Colloquium " DH@LLM: Large language models and digital humanities ”

Colloquium organized by Alexandre Gefen (CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle), Glenn Roe (Sorbonne-Université), Ayla Rigouts Terryn (Université de Montréal) and Michael Sinatra (Université de Montréal).

In association with l’Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus (ObTIC), Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) et Huma-Num.

Program

Wednesday, July 3, 2025 @ Paris Institute for Advanced Study

9:30–9:45 AM: Welcome remarks by the organizers
9:45–10:45 AM: Keynote Lecture by Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta), “Care and Repair for Responsibility Practices in Artificial Intelligence”

10:45–11:45 AM: Session #1 (Chair: Alexandre Gefen)

• Marie Puren and Aurélien Pellet (EPITA), “Understanding Without Betrayal: What Guarantees Can Historians Expect from Large Language Models?”
• Frédéric Clavert (University of Luxembourg), “The End of the Historian-Programmer?”

11:45 AM–12:15 PM: Coffee break

12:15–1:15 PM: Session #2 (Chair: Ayla Rigouts Terryn)

• Emile Provendier (IR* Huma-Num), “Comparing Learning Methodologies Across Language Models: Implementing Verlan Logic in a Machine”
• Liliane Hodieb, Bastien Sepúlveda, Peter Stockinger (INALCO), “Generative AI and the LaCAS Platform for Area Studies Research: Contributions and Challenges”

1:15–2:15 PM: Lunch break

2:15–3:15 PM: Session #3 (Chair: Michael Sinatra)

• Jim Gabaret (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), “Autopsy of the Author by Generative AI: Introspection, Perpetuation of the Authorial Persona, and New Creative Modalities through Literary Journals, Correspondence, and Digital Recordings”
• Marcello Vitali-Rosati (University of Montreal), “Can Human Beings Think?”

3:15–3:45 PM: Coffee break

3:45–4:45 PM: Session #4 (Chair: Glenn Roe)

• Morgan Blangeois (Université Clermont Auvergne, CLERMA), Naïs Sabatier (Université Clermont Auvergne, PHIER), Aurelia Vasile (Université Clermont Auvergne, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme), and Henri Galinon (Université Clermont Auvergne, PHIER), “Exploring the Emergence of Economic Science in the Encyclopédie Using LLMs: Feedback from the Encycloscope 2.0 Project”
• Jordi Brahamcha-Marin and Elsa Courant (CNRS / CELLF), “From Prompting to Fine-Tuning: Reflections on the Use of LLMs for a Digital Edition of the Bibliographie de la France (19th Century)”

Friday, July 4, 2025 @ Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, Amphi 55B

9:00–10:00 AM: Session #5 (Chair: Alexandre Gefen)

• Marie Petitjean (CY Cergy Paris University), “Generative Theories of Literature and LLMs: ‘Setting the Answers’ of ChatGPT with Milène Tournier”
• Bertrand Gervais (UQAM), “From Intelligence to Artificial Imagination: Understanding the New Agents of Digital Culture”

10:00–10:30 AM: Coffee break

10:30 AM–12:00 PM: Session #6 (Chair: Michael Sinatra)

• Alexandre Gefen (CNRS), Antoine Sylvestre de Sacy, and Marc Allassonnière-Tang (National Museum of Natural History), “The Representation of Gender in French Novels Through the Lens of AI”
  Irène Langlet (Université Gustave Eiffel) and Adam Faci (CNRS) (with Marianne Chamboux and Fayçal Salhi), “‘Hundreds of Canons’: How Manual and Automatic Tagging on Social Webs Reshape Literary Corpora”
• Simon Bréan (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Adam Faci (CNRS), Julien Schuh (Université Paris Nanterre), “‘AI Reading Club’: Teaching AI Agents to Read ‘in Genre’”

12:00–1:00 PM: Lunch break

1:00–2:30 PM: Session #7 (Chair: Ayla Rigouts Terryn)

• Claire Larsonneur (Université Paris 8), “What Kind of AI for Translators? Challenging Common Assumptions”
• Jean-Philippe Magué (ENS Lyon), “Towards a Critical Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence in the Humanities and Social Sciences”
• Katherine McDonough (Lancaster University), “LLMs and Historical Learning”

2:30–3:00 PM: Coffee break

3:00–4:00 PM: Session #8 (Chair: Glenn Roe)

• Riccardo Barontini (ALTER) and Johanna Cordova (ERTIM), “Ecopoetics and LLMs: Analyzing Figurative Uses of Biodiversity in Contemporary Fiction”
• Baptiste Bohet (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Nicole Vincent (Université Paris Cité), “The Littéroscope Platform: Proposing a New Approach to Literary Analysis Using Language Models”

4:00–4:15 PM: Closing remarks by the organizers

Thank you for filling out this form to register for the conference and gain access to the buildings.

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Large Language Models (LLMs)—whether widely-used, highly-aligned systems like ChatGPT or open-source alternatives—have, in just a few years, demonstrated remarkable capacities for translating, analyzing, rewriting, synthesizing documents, and even generating computer code. They have established themselves as revolutionary tools for augmenting our linguistic and cognitive capabilities. Digital Humanities (DH), which have long employed machine learning-based tools (such as text clustering, topic modeling, embeddings, and vectorial analyses), are now faced with a new question: how might LLMs be used within the field? What traditional tasks can they undertake, and what new forms of analysis might they enable? Beyond their utility for tasks such as named entity recognition or sentiment analysis, these models seem poised to facilitate unprecedented or significantly accelerated textual analyses—character identification, classification of texts based on narrative modalities, thematic analysis, and more. They also offer substantial efficiencies for tasks like scripting or creating visualizations through AI-driven code capacities. Looking further ahead, tools such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation or fine-tuning suggest the possibility of engaging directly with texts through question-and-answer modalities, opening up a whole new domain of innovative analysis—not to mention the potential to generate images informed by textual analysis. At the same time, these practices raise concerns, particularly around the biases inherent in LLMs and the challenges they pose to interpretablitiy, explainability and falsifiability, given their tendency to produce ‘hallucinations’.

This conference aims to explore these horizons by welcoming both general reflections and innovative experiments.