Mediation of Artificial Intelligence in Digitizing Bibliographies of Secondary Sources in Historical Research

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

二手史料是历史研究的重要相关资料来源，涵盖期刊论文、专著、报纸与百科全书。定期刊行的二手史料通常以书目形式进行著录，以便历史学家查阅。然而，此类资料多以纸质印刷版形式馆藏于图书馆书架中，仅少数研究者或历史学家可获取，因此查阅始终十分繁琐。数十年来，学者们始终面临一项长期困扰的困境：需耗费大量时间用于梳理与搜集研究所需的文献清单。本文旨在探讨人工智能（Artificial Intelligence）在历史研究二手史料书目数字化进程中的辅助作用。本研究采用历史研究方法论，并通过专著、期刊论文及网络资源等二手史料开展数据采集工作。研究结果表明，人工智能凭借强大的数据处理能力，可通过自动从研究论文与学术文献网络中提取被引信息，将其格式化为标准化引用格式并录入数字书目数据库，从而助力历史研究二手史料书目的数字化工作。研究结论显示，如今历史相关在线书目已可便捷获取，历史学家无需再将精力耗费在繁琐的数据采集环节，可将重心转向史料的解读与分析。本研究建议，历史学家应培育适配历史研究中人工智能应用的数字文化素养。