Using Natural Language Processing Tools in Historical Research & Teaching

Ph.D. candidate Merve Tekgürler was awarded one of the 2023-24 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships which aim to foster practical, trans- or interdisciplinary, collaborative, critical, or methodological innovations in doctoral research.

What are your thoughts on using digital methods in teaching?

In the past decade, literacy of digital methods, particularly AI literacy, has become crucial for undergraduate pedagogy. It is increasingly important for us instructors to learn and to communicate to our students, how to use and how not to use generative AI in the classroom and beyond. The current moment reminds me of the discussions around Google, Google Scholar, and Wikipedia. When (re) search became almost synonymous with googling, scholars developed critical yet constructive ways to teach students how to conduct research online and how to evaluate the output of their search queries. I anticipate a similar trajectory with generative AI. We will develop ways to use these technologies in our teaching and learning and devise methods to evaluate the generated text for accuracy and representativeness.

Read more about Merve Tekgürler’s Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship here

Awards & Fellowships

Tanner Allread Stanford Law School Legal History Paper Prize Winner

Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships

Jeffery Chen Dissertation Prize Fellowship

Joe Amato Career Launch Fellowship

Luther Cenci Austin Steelman

Wallace Teska

Emily Greenfield Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship

Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin & Austin Steelman Mentored undergraduates Isaac Harris & Mátyás Kisiday, 2023 Hoefer Prize Winners