Register Now at https://form.jotform.com/252734707575364 (before 30 November 2025)
Join leading pre-modernists and technologists from around the world at Ars Inquirendi, 4th-7th December 2025 (online / St Edmund Hall, Oxford ), to explore how Large Multimodal Models like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – massive, humanly conversant assimilations of learning – are transforming pre-modern studies, and how to use them in your own research.
Format: the first three days are entirely online. Presentations will be pre-released in late November via the Oxford Medieval Studies website, with the live sessions devoted to discussion, and held in the UK afternoon to maximize participation from around the world. The hybrid workshops on Days 3 & 4 are live.
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Day 1 (Thursday, 4th December) – A New Age of Pre-Modern Inquiry. In his opening keynote, Maurizio Forte unfolds how AI is transforming the conditions of archaeological knowledge, enabling archaeologists to rethink, reconstruct and even simulate the pre-modern world. From the evolution of ancient societies to the relations of minds and artifacts, humans and environments, he surveys emerging techniques such as agent-based reconstruction of cultural transitions, and neuroaesthetic analyses of gaze and visual attention. The following panel, Creating Research Machines with LMMs, gathers varied technologists and humanists to compare how they are already building working research systems using LMMs – and how even modest inputs can yield disproportionately large results.
| 2.45pm | Stephen Pink, Henrike Lähnemann and Anthony J. Lappin (co-organisers) | Welcome |
| 3pm | Maurizio Forte (Duke) | Opening Keynote (live): Rethinking the Past: An AI Perspective in Archaeology |
| Abstract: Archaeology, traditionally reliant on material traces and contextual interpretation, is now engaging AI to simulate the evolution and transformation of ancient societies, to generate new scenarios, and to study the relationships between minds and artifacts, humans and environments. This keynote offers a methodological overview of emerging research questions and applications across different periods, from agent-based reconstructions of cultural transitions to machine learning and neuroaesthetics applied to the analysis of gaze, attention, and affordances in art and architecture. Together, these approaches demonstrate that AI is not only a technical instrument but also a new epistemic partner. By integrating computation with contextual interpretation, AI enables us to rethink both the past itself and the conditions of archaeological knowledge in the twenty-first century. | ||
| 4.15pm | Respondent, Roger Martinez-Dávila (University of Colorado) | Response and Questions on keynote and the following talks (pre-released on 27th November): Mark Faulkner & Elisabetta Magnanti (TCD), Evaluating LLM Performance on NLP Tasks for Old English: Towards Philological Benchmarks Stephen Pink, The Graphom Project: Towards a Preliminary Atlas of Pre-Modern Written Sources |
| 6pm | Break | |
| 6.30pm | Panel | Creating Research Machines with LMMs, I |
| Participants: Panelists above, plus Ben Kiessling (Université Paris Sciences et Lettres). | ||
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Day 2 (Friday, 5th December) – LMMs and / as the Archive. Our first panel exposes the unprecedented opportunities and challenges for using the technology with archival materials and records – how can one document and trust LMM records in the same fashion as those generated by people? The second panel asks what it means for LMMs themselves to be the archive. Almost automatically, such models infer a pre-modern Graphosphere: the Old World’s totality of scratched, daubed, written, and otherwise inscribed artifacts, extant and destroyed. Yet only a fraction of what survives is imaged, let alone readable by LMMs —and that survival itself is only a fraction of what once existed. How can an LMM usefully know the pre-modern? From there, we turn to what a realised Graphosphere might enable by mapping what exists and is missing: from guiding the allocation of scant human and financial resources, and correcting long-term historical biases; to opening wholly new fields of scholarship.
| Start 2.30pm | Panel | LMMs and the Archive. Including Response and Questions to the following talks (pre-released 27th November): Madeline Rose (TCD): (Re-) Structuring the Catalogue: Limitations and Design Strategy for Applying LLMs to Medieval Manuscript Catalogues Achim Rabus (Freiburg): Visual Language Models and Traditional HTR for Multilingual Handwritten Text Dmitri Sitchinava (Potsdam), ‘Birchbark letters: the case of complex fragmented texts calling for LLM reconstruction’ | ||
| 4pm | Half-hour Break | |||
| 4.30pm-6pm | Panel | LMMs as Archive | ||
| Participants: panelists above, Peter B. Kaufman (MIT) | ||||
| Imagine a pre-modern graphosphere: an LMM-inferred reconstruction of the totality of the Old World’s scratched, daubed, written, and otherwise inscribed artifacts – extant and destroyed – before the dominance of movable type. LMMs are already, almost automatically, inferring such a thing. Yet its likely centrality to future research also exposes the profound inadequacy of the current pre-modern LMM archive – that is, of the material on which these models train. This “archive” differs radically from an LMM’s usual training data: not printed matter (by our definition of the pre-modern), not born-digital texts and images, but a fragmented, mediated corpus. What survives is only a fraction of what once existed—and of that, only a fraction has been imaged, let alone transcribed (indeed most remains untranscribable by machine), or made accessible outside paywalls. The first part of the panel examines this predicament: how the structure of digital availability shapes what AI can usefully “know” of the pre-modern world, and technologies such as machine transcription are working to improve that structure. The second part turns to the opportunity even at a foundational phase: how LMMs can help map what exists and what is missing, guide digitisation priorities for funders, correct long-term biases in the historical record, and begin to uncover the evolution – or polygenesis – of ideas and cultures across regions of the Old World and beyond. | ||||
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Day 3 (Saturday, 6th December) – Emergent Properties. We explore the unpredictable behaviours that appear as LMMs become more complex – above all, their apparent intellectual and aesthetic creativity. In his keynote, Roger Martínez-Dávila presents an AI-powered simulation of a fifteenth-century Castilian city, Plasencia, which resolved a civic dispute through an unforeseen strategy—one unattested in the sources yet historically plausible. The following panel broadens the discussion to ask what these behaviours mean for history, interpretation, and knowledge itself.
| 11am-2pm (lunch provided) | Peter Broadwell, Simon Wiles (Stanford) & Katherine McDonough (Lancaster) Introduction to Computational Map Studies with MapReader | Workshop (live: online / Doctorow Hall, St Edmund Hall). Explore MapReader, a powerful toolkit for analysing historical maps – ideal for anyone interested in spatial humanities, cartography, or visual datasets. |
| 2.30pm | Roger Martinez-Dávila (University of Colorado) When Players Rewrite History: Gameworlds, LMMs, and Alternative Medieval Scenarios | Keynote (online / live). |
| Abstract: In this keynote I’ll present Virtual Plasencia v4.0: The Medieval Vines of Three Religions, an AI-powered simulation of a fifteenth-century Castilian city, modeling its social, religious, and economic networks. In a course test run, a student team resolved a dispute involving a senorial lord, civic council, and bishop in an unforeseen way—one not attested in primary sources—yet arrived at the same result. Their novel strategy hints at a plausible but unrecorded historical pathway. I’ll analyse this surprise and propose that AI simulations like Virtual Plasencia v4.0 function not as rigid reconstructions, but as speculative spaces where LMM-driven agents can explore trajectories beyond the constraints of archival silence. | ||
| 3.30pm | Respondent: Anthony J. Lappin | Response and Questions to Keynote and Following Talks (pre-released 27th November) Anthony Harris (Cambridge) Using Generative AI for Medieval Studies Research, I Peter Broadwell , Simon Wiles (Stanford) and Katherine McDonough (Lancaster): AI Models for Transcription and Exploration of Historical Maps and Other Troublesome Materials Damon Wischik (Cambridge), Agentic AI and homoiconic coding Pablo Acosta-García (UAB), Soundspaces of devotion: using AI to explore emotional communities in the past |
| 4.45pm | Break | |
| 5pm-7pm | Panel | The Future of Pre-Modern Inference Studies |
| Participants: Panelists above, with Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University), Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford), Peter B. Kaufman (MIT) | ||
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Day 4 (Sunday, 7th December) – Workshops. A hands-on continuation of Day 1’s theme, hybrid online / in-person workshops at St Edmund Hall, Oxford invite all participants to begin building and experimenting directly in their browsers. From promptotyping to map-based AI exploration and automated manuscript transcription, tutors guide attendees through the practicalities of integrating LMMs into their research.
| 9am | Achim Rabus (Freiburg) LLMs and Promptotyping – reclaim your data | Learn to interact with an LLM to create scholarly presentations of editions, corpora, and other research datasets, without the need for IT departments. Regain control of your own data in the process ! |
| 1pm -1.45pm | Lunch (provided) | |
| 1.45pm | Anthony Harris (Cambridge) Using Generative AI for Medieval Studies Research, II | Practical methods for using Generative AI in manuscript, textual, and historical research. |
| 4.15pm | Ben Kiessling (Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) Unpacking Large Language Models: Design, Limitations, and Solutions for Humanities Research | Although LLMs have transformed text analysis, they remain optimised for the modern, leaving the pre-modern underserved. Learn how LLMs are constructed, and how the chosen parameters intersect, often conflictingly, with common scholarly practice. The session concludes with practical strategies for overcoming such limitations. |
| End 6.30pm | ||
The conference is organised in collaboration with Dr Stephen Pink; Prof. Henrike Lähnemann, Oxford Medieval Studies; Dr Anthony John Lappin at the University of Stockholm; and the Plus Ultra Collective—a network of 40+ international scholars advancing intercultural studies and the digital humanities. If you have any further queries, please email us at arsinquirendi@gmail.com