The Role of Artificial Intelligence in History Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in historical research, particularly in countries like India where archives are multilingual, multi-script, and physically diverse. This paper examines the practical role of AI in transforming historical materials—such as manuscripts, inscriptions, newspapers, gazettes, and maps—into structured, searchable, and analysable forms. Indian historical sources exist in scripts including Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Odia, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, as well as older scripts like Brahmi and Modi. AI assists by converting scanned images into machine-readable text, parsing complex layouts, identifying entities across languages, and aligning spatial information with textual evidence. However, this paper argues that AI does not interpret history. It organizes, detects, and scales data; interpretation remains the responsibility of the historian. Alongside technical capabilities, this study also addresses limitations such as OCR errors, transliteration ambiguity, bias in language models, and ethical considerations related to provenance and cultural sensitivity. In the Indian research context, AI functions as an infrastructural enabler—expanding access, improving efficiency, and allowing historians to ask large-scale comparative questions that were previously difficult to pursue.