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Lookup NU author(s): Dr James CummingsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
This article explores the evolving landscape of digital scholarly editing, focusing especially on the impact for scholarly editing of recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) as a transformative technology that significantly accelerates the transcription of historical documents and promises to expand access to archives that were previously accessible only in person by those with palaeographic training. However, the article argues for caution against uncritical adoption of AI in scholarly editing workflows, emphasising the crucial role of human editors in ensuring accuracy, addressing inherent biases, and maintaining a human-centred approach to digital scholarship. The article investigates both the potential and limitations of AI in scholarly tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), text parsing, collation of multiple witnesses, analysis of allusion and re-use and document summarisation, arguing for a collaborative model where human expertise complements, rather than is replaced by, AI tools. The article advocates for a thoughtful integration of AI into scholarly workflows, prioritising accuracy, transparency, and the preservation of essential editorial judgement.
Author(s): Cummings James
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Philologia Hispalensis
Year: 2025
Volume: 39
Issue: 2
Pages: 179-199
Print publication date: 06/11/2025
Online publication date: 06/11/2025
Acceptance date: 23/04/2025
Date deposited: 06/11/2025
ISSN (print): 1132-0265
ISSN (electronic): 2253-8321
Publisher: Universidad De Sevilla
URL: https://doi.org/10.12795/PH.2025.v39.i02.07
DOI: 10.12795/PH.2025.v39.i02.07
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