Mark Humphries
Professor
Faculty of Arts
History
Waterloo, Ontario
mhumphries@wlu.ca
Office:
(548) 889-5054
Expert In
Languages
English
Bio/Research
I’ve published seven books and more than two dozen articles on Canadian, military, and health history supported by more than $1.5 million in external funding. I have more than twenty years experience working in digital history, including the Through Veterans Eyes project which digitized more than...
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Bio/Research
I’ve published seven books and more than two dozen articles on Canadian, military, and health history supported by more than $1.5 million in external funding. I have more than twenty years experience working in digital history, including the Through Veterans Eyes project which digitized more than 10 million pages of First World War veterans’ files in partnership with Veterans Affairs Canada. Since 2020 I have been developing new digital approaches to the history of the North American fur trade, seeking to use AI to trace individuals across massive source bases that include parish records, account books, fur trade post journals, legal records, and correspondence. By exploring this specific application of AI to a historical research problem, I am trying to develop a broadly applicable research stack for use in the social sciences and humanities.
I began working in machine-learning almost two decades ago when I trained an ABBYY FineReader model to accurately read German Fraktur script. My current research focuses on applying the use of artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, to historical practice to understand how knowledge work is likely to evolve and change over time. I’ve fine-tune models (primarily from OpenAI and Llama) to improve accuracy on domain specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) and summarization tasks. I’ve also developed domain specific Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that surface 95-98% of relevant documents on proprietorial validation sets. I build open-source software that lets historians transcribe and analyze handwritten historical documents and maintain the Historical Handwritten Text Recognition (HHTR) benchmark which tracks LLM progress on recognizing historical handwriting without fine-tuning.
I’ve developed one of the first certificate programs in Generative AI and teach courses on AI to undergraduates through our digital humanities program and graduate students at the Balsillie school of International Affairs. write a popular substack called Generative History, publish articles in peer-reviewed journals, and maintain several open-source repositories on GitHub. My research has also been featured in the Verge, University Affairs, on the Cognitive Revolution podcast, and I regularly speak to academic and public audiences across Canada and the United States.
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I began working in machine-learning almost two decades ago when I trained an ABBYY FineReader model to accurately read German Fraktur script. My current research focuses on applying the use of artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, to historical practice to understand how knowledge work is likely to evolve and change over time. I’ve fine-tune models (primarily from OpenAI and Llama) to improve accuracy on domain specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) and summarization tasks. I’ve also developed domain specific Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that surface 95-98% of relevant documents on proprietorial validation sets. I build open-source software that lets historians transcribe and analyze handwritten historical documents and maintain the Historical Handwritten Text Recognition (HHTR) benchmark which tracks LLM progress on recognizing historical handwriting without fine-tuning.
I’ve developed one of the first certificate programs in Generative AI and teach courses on AI to undergraduates through our digital humanities program and graduate students at the Balsillie school of International Affairs. write a popular substack called Generative History, publish articles in peer-reviewed journals, and maintain several open-source repositories on GitHub. My research has also been featured in the Verge, University Affairs, on the Cognitive Revolution podcast, and I regularly speak to academic and public audiences across Canada and the United States.
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Media Relations
Aonghus Kealy
Communications and Media Relations Officer
akealy@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4855
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Communications and Media Relations Officer
akealy@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4855
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Media Relations
Aonghus Kealy
Communications and Media Relations Officer
akealy@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4855
Lori Chalmers Morrison
Director: Integrated Communications
lchalmersmorrison@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4857
Vanessa Barrasa
Director: Communications & Issues Management
vbarrasa@wlu.ca
(548) 889-3812
Brantford Campus:
Beth Gurney
Director, Strategic Communications and Community Engagement
bgurney@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4199
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Communications and Media Relations Officer
akealy@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4855
Lori Chalmers Morrison
Director: Integrated Communications
lchalmersmorrison@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4857
Vanessa Barrasa
Director: Communications & Issues Management
vbarrasa@wlu.ca
(548) 889-3812
Brantford Campus:
Beth Gurney
Director, Strategic Communications and Community Engagement
bgurney@wlu.ca
(548) 889-4199
Click to Shrink <<