Skip to content

Deep Research, Canvas, and Gemini Live

Deep Research

Gemini's Deep Research is designed for complex, multi-source investigations. It researches, reasons, and synthesises material into a documented report. What distinguishes it from similar features on other platforms is the range of sources it can draw on: public web, uploaded files, your Gmail, your Google Drive, and even NotebookLM notebooks — all in a single research session.

NotebookLM is Google's separate research tool for uploading source documents and asking questions specifically about them — think of it as a personal research library that Gemini's Deep Research can also draw on.

For humanities use, Deep Research is potentially valuable for:

  • Exploratory literature overviews
  • Policy or funding landscape scans
  • Background briefings on current debates
  • Preliminary comparisons of institutions or archives
  • Synthesis across a large number of contemporary web sources
  • Drawing together material from your own files and the open web

It is much less suitable as a substitute for primary-source scholarship, and it should not be treated as a reliable bibliographic authority without careful checking.

Leif's Notes

Deep Research is a scoping assistant, not a scholarly guarantor. The reports look polished and well-sourced. That is precisely when you need to check the references most carefully. See Verification & Citation.

Canvas

Canvas is Gemini's artefact-creation surface. It goes well beyond simple text editing. Canvas supports:

  • Documents — prose, notes, reports
  • Code — with syntax highlighting and execution
  • Slides — with export to Google Slides
  • Apps — interactive prototypes
  • Infographics — visual summaries
  • Quizzes — for teaching and self-assessment
  • Audio Overviews — generated audio summaries

For humanities users, Canvas is particularly useful for teaching-material production (slides, quizzes, handouts), iterative writing (essays, grant text, lesson plans), and creating visual artefacts for presentations. The Google Slides export is a practical advantage if you already use Google's presentation tools.

Gemini Live

Gemini Live is Google's voice interaction mode. It supports natural, conversational speech and is available on mobile (Android and iOS) and desktop.

For humanities researchers, voice interaction is useful for thinking aloud, brainstorming, note capture, and accessibility. It is less suited to precision work that requires careful phrasing or where you need to review and edit the conversation.

Image and video generation

Gemini can generate images and videos. Image generation uses Google's models; video generation uses Veo/Flow. For humanities users thinking about teaching materials, illustrations, presentations, or visualising historical scenarios, these are worth knowing about. As with all generated content, outputs should be clearly disclosed as AI-generated. See Disclosure & Ethics.

Agent mode and Project Mariner

Gemini also offers Agent mode for agentic task completion, and Project Mariner, a browser agent for managing multiple tasks simultaneously. As of March 2026, both are restricted to Google AI Ultra, personal accounts, US availability, and English only. For most humanities researchers, these are not the starting point — they are for moments when you genuinely want delegated action, not just delegated thinking.