Digital Humanities have been long constrained: Not only is the development of functioning websites, databases, and apps notoriously costly and time-consuming, but the landscape is full of no longer maintained, dead, and hardly functioning digital projects after their funding runs out. Digital Humanities as a field is also peculiarly complex. It usually requires a close and often complicated cooperation of humanities researchers with programmers, since possessing knowledge of traditional scholarship and technical understanding on a high level to produce viable solutions, is rare.
Coding with the help of large language models promises a solution to many of these issues. It offers a simple and relatively cheap way to create digital solutions that fit scholar's needs, without requiring deep understanding of programming languages and technicalities. A humanities researcher experiences a previously unknown agency and power of creation. A humanities programmer finds an attractive shortcut. Yet this borrowed knowledge contains its own risks and challenges.
The three day workshop is a follow-up to the Ruse of Reuse event from February 2026. It combines a public introductory workshop on basics LLM coding on Monday 14th December, followed by papers on Monday 14th afternoon and Tuesday 15th December, and finishing with a closed internal workshop on Wednesday 16th December for speakers and moderators.
Organizers
- Jan Odstrčilík, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Martin Roček, Faculty of Arts, Charles University and Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Gleb Schmidt, The Social Life of Early Medieval Normative Texts’ SOLEMNE (canones.org) (ERC Cons: 101087979), Radboud University
Organizing institutions
- Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- The Social Life of Early Medieval Normative Texts’ SOLEMNE (canones.org) (ERC Cons: 101087979), Radboud University
Cooperation
- Machine Learning Topical Platform, Austrian Academy of Sciences