When Archive Meets A.I. – Computational Humanities Research on a Danish Secular Saint

The allure of speaking on behalf of a dead personality or scholar is a constant impulse among their respective followers. Every now and then questions like “what would x think about the world we live in?” or “what did x exactly meant with this argument?” are thrown in debate rooms, the political arena, or specialized conferences on the relevance of a certain scholar. And while the answers to these questions continue to fill up edited volumes, social media feeds, or inspirational quotes for the day, the accuracy of these statements remain to be proven by the very persons who uttered them in the first place.

Fortunately, we are growing closer to a solution to this conundrum with the increasing development of artificial intelligence (a.i.). In this week’s podcast, Katrine Frøkjaer Baunvig discusses preliminary results from the research project “Waking the Dead”. This project aims to build an a.i. bot of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), a Danish “secular saint” considered to be the father of modern Denmark, who contributed immensely into generating a national consciousness through his writings, both in a political and religious way.

Professor Baunvig explains how the research team went through by using the digitized works of Grundtvig with machine learning, into developing and algorithm and training it with the whole work corpus. Then they used word embedding to build semantic networks -a sort of conceptual blueprint for outlining Grundtvig’s worldview- and contextualized them using digitized newspapers of the time when he was alive. The expected result is to place the a.i. Grundtvig bot inside a look-alike robot that can interact with people in public settings such as the Danish National Museum by September 2022, the year of his 150th deathday.

The anthropological, sociological and philosophical reflections these future interactions with the public will be of much interest once we find out what people have to say about the accuracy of thought of this “resurrected” Danish thinker, but also, what this version of “Grundtvig” has to say about the current state of affairs of Danish society, and the world overall. Regardless of the result, one thing is for sure, both sides will honor Grundtvig’s idea of the “living word”: using the spoken act of communication as the best means to convey each other’s ideas.