Querying the Archived Web with an AI Assistant
This presentation explores using an AI assistant to help historians query the archived web. Taking a postphenomenological approach, it focuses on question-driven discovery rather than data-centred exploration. The project examines how humanities research questions can be turned into prompts that guide large language models to identify relevant documents, while ensuring traceability through source links or IDs and assessing performance across large corpora and different models. Presented at the IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference held on April 20-23, 2026 in Brusells, Belgium.