Historians

Research and prepare manuscripts in support of public programming and the development of exhibits at historic sites, museums, libraries, and archives.

AI: Fully automatable - AI can research, synthesize sources, and draft manuscripts, labels, and interpretive texts for public programming and exhibits to a publication-ready standard, with humans typically reviewing rather than creating from scratch.

Present historical accounts in terms of individuals or social, ethnic, political, economic, or geographic groupings.

AI: Fully automatable - AI can generate coherent historical narratives framed by individuals, social groups, politics, economics, or geography and adapt accounts to different interpretive perspectives.

Research the history of a particular country or region, or of a specific time period.

AI: Fully automatable - AI can comprehensively survey literature, synthesize primary and secondary sources, and produce well-structured research on a country, region, or period, providing high-quality historical overviews and summaries.

Organize information for publication and for other means of dissemination, such as use in CD-ROMs or Internet sites.

AI: Fully automatable - Organizing content, creating metadata, formatting for web or multimedia and generating site assets are tasks AI can fully perform reliably by 2025 with minimal human input.

Translate or request translation of reference materials.

AI: Fully automatable - By 2025 LLMs and translation models can reliably translate many reference materials and can orchestrate workflows to request human translators when needed.

Conserve and preserve manuscripts, records, and other artifacts.

AI: Partial - AI can support conservation by diagnosing conditions, recommending treatments, and managing digital preservation workflows, but cannot perform the hands-on physical treatments and tactile decision-making required for preserving artifacts.

Gather historical data from sources such as archives, court records, diaries, news files, and photographs, as well as collect data sources such as books, pamphlets, and periodicals.

AI: Partial - AI excels at digitizing, indexing, OCR, and extracting historical data from many sources, but it is limited by paywalled/restricted archives and cannot physically retrieve non-digitized materials without human intervention.

Conduct historical research as a basis for the identification, conservation, and reconstruction of historic places and materials.

AI: Partial - AI can analyze sources, generate reconstructions and conservation plans using digital models, but final identification and physical conservation/reconstruction decisions require expert human oversight and field validation.

Organize data, and analyze and interpret its authenticity and relative significance.

AI: Partial - AI can organize data and flag provenance issues or inconsistencies, but reliably judging authenticity and relative historical significance still requires expert contextual evaluation and often material analysis.

Conduct historical research, and publish or present findings and theories.

AI: Partial - AI can perform much of the research, drafting, and presentation work and even propose hypotheses, but original interpretive scholarship, archival discovery work, and scholarly validation remain areas requiring human researchers and peer review.

Recommend actions related to historical art, such as which items to add to a collection or which items to display in an exhibit.

AI: Partial - AI can analyze collections, visitor data, and provenance to recommend acquisitions or displays, but curatorial, ethical, and cultural-value judgments need human decision-makers.

Determine which topics to research, or pursue research topics specified by clients or employers.

AI: Partial - By 2025 AI can analyze literature, citation gaps, funding trends and stakeholders to propose and prioritize research topics, but final selection and strategic judgement still require human historians.

Speak to various groups, organizations, and clubs to promote the aims and activities of historical societies.

AI: Partial - AI can write speeches, generate presentation materials and even deliver virtual talks, but live outreach, in-person rapport-building and local representation remain predominantly human tasks.

Edit historical society publications.

AI: Partial - AI can copyedit, standardize style, flag factual inconsistencies and suggest revisions, but final editorial judgement and interpretive decisions remain human responsibilities.

Advise or consult with individuals and institutions regarding issues such as the historical authenticity of materials or the customs of a specific historical period.

AI: Partial - AI can cross-check provenance, stylistic and textual evidence and flag likely issues, but physical authentication of materials and nuanced expert judgement about customs still require human/expert and laboratory work.

Trace historical development in a particular field, such as social, cultural, political, or diplomatic history.

AI: Partial - AI can synthesize large corpora to trace developments and produce coherent narratives, but interpretations, framing and handling ambiguous/contested evidence benefit from human historian judgment.

Prepare publications and exhibits, or review those prepared by others, to ensure their historical accuracy.

AI: Partial - AI can draft exhibit text, perform automated fact checks against digitized sources and suggest layouts, but final curation and authoritative accuracy verification need expert oversight.

Interview people to gather information about historical events and to record oral histories.

AI: Partial - AI can conduct structured oral-history interviews (text or voice), transcribe and index them, but establishing trust, ethical consent and sensitive follow‑up in many contexts require human interviewers.

Collect detailed information on individuals for use in biographies.

AI: Partial - AI can aggregate public records, newspapers and digitized archives to compile biographical detail rapidly, but gaps in non-digitized sources, verification and ethical/privacy decisions need human work.

Coordinate activities of workers engaged in cataloging and filing materials.

AI: Partial - AI can automate scheduling, task assignment, tracking and provide procedural guidance for cataloging, but on-site supervision, conflict resolution and some coordination duties still need human managers.

Teach and conduct research in colleges, universities, museums, and other research agencies and schools.

AI: Partial - AI can generate lectures, course materials, literature reviews, and research drafts but cannot fully replace the human roles of pedagogy, mentorship, fieldwork coordination, and scholarly leadership.