Event Type

AHA Workshop, Conference

AHA Topics

AHA Initiatives & Projects, Research & Publications

Location

  • Museum of the Rockies
  • Bozeman, MT

Event Description

This symposium will take place on Thursday, March 27, and Friday, March 28 at the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman, Montana. The event is supported by MSU’s College of Letters and Science, the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, the Gianforte School of Computing, and the MSU Library.

Our goal is to foster a community of practice that spans many disciplines and kinds of institutions and to enable colleagues to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for conducting large-scale research and creative inquiry in the age of AI in the discipline of history and allied disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

  • What models of large-scale research are suitable for historians and humanities scholars?
  • What discoveries and opportunities are possible when these scholars engage in large-scale research?
  • How can scholars work with federal agencies and private foundations to support research on a scale appropriate to advance their disciplines?

 

Who Should Attend

The conference is free and open to all with an interest in large-scale historical and social science research. Sessions will include roundtables, project showcases, and brainstorming sessions.

Registration

The symposium is free. Registration will open on February 15, 2025. We will publish the program in mid-February.

Questions

Contact Lizzy Meggyesy, AHA publications and communications associate, at lmeggyesy@historians.org with questions about the symposium.

 


About the Symposia on Large Scale Research

In 2025, the American Historical Association will co-host a series of three symposia on the possibilities and challenges of large-scale historical research. For decades, historians and digital humanists have been at the forefront of collaborative, computational, and digital research, but the scale, volume, and complexity of historical records have expanded far beyond the organizational capacity of individual scholars.

Historians are increasingly engaged with questions of data sovereignty, access, and preservation. Despite the significance of these historical records, federal and private foundation funding for historical research has remained largely static and is often tailored for individual researchers. As federal agencies support multi-institutional centers (“engines”) to drive research in the natural and social sciences, historians are considering similar modes of organizing historical research. These symposia will explore the possibilities and challenges of large-scale historical research.