sources.	GIS & Spatial	Room 242
1:30 – 2:30	Main Hall Unavailable Being set up for the evening lecture and reception.		Main Hall
1:30 – 2:30	26 Experiments in AI and Handwriting Recognition# Laurel Bestock, Haley Price, Anya Lewis-Meeks, Cody Carvel & Ashley Champagne (Brown University) A multilingual handwriting-recognition project spanning 17th-century Florence through 20th- and 21st-century Egypt and the Caribbean, working across English, Tuscan Italian, Latin, German, French, and Spanish sources.	OCR	Room 107
2:30 – 3:00	Coffee Break		Prefunction Room
2:30 – 3:00	Ask a Historian Anything: Office Hours Drop in with a basic question about AI and computational methods. Staffed by rotating volunteer experts. Completely optional.		Room 200
3:00 – 3:30	27 Closing Remarks & Next Steps# Louis Hyman (Johns Hopkins University) Synthesis of themes, collective commitments, community infrastructure next steps, and how to stay connected after the conference ends.		Main Hall
3:30 – 4:00	Short Break		Prefunction Room
4:00 – 5:00	28 Annual Margaret Levi Lecture in Political Economy: "From Value Creation to Value Extraction in Silicon Valley"# Tim O'Reilly (Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media) Silicon Valley once promised to create more value than it captured, building open networks that connected people, knowledge, and opportunity. Over the past several decades, that model has increasingly given way to extraction. Drawing on more than forty years as a technology entrepreneur and observer, this talk traces how the incentives of modern shareholder capitalism transformed the digital economy and asks whether the emerging AI economy will repeat the same trajectory. O'Reilly argues that AI offers a rare opportunity to redesign the rules of the game around openness, distributed innovation, and shared prosperity so Silicon Valley can once again create more value than it captures.	Keynote	Main Hall
5:00 – 6:30	Closing Cocktails & Farewell Reception		Main Hall

Speakers & Participants

Louis Hyman

Johns Hopkins University

Conference Organizer

Dorothy Ross Professor of History at Johns Hopkins, writing on the history of American capitalism, including Debtor Nation, Borrow, and Temp, and the Computational History Substack.

Katie McDonough

Carnegie Mellon University

Speaker

Digital historian using computational image, text, and spatial analysis on large cultural-heritage collections; co-developed the MapReader software library for reading historical maps as data.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington

University of Adelaide

Day 1 Plenary Speaker

Distinguished Professor researching the relationship between history and artificial intelligence, including how machines write histories and what that means for the discipline. Learn more: Adelaide faculty profile.

Christopher Phillips

Carnegie Mellon University

Day 2 Plenary Speaker

Professor and Department Head of History, specializing in the history of science in modern America, particularly how statistics and mathematics came to shape clinical medicine. Learn more: personal website.

William G. Thomas III

Montana State University

Speaker

Dean of the College of Letters and Science at Montana State; Guggenheim Fellow and digital history pioneer directing "The Iron Way / Railroads project" research.

Jo Guldi

Southern Methodist University

Speaker

Author of The Long Land War and Roads to Power; currently principal investigator on an NSF grant on the history of property rights. Learn more: personal website.

Samuel Backer

University of Maine

Speaker

Assistant Professor and director of the DiSH (Digital and Spatial Humanities) lab, working on American cultural and economic history of the long 20th century, particularly the entertainment industry's origins. Learn more: Money 4 Nothing podcast.

Laura Ansley

American Historical Association

Institutional Partner

Director of Publications at the American Historical Association. Learn more: ORCID profile.

Sarah Weicksel

Executive Director, American Historical Association

Institutional Partner

Executive Director of the American Historical Association. Learn more: personal website.

Song Chen

Bucknell University

Speaker

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies specializing in the social and cultural history of the Tang and Song dynasties and elite migration networks in early China; serves on the executive committee of the China Biographical Database Project. Learn more: faculty page.

Richard Marciano

University of Maryland

Speaker

Professor in the College of Information and director of the Advanced Information Collaboratory, applying machine learning and AI to Computational Archival Science, data visualization, and information retrieval.

Rajesh Gnanasekaran

University of Maryland

Speaker

Assistant Director of AI Solutions, Division of IT, and Research Fellow at the Advanced Information Collaboratory, working with Richard Marciano on generative AI and knowledge-graph systems for archival collections. Learn more: Google Scholar profile.

Linde Brocato

University of Arkansas

Speaker

Metadata Librarian at the University of Arkansas Libraries, specializing in cataloging and description practices that make archival collections discoverable. Learn more: UA Libraries faculty profile.

Kwok Leong Tang

Harvard University

Speaker

Lecturer in Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Managing Director of the Digital China Initiative. Learn more: teaching game (vibe-coded).

Nate Sleeter

George Mason University (RRCHNM)

Speaker

Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Educational Projects at RRCHNM, overseeing K-16 education projects including World History Commons. Learn more: GMU faculty page.

Tim O'Reilly

Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media

Annual Levi Lecture

Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, known for shaping ideas like open source software and Web 2.0, now focused on mechanism design for the human-AI economy. Learn more: personal bio page.

Dean Moyar

Johns Hopkins University, Vice Dean for Humanities

Dinner Opening Remarks

Professor of Philosophy and Vice Dean for Humanities, researching German philosophy from Kant through Hegel's theories of practical reason and value. Learn more: personal website.

Chris Celenza

Dean, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University

Speaker

Dean of the Krieger School and professor of history and classics, focused on Renaissance Latin, paleography, and the history of the classical tradition. Learn more: faculty page.

Mark Humphries

Wilfrid Laurier University

Speaker

Professor of History working on generative AI and large language models applied to historical research, including tracing individuals across fur-trade-era archival records. Learn more: faculty page.

Jeri Wieringa

Princeton University

Speaker

Assistant Director at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, specializing in computational methods for historical research and US religious history. Learn more: profile page.

Jacob Bruggeman

Ohio State University

Speaker

Historian of intellectual history, political economy, and technology in modern America; PhD candidate and Ambrose Monell National Fellow in Technology and Democracy. Learn more: Roots of Progress fellow profile.

Amanda Regan

Clemson University

Speaker

Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, History and Geography, specializing in digital and computational history of the late-19th and 20th century United States. Learn more: personal website.

Jim Clifford

University of Saskatchewan

Speaker

Professor of History and Co-Editor of Historical Methods, building spatial databases and text-mining pipelines to study urban environments, environmental justice, and settler colonialism. Learn more: OCR Benchmark paper.

Edward J. K. Gitre

Virginia Tech

Speaker

Associate Professor of History directing "The American Soldier in World War II," an NEH-funded project using machine learning to make available uncensored handwritten commentaries from American WWII service personnel.

Anjalie Field

Johns Hopkins University, Data Science and AI Institute

Speaker

Assistant Professor of Computer Science whose research focuses on the ethics and social-science dimensions of natural language processing, including privacy, transparency, and fairness in AI pipelines. Learn more: personal website.

Loren Moulds

University of Virginia School of Law

Speaker

Head of Digital Scholarship and Preservation and Digital Collections Librarian at UVA Law, leading digital scholarship projects and applying AI and computational tools to transcribing and analyzing archival material at scale. Learn more: UVA Law faculty page.

S. Wright Kennedy

University of South Carolina

Speaker

Assistant Professor of History specializing in public-facing spatial history projects, using GIS and spatial analysis to study epidemics, streetcar corruption, hurricane recovery, and residential segregation.

Tore Olsson

University of Tennessee

Speaker

Lindsay Young Professor of American History specializing in post-1865 US history; teaches "Grand Theft America: U.S. History Since 1980 Through the GTA Video Games." Learn more: faculty profile.

Ruth Mostern

University of Pittsburgh

Speaker

Historian studying the human past at large spatial and temporal scales using environmental and spatial information science; directs the World Historical Gazetteer.

Atiba Pertilla

German Historical Institute Washington

Speaker

Research Fellow and Digital Editor at the German Historical Institute Washington, working on U.S. financial, economic, and migration history, including Migrant Connections.

Jeffrey McClurken

University of Mary Washington

Speaker

Professor of History and American Studies, author of Take Care of the Living (2009); scholarship spans Civil War history, digital humanities, and technology-enhanced teaching. Learn more: personal website.

Greg Hager

Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Speaker

Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science, with joint appointments in Electrical/Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering; directs the Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab. Learn more: faculty website.

Jacob Polay

University of Saskatchewan

Speaker

PhD student in History studying the roles large language models play in historical method, building an AI-driven information retrieval pipeline for early modern archives. Learn more: OCR Benchmark paper.

Keith Pemberton

Yale University

Speaker

History major with a Certificate in Computing, Culture, and Society; research assistant at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division and founder of QuarterMill, an AI-enabled archival provenance startup. Learn more: Yale ISPS profile.

Matthew Connelly

Columbia University

Day 2 Plenary Speaker

Historian of international politics and founder of History Lab, applying computational methods to declassified government records. Joins the Day 2 plenary on what graduate training, hiring, and publishing would have to change for computational history to last.

Daphne Ippolito

Carnegie Mellon University

Speaker

Computer scientist working on language model generation and evaluation, and on AI deep-research agents for archaeological questions. Speaks on session 13, on how historians and computer scientists can actually collaborate.

Michael Harrower

Johns Hopkins University

Speaker

Archaeologist in Near Eastern Studies, working on AI deep-research agents applied to archaeological questions. Joins session 13 alongside Anjalie Field and Daphne Ippolito.

Edward Gitre

Virginia Tech

Speaker

Historian directing The American Soldier in World War II, an NEH-funded project transcribing and analysing tens of thousands of soldiers' uncensored commentaries. Speaks on session 11, on hallucination, bias, and evidentiary standards.

Robyn Smith

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Speaker

Works on large-scale historical document analysis at the Philadelphia Fed. Session 12 covers the practical tradeoffs in a modular data pipeline: evaluating OCR models at scale, frontier against open-weight models, and what holds up across a multi-million-document corpus.

Ashley Champagne

Brown University

Speaker

Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University Library, leading the team behind session 26, a multilingual handwriting-recognition project spanning 17th-century Florence through 20th- and 21st-century Egypt and the Caribbean.

Bob Pasker

CUNY Graduate Center

Speaker

History PhD student and builder of Roscoe, a semantic-retrieval system over roughly eight million digitized US appellate court decisions, used as the infrastructure for his own dissertation. Joins session 19 on the path from ledger to query.

Raja Adal

University of Pittsburgh

Speaker

Historian of modern Japan and the global history of writing technologies. Session 21 argues that a character Unicode has not encoded cannot be searched, indexed, or reliably passed through an OCR pipeline or a tokenizer, and asks what that means for open-ended scripts.

Alexander More

UMass Boston & Harvard University

Speaker

Climate historian and epidemiologist. Session 22 draws on a geo-database of 56,000 records of pre-modern weather and health to argue that gradual climate change, not catastrophe, sets the baseline for how climate shapes health and economic fate.

Kristin Dutcher Mann

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Speaker

Historian and author on teaching history with AI, bringing the university side of session 14 alongside Nate Sleeter on the grades 6-12 classroom.

Mark Spindler

Johns Hopkins University

Speaker

Trains the teaching assistants for Gateway Computing at Johns Hopkins. Session 6 makes the case that people experienced with true novices, not only graduate students in computer science, may be the better resource for reaching humanities students starting from zero.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your registration options

Online registration is free, open to everyone, and has no closing date, so you can sign up whenever you like. In-person attendance has reached capacity, so in-person sign-ups now join a waitlist. There are three ways to register:

Online only. Open to all, free regardless of your fee category. Every session will stream.
Online, plus the in-person waitlist. You are registered for online right away, and you keep a place in line for a seat in Baltimore if one opens. There is no downside to being on the list.
In person. Joins the waitlist. We will contact you if a place opens up.

Questions about any of this? Email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu.

Is in-person attendance really full?

Yes. We reached capacity faster than expected. Anyone registering for in person now joins a waitlist, and we will be in touch if a place opens up. Places do open, so it is worth joining.

If I join the waitlist, can I still attend online?

Yes, and we would encourage it. Choose "Online, and add me to the in-person waitlist" on the registration form. That registers you for online access immediately and keeps your place in line, so you are guaranteed to be able to attend either way.

How much does it cost?

Online attendance is free for everyone, whatever your category.

For in-person attendance, graduate students attend free, and there is a $100 fee for faculty and professionals. If that fee would be a barrier, you do not need to pay it and no documentation is required. Select the financial hardship category on the form. Nothing else about your registration changes either way.

I registered late. How do I pay the $100 fee?

We emailed payment links in one batch in August, so if you registered after that, you probably never got one. That is our mistake, not yours. Your seat is confirmed whether or not you have paid yet.

To pay:

Go to cglink.me/2dh/r1989944. This is Hopkins Groups, the university's events system.
Ignore the sign-in box on the left. Under First Time User on the right, click SIGN UP.
Fill in your details and choose Guest as the account type. You need to create this account even though you already registered on our form.
Once you are signed in, the event page shows the $100 fee and the payment step.

If you already have a Hopkins Groups account from an earlier event, sign in on the left instead.

Earlier this fall the payment page wrongly said registration had ended on September 16. That is fixed as of October 2. If you were turned away before, please try again. If you still cannot pay, email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu.

If you are a graduate student or selected financial hardship, there is nothing to pay.

What if I can no longer attend? Can I get my registration fee back?

Yes. If you paid the in-person fee and can no longer come, log in to Hopkins Groups, where you paid, and request a refund there. Approval takes about two to three weeks, so please allow for that before chasing it.

Please also let us know you are not coming, whether or not a fee is involved. In-person is at capacity with a waitlist behind it, so a seat you release goes to someone else.

If you would rather not drop out altogether, you are welcome to switch to online attendance instead, which is free and covers every session. Email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu and we will move you across.

Which sessions will be streamed?

All of them. Every session on the program will be streamed, including the plenaries, the parallel breakout sessions, and the Margaret Levi Lecture. How to access the streams will be announced closer to the conference, and everyone registered for online attendance will receive those details by email.

Will the online sessions be captioned?

Yes. Sessions are streamed through Zoom, which generates live captions automatically, so captioning is available on every streamed session without your having to arrange anything in advance. You turn them on yourself from the Zoom toolbar once you have joined.

If you need something beyond automatic captions, including ASL interpretation, email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu as early as you can. Booking interpreters takes lead time, so the sooner we know, the better we can do.

Do I need technical experience to attend?

No. Sessions are run at different levels in parallel rather than putting everyone in the same room, so there is programming for people who have never used these tools and for people who build them. Most registrants so far describe themselves as new to this or just getting started.

When does registration close?

Online registration does not close. You can sign up at any point before the conference, and it stays free. The in-person waitlist also stays open, though we cannot promise a seat will come free.

I have a dietary restriction or an accessibility need.

There are fields for both on the registration form, and we plan catering and room setup against what people tell us there. If something comes up after you have registered, email lhyman6@jh.edu and we will handle it.

Will the sessions be amplified?

Yes. Sessions will be amplified.

If you need more than amplification, tell us on the registration form or email lhyman6@jh.edu. We would rather hear early, since some arrangements need lead time to book.

Is travel funding available?

We are not able to offer travel funding for attendees. See our hotel suggestions and travel guide for help keeping costs down.

I registered already and need to change something.

Email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu with what needs changing rather than submitting the form a second time, which creates a duplicate registration.

If you have already submitted the form twice, do not worry about it. Tell us which answer is the one you meant and we will set the other aside.

I still have a question.

Email Louis Hyman at lhyman6@jh.edu. Anything about registration, the waitlist, the program, or logistics is welcome.

AI and History Conference 2026

About the Conference

Conference Program

Speakers & Participants

Join the Conversation Now

Structured Conversations

Table Conversation Questions

Conference Venue: The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins

Venue & Logistics

Where to Stay

Registration

Travel & Getting Here

Frequently Asked Questions

Your registration options