The Connected History Project (CHiP) seeks to develop a novel approach to working with historical archive material in digital scholarship through the creation of a web-based research platform. Expanding on results from the MIT Czech Republic Seed Fund, the project is intended to serve as a prototype and test case for developing innovative computational components, processes, and procedures for working with digitized historical sources.
Using the historical example of the implementation of the controlled economy in the Kladno district during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 1939–1945, CHiP integrates state-of-the-art digital tools including databases, machine learning, multilingual NLP, historical GIS, GenAI, and machine translation. The results and insights from this project will enable scholarly processes in digital historiography to be abstracted and applied to other research contexts, thus functioning as a model for shifting the boundaries of digital scholarship.
