Technical Workshop
The AI-Powered Archive: Querying History with NotebookLM
Learn to use NotebookLM to analyze primary source documents, synthesize historical materials, and generate research insights from archival collections.
In this hands-on workshop, you will bring 5-10 sources related to your own MA or PhD research and use Google’s NotebookLM to interrogate them. NotebookLM is a research-focused AI tool that allows you to upload documents — PDFs, articles, book chapters, archival materials — and then query them conversationally, generate summaries, identify connections across sources, and even produce audio overviews.
The goal is not simply to learn the tool but to critically evaluate it. We will test NotebookLM’s ability to handle non-English sources, assess the accuracy of its summaries against your own expert knowledge of the material, and examine what gets lost or distorted when AI mediates the research process. What kinds of questions does NotebookLM answer well, and where does it mislead? How does it handle ambiguity, contradiction, and nuance in your sources? What does it mean to “query” an archive through an AI interface rather than reading it yourself?
By the end of this workshop, you should have both a practical sense of how NotebookLM can support (or hinder) your research workflow and a critical framework for evaluating AI research tools more broadly.