Exciting news have lately arrived: I was awarded a grant by DIGI-K & Research Council of Uni Bern for developing a proof-of-concept for MobileMinds.AI.
The idea of MigratingMinds.AI emerges from my ongoing SNSF postdoc project devoted to mapping Christian networks and mobility during the first state orchestrated persecution of Christians during Decian (250-1 CE).
Although this project explores ‘only’ a comparably small corpus of 81 letters associated with Cyprian, bishop and martyr of Carthage, it faces the same two problems as any written sources based study of networks and mobility of the later Roman world face: the difficulty to spot mobile persons in the sources, and, the magnitude of available source material.
The guiding question is therefore: How can one spot nearly ‘invisible’ mobile persons buried somewhere in 200 folio volumes?
This challenge requires a fundamentally new approach. MigratingMinds.AI proposes to harness the potential of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) and aims to develop the proof of concept (PoC) that a state-of-the-art machine learning is able to automatically recognise mobile persons in large Latin corpora.
Stay tuned—exciting things are about to happen!