Artificial intelligence is offering historians new ways to examine vast collections of medieval manuscripts and documents, as more than 100 international experts gather in Vienna to explore how machine learning could transform research into the past.
The two-day conference, taking place on 7 and 8 September, brings together historians and technology specialists to examine the growing use of AI in digitising, transcribing and analysing historical sources that have long been difficult or time-consuming to study.
Organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the University of Vienna, the meeting focuses on technologies that could help researchers process extensive collections of papyri, manuscripts, archival files and other documents preserved in repositories around the world.
Among the subjects under discussion are the development of AI models for historical research, handwriting recognition, automated transcription and the use of big data to identify connections across large bodies of historical material.
The event, titled “2nd International Exchange Meeting: SCOOP: Source Codes of the Past,” is the second gathering of the SCOOP research network. The initiative began at Princeton University, which hosted its first conference in 2025, and Princeton researchers are among those contributing to this year’s meeting in Vienna.
The conference also marks a significant homecoming for Austrian medieval historian Helmut Reimitz, who is returning to Vienna after 18 years of research and teaching at Princeton University.
Reimitz is joining the University of Vienna as a professor at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research and is set to become director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Medieval Research in January 2027.
He is seeking to establish Vienna as a new centre and hub for the SCOOP network, strengthening links between historical scholarship and rapidly developing digital research methods.
Reimitz described his return to the Austrian capital as “a great privilege”, pointing to Vienna’s longstanding international reputation in medieval and historical research.
He said the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna shared a commitment to scientific excellence and to communicating the wider societal relevance of academic research.
Heinz Faßmann, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said Reimitz’s return after nearly two decades at Princeton demonstrated Vienna’s ability to attract internationally established researchers.
“With Helmut Reimitz, we are gaining an internationally highly respected historian,” Faßmann said, adding that his move from Princeton sent “a strong signal about the attractiveness of our research location”.
The conference comes as historians increasingly explore how artificial intelligence can be applied to collections that are too extensive to examine efficiently using conventional methods alone.
Handwritten documents pose a particular challenge. Historical handwriting, variations between scribes, damaged material and changing languages and scripts can make transcription difficult. Advances in AI-assisted handwriting recognition could allow researchers to process substantially larger collections and make previously inaccessible material searchable and suitable for large-scale analysis.
Such technologies could also change the scale at which historians work. Rather than examining documents solely on an individual basis, researchers can use computational methods to analyse large collections, potentially identifying recurring names, places, linguistic patterns and connections across sources.
The Vienna meeting will examine both the opportunities and the challenges created by those methods, including the technical architecture behind AI systems and the difficulties involved in producing reliable transcriptions of historical sources.
For Reimitz, bringing the SCOOP network to Vienna is also an opportunity to connect the city’s established expertise in medieval studies with emerging computational approaches to historical research.
With enormous quantities of historical material still awaiting detailed examination in archives and collections worldwide, researchers hope the combination of traditional scholarship and increasingly sophisticated AI tools will provide new ways of accessing the knowledge preserved in the documentary record of the Middle Ages.
Sources : OAW
