Our Next Forum

April 19, 1pm: Regenstein Library 122

Peter K. Bol, Carswell Professor of EALC, Harvard University and Jeffrey Tharsen, Associate Director of Technology, Forum for Digital Culture, University of Chicago

AI as UI: MARKUS and GPT-4 for Chinese Historical Analysis (CBDB)

The China Biographical Database Project (CBDB, online at projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb) takes as its stated goal “to include all significant biographical material from China’s historical record and to make the contents available free of charge, without restriction, for academic use.”  Despite its extensive and valuable contents, the CBDB has generally only been available to those who can manipulate it as a database (either in Access or SQLite) or via its programmatic API.  Since 2015, the MARKUS project (dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus) has been working to create lookup and filtering tools and make the CBDB data available via its text auto-tagger. Recent work has now led to the CBDB database becoming available as a backend in OpenAI’s web-based GPT user interface, via which users can use “natural language queries” to explore the data, generate charts and graphs, and even auto-generate code in a wide variety of programming languages (e.g. Python, HTML, Javascript) to produce advanced visualizations like dashboards and networks, animated maps and a wide range of data analytical representations.

If you need any assistance to participate in the Forum, please contact Carmen Caswell (caswellc@uchicago.edu)