How AI interprets history: New sandpit project investigates application of AI to analyze genocide tribunal archives
Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft is funding the project "Interpreting Atrocities at Scale: AI, International Criminal Trials, and the Making of History" as part of its sandpit program on the annual theme "big data". The project brings together researchers from history, international criminal law, the digital humanities, and informatics. The aim is to use a clearly defined area of research to investigate how artificial intelligence is changing historical knowledge production and remembrance culture.
How do AI systems evaluate large digital archives of international criminal proceedings and what are the consequences for the public’s understanding of historical violent crimes? To answer this question, the researchers are analyzing archives from the Nuremberg Trials, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
“More and more people are using AI as a source of information but it’s not yet clear how these systems process historical sources and what narratives they derive from them,” says Daniel Stahl, a historian and one of the two project spokespersons. International criminal trials document events in detail but only from a legal perspective. “However, we know from many research projects that case records cannot reproduce complex historical realities, and we are testing how AI systems deal with this problem,” says Stahl’s co-spokesperson, the historian Roman Birke. The researchers intend to study whether and how AI models glean historical knowledge from court documents, what distortions occur, and how this influences remembrance culture.
The sandpit will bring together experts from a range of different disciplines to carry out a series of AI experiments. On the one hand, they will analyze how leading AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini present knowledge concerning international criminal trials. On the other, they will test how AI tools developed specifically for the sandpit workshop process millions of pages of historical trial documents and whether they can identify complex connections in the sources.
The experiments will form the basis of an interdisciplinary sandpit discussion from September 14 to 16, 2026 in Nuremberg. The workshop will be international, with researchers from Germany, the UK, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United States taking part. The aim is for the project to lead to follow-on academic activities, including a peer-reviewed publication at the intersection of history and the digital humanities, and a more accessible article aimed at the general public.
Academic contacts
- Daniel Stahl, Senior Researcher attached to the Chair in Modern and Contemporary History, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, daniel.stahl@fau.de
- Roman Birke, Assistant Professor in Modern European History, Dublin City University,
roman.birke@dcu.ie
The sandpit program
Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft’s sandpit program promotes novel, interdisciplinary research approaches to topics that are of relevance to society and its future. In a creative workshop format, researchers from different disciplines work together to develop new perspectives, research questions, and collaborative projects.
The Foundation
Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft is a private grant-making foundation based in Berlin. It aims to strengthen Germany’s position as a science and research hub by supporting outstanding academics at various career stages.