2025 Fall DLC: History Lab AI: A New Way to Explore a Vast Corpus of Declassified Documents

This session will provide a deep dive into History Lab AI, a free research tool built on a corpus of more than 5 million declassified government documents. The project’s mission is to make historical records more accessible by enabling natural language and embedding-based search, offering a powerful alternative to traditional keyword methods. We will discuss the philosophy behind this approach, practical differences in search experiences, and principles of retrieval-augmented generation. Attendees will be encouraged to try the tool in real time, ask questions, and share feedback.