Mediation of Artificial Intelligence in Digitizing Bibliographies of Secondary Sources in Historical Research
Description
Secondary sources are relevant sources of historical research. These are journal articles, books, newspapers and encyclopedias. Secondary sources published at regular intervals are documented in the form of bibliographies for easy consultation by historians. However, accessing these sources has always been cumbersome as they are in hardcopy format and kept in the shelves of libraries that only few researchers or historians can access them. More time is spent in the acquisition of list of literature needed to conduct research being the predicament that confronted scholars for decades. The essence of this paper is to discuss the meditative role of artificial intelligence in digitizing bibliographies of secondary sources of historical research. The method adopted for this study is historical methodology and the use of secondary sources such as books, journal articles and internet sources for data collection. The findings shows that Artificial Intelligence, with its powerful data processing capabilities, can aid digitization of bibliographies of secondary sources through automatic extraction of cited information from the web of research papers and articles, formatted into a standardized citation style and included into a digital bibliography database. It concludes that online bibliographies related to history can now be accessed easily unlike before, while historians focus on interpretation and analysis rather than tedious data collection. The study recommends the need for historians to build a digital culture needed in the utilization of AI for historical research