The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) launched its new Data Research Center (DRC) in November, consolidating the institute’s information science resources and introducing a digital component to help researchers research, analyze, and visualize the archives more effectively.
Since its founding in 1919, ISAC—a research institute at UChicago focused on the study of ancient West Asia and North Africa—has primarily relied on analog methods to document excavations and conduct research. By employing new data analysis tools, the center aims to help students and faculty push the frontiers of contemporary scholarship.
“With powerful analytical, computational tools like AI, we can analyze high-quality, diverse data that’s been very carefully curated,” ISAC Director and professor of Near Eastern archaeology Timothy Harrison told the Maroon. “It enables us to engage in research that wasn’t possible to imagine before.”
AI will be used to synthesize and model language-based and archaeological data in ways that enable users to draw their own conclusions. For example, Foy Scalf, the director of the DRC, explained that AI could map regions where a certain term was used and layer a chronological framework to demonstrate how the word developed across time and space.
The center will support ongoing faculty and student projects, serving as a facilitator between academia and the programming realm. The initiative began roughly two years ago, and the idea received overwhelmingly positive feedback from stakeholders, according to Scalf. As it enters its next phase, the DRC is hiring a web application developer to help researchers leverage the new tools effectively.
The center is also collaborating with departments across the University to advance interdisciplinary research in the biological and physical sciences, Harrison explained.
As home to one of the largest repositories of knowledge on the past 15,000 years of human history, ISAC can be a resource for studying topics ranging from urbanization to genetics to climate change.
For example, ISAC is partnering with an atmospheric physicist at another university who creates simulations of global climate models using supercomputers. “They’re very interested in testing their models against the data sets that we have, because their basic empirical data is climate and weather patterns from the past 100 or 200 years,” Harrison said. “We can bring into the conversation thousands of years of carefully archived and processed data about very specific places and periods of time.”
By collaborating with additional campus partners, including the Forum for Digital Culture, UChicago IT Services, the UChicago Library, and the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation, Scalf explained, ISAC also seeks to steward a robust digital infrastructure that can evolve. “You can’t just put something online and then stop working on it,” he said. “Our [Assyrian] dictionary took 90 years to complete, so we’re looking ahead to the next century.”
Both Harrison and Scalf believe that the DRC will build on ISAC’s previous attempts to manage its vast quantities of information about the ancient world. In 1933, ISAC’s founder, James Henry Breasted, proposed the Archaeological Corpus Project, a card catalogue that was an early version of what is today called a database. “In the 21st century, databases, online platforms, artificial intelligence—all this kind of stuff is at the cutting edge, so we’re trying to continue ISAC’s legacy,” Scalf said.
During Breasted’s tenure, ISAC acquired artifacts through partage and colonial mandates, but it pivoted toward research and fieldwork after World War II. According to Harrison, ISAC’s archives comprise multimedia items including paper field records, biological artifacts, material culture, and even data from remote sensing and satellite imagery.
Now, the information ISAC has amassed over the past century—which includes millions of physical notecards—has to be digitized. Scalf explained that ISAC’s physical documents are scanned with simple flatbed scanners and feeders before undergoing optical character recognition (OCR), which makes the text searchable and machine-readable.
However, because many ancient languages, such as cuneiform, include unique diacritics and stylings, past technology has not always produced accurate results. Researchers have struggled to manage the volume of information. “It’s very hard to control 45,000 ancient texts, all in your mind, or even in a spreadsheet or book,” Scalf said.
AI provides a new solution to organize this massive data corpus and can enhance OCR accuracy. While many users interact with AI in a simple question-and-answer format, for Scalf, its innovation lies in its ability to organize and model information.
“People often think that we’ll just teach AI to understand ancient texts, but to me, that’s so boring,” he said. “It’s part of the romantic beauty of what we do—you have a 1,000-year-old document that nobody’s ever read, and you get to read it first.”
Most of ISAC’s discussions about responsible AI usage focus on protecting intellectual property and promoting open access. “We want to be publicly accessible, but, if we throw everything out there, big tech companies might find commercial applications for it, at the potential expense of our researchers,” Harrison said. “I don’t think we have ready answers for all of these questions, but I think the DRC will help us deal with them.”
Scalf views the project as part of a wider movement to use developing technologies as a supplement—not a replacement—for traditional scholarship.
“I think we’re aligning ourselves with the larger goals of the University, and it’s very prescient,” he said. “All three University leaders [involved]—our director of the museum [Marc Maillot], the library dean [Torsten Reimer], and the University president [Paul Alivisatos]—see that academia and the humanities need to have a seat at the table if we want to negotiate the challenges that we’re going to face as new technology spreads.”
Scalf and Harrison agreed that the demand for new skill sets will influence how students are trained across fields, creating the potential for exciting connections. “If we have atmospheric physicists and archeologists and historians and language people working together, and each of these disciplines have their own culture, it’s almost like a different language,” Harrison said. “If I was a student, that nexus is where I’d want to be, because it’s pure discovery.”
Editor’s note, January 13, 11:12 a.m.: The director of the ISAC Museum is Marc Maillot. A previous version of this article misidentified the museum director as Timothy Harrison.
