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NEWS: Professor Nirmala Menon visits the Lab

Lab member Professor Nirmala Menon (Indian Institute of Technology Indore) visited the Lab at Regent’s Park College in September 2026, in the days before the DARIAH conference in Brighton (28 September to 1 October 2026). The visit started a new phase in the collaboration around two strands of joint work: work on an edited volume DH’ing: Mining Multilingual Methods (edited by Nirmala Menon and Pieter François) and a set of projects on multilingual research infrastructures for the Arts and Humanities.

NEWS: Hong Kong Baptist University delegation visits the Lab

On 26 June 2026 the Lab welcomed a delegation from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) to Regent’s Park College: Professor Daniel Lai, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Zhou Jiajia (Academy of Wellness and Human Development) and Ms Alice Wong (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), joined online from Hong Kong by Professor Wong Man Kong, historian of HKBU and of British Baptist missionaries in China. The visit followed Professor Pieter François’s keynote lecture at HKBU in March and brought the two institutions together around a shared interest in the digital humanities, AI and the history of the Baptist world.

The afternoon began in the Angus Library and Archive, the College’s internationally important collection on the history of the Baptist movement, where the archivists gave the visitors a private tour and showed a selection of some twenty items on China from the 1840s to the 1950s: letters, pamphlets, photographs, manuals and testimonies, drawn from more than thirty running metres of material on China that has hardly been used and that digital humanities methods can now open up.

Back in the meeting room, the Director introduced the Lab, presented the Seshat Global History Databank and the Lab’s benchmarking of large language models on historical knowledge, and gave an overview of the Lab’s wider portfolio: from generational patterns in authorship and

Indigenous Peoples and the CARE principles to the Neo-Alexandria digital library, AI for lesson plans, the Great Divergence and the AI Historian, empires in comparative perspective, and the AI Diplomat. Four Lab members then showcased current projects:

Sabbir Saown – Religion, Power, Time: an exploratory instrument for comparing religious coercion across history and the present day, built on the religious-tolerance variables of the Seshat Global History Databank and the Pew Research Center’s indices (with Enrico Cioni, Dr Rachel Ainsworth and Pieter François).
Dr Matilda Peruzzo – The Estimator project: modelling historical diffusion from geographic characteristics, testing the Diamond and Bates hypotheses on how crops, animals and technologies spread.
Jianing (Brian) Shi – Exploring travel history through the AI Historian: a case study on 668 nineteenth-century British travel books, in which an AI system extracts the places visited and reconstructs itineraries to ask whether mass travel really made journeys uniform.
Dr Giovanna Di Martino – The Data/Culture project: building sustainable scholarly communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and software.

The talks were followed by a discussion of how the two institutions can work together on digital humanities projects, including the Angus Library’s China material, and the day closed with drinks and a private dinner hosted by the Principal, Sir Malcolm Evans, at the Principal’s Lodge.

NEWS: Religious tolerance as a deep driver of resilient societies: talk at the Boniuk Institute

Lab Director Professor Pieter François took part in the Boniuk Institute’s Spring Convening at Rice University, Houston, on 27–29 May 2026. The convening brought together some thirty scholars, community leaders and practitioners from around the world on the theme ‘Religious Conflict and Religious Pluralism in Public Life: Towards a New Agenda’. Professor François presented Religious Tolerance and Societal Stability: a deep driver analysis, a proposal for an edited volume that draws on the Lab’s Religious Tolerance strand and on the dataset of more than 60 religious-tolerance variables for over 700 historical societies assembled by the FCDO-funded Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network.

NEWS: Keynote lecture at Hong Kong Baptist University: AI and World History

Lab Director Professor Pieter François gave a keynote lecture, AI and World History, at the 3rd International Symposium on Humanities and Culture, hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong and Zhuhai on 18–20 March 2026. The lecture, on the afternoon of 18 March, introduced the Seshat Global History Databank, the Lab’s flagship resource of over 1,500 variables on 47 time series of past societies from the Neolithic to the twentieth century, built with a network of more than 700 historians.

NEWS: New Databases and Testing Theories of Social Evolution
Lab members Matilda Peruzzo and Pieter François attended two workshops (11-14 November 2025) on databases and testing theories of social evolution organised by long-term collaborator Peter Turchin at the Complexity Science Hub – Vienna.