Starting today as Assistant Professor of Digital History and AI at the University of Amsterdam
Happy to announce that I’ve started my new position as Assistant Professor of Digital History & AI at the University of Amsterdam. Please find a quote from my application below:
“All the basic components of the historical métier – historiographical analysis, source analysis, writing, and publishing – nowadays contain crucial digital elements. This includes finding relevant secondary literature online, making responsible use of reference managers (Zotero), robust key-word searching (in Delpher), bulk downloading from the Internet Archive, database analysis with Excel or Pandas, using interfaces, such as Gephi or Nodegoat, to visualize networks, but also dealing with AI writing assistants, such as ChatGTP – a tool which must be taught, and not avoided in our curriculum. The increasingly digital nature of our profession does not mean that every historian needs to become a computer scientist. The essential element of digital history is digital literacy. We need to equip students with the skills to navigate and analyze historical information in the digital age and the necessary knowledge to critically interrogate the digital infrastructure that makes this possible. Acquiring these skills will not only make students more desirable to future employers but – most importantly – also better historians.””