The Future of Medieval Studies

April 14, 2025 by ljudy

The Symposium on AI in the Humanities and Social Sciences will bring together researchers and faculty from across disciplines to share groundbreaking techniques and technology for the use of artificial intelligence in higher education. 

“Collaborating across disciplines in arts and sciences is essential for teaching and research using AI, as I hope our event will demonstrate,” said Professor Anne-Hélène Miller, Riggsby Director of UT’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which will host the event. “You need people from different disciplines bringing together different skills. We have invited some of the most prominent scholars working currently with AI—and we will also showcase the great work of our colleagues working with AI at UT.”

The symposium is funded by a grant from the AI Tennessee Initiative and co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Consortium on Social and Cultural Inquiry, the Departments of English and World Languages and Cultures, and UT’s Learning Resource Center.

The day will include hands-on demonstrations and workshops along with discussion panels and formal presentations on AI applications, ethics, and pedagogy in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Discussions will promote a constructive and collaborative approach to AI, emphasizing its role as an assistant and not a replacement for human intelligence.

“The panels will be about educating our students, not just ourselves,” said Miller. “How do we incorporate it in the classroom? How do we teach students to use AI responsibly and ethically? What is it that AI cannot do? We want to raise those questions.”

Brent Seales, director of data science graduate studies at the University of Kentucky, will deliver the keynote presentation on Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls. His talk details the virtual unwrapping of these pre-modern papyrus scrolls that were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Physically attempting to open the scrolls would destroy them, but advancements in AI, high-energy physics, and digital restoration techniques enabled the team to recover the information they contain.

“Thanks to the technology, they were able to do that,” said Miller. “They’ll be here to share how they did it. Working with AI is highly collaborative, so I also want them to tell us a little more about how they put their team together.”

Collaboration and technology are important factors for studying the premodern sources that the Marco Institute specializes in. Scholars can share digitized versions of manuscripts or other artifacts without having to travel to international locations. They can also bring this information to classrooms for students to learn about premodern history and culture in new and engaging ways.

“In premodern studies, technology has always been extremely important for us to be able to access a world that is not here—that is remote physically and temporally,” said Miller. “Every time we have new tools, it’s extremely useful for us.”

One innovative tool that symposium attendees can experience is the virtual-reality “holodeck” in UT’s Language Resource Center, which provides an across-the-ages connection in adaptive learning, language assistance, and real-time cultural immersion. Resource center Coordinator Doug Canfield is a co-organizer of the symposium.

“We created a virtual medieval castle with avatars of medieval characters,” said Miller. “Students are able to interact very productively with the AI character in the castle, asking questions.”

This virtual environment was created with help from Wonda VR. Members of the Wonda team will present a workshop within the symposium on “Maximizing the Impact of Immersive Conversational Simulations with AI-generated Feedback.” The workshop is free, but does require separate registration.

In addition to sharing valuable techniques, an overall goal for the symposium is to show the positive use of AI for teaching humanities topics—making AI tools more student-oriented and encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving.

“We really want to be constructive about the use of AI,” said Miller. “In the humanities, there is a lot of anxiety about it. One of the goals of the symposium is to overcome those anxieties. It’s a challenge, but also an opportunity.”

The symposium is free and open to the public, though registration is required. The free virtual reality workshop also requires a separate registration.

By Randall Brown