Archives & Manuscripts¶

March 2026

Draft

This activity guide is under development. The structure is in place but the content is not yet complete.

What this task involves¶

Archival and manuscript research involves working with primary source documents — handwritten texts, official records, correspondence, legal documents, and other materials that exist in specific physical or digitised forms. The work includes transcription, palaeographic analysis, contextualisation, and the careful handling of provenance and dating.

Where AI tools help¶

AI tools can assist with OCR and transcription of digitised manuscripts (particularly for well-represented scripts and periods), summarising and structuring large bodies of transcribed material, navigating finding aids and catalogue descriptions, and generating metadata. For historians working with large archival collections, AI can help identify patterns, extract dates and names, and produce structured summaries of document runs.

What to watch out for¶

Models cannot read manuscripts — they work with digitised images or transcribed text. Palaeographic judgement, codicological analysis, and the contextual knowledge needed to interpret archival documents are outside their competence. They may confidently misread letterforms, misdate hands, or impose anachronistic interpretations on historical documents.

Worked examples¶

Coming soon.