AI and LLMs as Tools for the Humanities

John Ladd, jrladd.com/slides/ai-tools 🛠️🛠️🛠️

spacebar for next slide, arrow keys to navigate, esc/menu for overview

About me

Zoe LeBlanc

Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, UIUC
zoeleblanc.com

Today’s Seminar

  1. A (short) long history of DH Tools
  2. Linking the histories of AI & DH
  3. Understanding GenAI as a tool

What Is a Tool?

The questions of ‘who is digital humanities?’ and ‘how is digital humanities?’ can evidently be reframed as questions like ‘what are the design goals of our tools?’, ‘when should a tool “just work”?’, and ‘are we tool users, tool builders, or tool theorists?’

Julia Flanders, “Jobs, Roles, and Tools in the Digital Humanities”, 2023

Every humanist uses digital tools.

The false dichotomy of “Hack vs. Yack”

DH vs. Cultural Analytics?

Eternal September

User-friendliness

The Killer App

DH Tools?

  • GUI Applications
  • Code libraries
  • Programming Languages
  • Statistics & Models
  • Corpora
  • AI Chatbots
  • Computers

Some Illustrative Examples

TAPoR 3

Voyant

The Distant Viewing Toolkit

RStudio

Zotero & Omeka

Gephi

LLMs as Humanities Tools

AI -> GenAI -> LLMs -> chatbots/agents/programs

“AI” i.e. machine learning i.e. statistical modeling

  • text analysis
  • authorship attribution
  • OCR
  • network analysis
  • GIS

cf. The entire history of DH & cultural analytics

How might we use an LLM?

Link to full chat

Can we think of our work as a set of discrete tasks?

Working with Local LLMs (On Your Own Computer!)

Generative AI represents a second step change in our ability to map and edit culture. Now we can manipulate, not only specific texts and images, but the dispositions, tropes, genres, habits of thought, and patterns of interaction that create them. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped yet what this could mean.

Ted Underwood, “A More Interesting Upside of AI”, 2025

“Using” a Model vs. Understanding a Model

Is there any difference?

LLMs as Tools

Understanding and unpacking design choices

While not every affordance of a tool is intentional or connected to the implementation of methods (some can, for instance, concern functionality), he [Gephi developer Mathieu Jacomy] overlooks how all choices reflect a particular perspective, contain certain assumptions and have implications for how knowledge is ultimately produced.

Karin van Es, “Unpacking Tool Criticism as Practice, in Practice”, 2023

Which part is the tool?

from “Attention is All You Need”

Google and the omnibox

Advertising claims

Incomplete information

Screenshot taken on 14 Sept. 2025 with GPT-5.

Alternatives to the “helpful assistant”

from “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet”

Who Is Digital Humanities?