Conference Program

The program below is still being finalized. Session times, presenters, and topics may change as outreach continues.

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

Room Legend

Main Hall (capacity ~120) — Plenary sessions, live demonstrations, opening/closing, receptions Assembly Room (capacity 36) — Parallel breakout sessions Room 108 | Room 110 (capacity 25 each) — 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 Text Mark Humphries (Wilfrid Laurier University) 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	Assembly Room
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	18 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	Room 110
12:30 – 1:30	Assigned Lunch Structured seating. Table conversation guides provided. Family-style service.		Main Hall
1:30 – 2:30	7 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	Assembly Room
1:30 – 2:30	8 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	9 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	20 Trust and Error: AI Hallucination, Bias, and Evidentiary Standards in Historical Research A conversation with Edward J. K. Gitre (Virginia Tech), Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo) & 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
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	12 Working with Computer Scientists Anjalie Field (Johns Hopkins University, Data Science and AI Institute) 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) A conversation on teaching secondary (grades 6-12) with AI, led by Nate Sleeter. Still open: a presenter or format for the higher-ed side — primary source analysis, student research assistance, essay feedback, and the pedagogical questions AI raises about learning and evidence.	Pedagogy	Room 110
3:30 – 4:30	10 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	Assembly Room
3:30 – 4:30	23 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	Main Hall
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	15 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	16 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	Assembly Room
11:30 – 12:30	17 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 108
11:30 – 12:30	19 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	13 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	Main Hall
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	21 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	22 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	5 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	Assembly Room
1:30 – 2:30	11 OCR Best Practices Jacob Polay (University of Saskatchewan) 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.	OCR	Main Hall
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	24 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	25 Annual Margaret Levi Lecture in Political Economy Tim O'Reilly (Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media) Tim O'Reilly founded O'Reilly Media and has spent decades identifying and naming the technology shifts that reshape the economy, from open source software to Web 2.0 to today's AI platforms. He will speak on the changing role of Silicon Valley.	Keynote	Main Hall
5:00 – 6:30	Closing Cocktails & Farewell Reception		Main Hall