Dr Ian McCrabb1
1University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Ian McCrabb is the founder and managing director of Systemik (systemiksolutions.com), a Sydney based IT consulting group focused on open-source digital humanities platforms and research sites. Since its establishment in 1994, he has led the design, development and commercialization of consulting methodologies, web technologies and content transformation services: adapting the organizations operational models to map to rapidly evolving web content management platforms and strategies across manufacturing, finance and the public sector.
Systemik is an innovative Consulting Group and Digital Humanities Lab. We design, develop, implement and support research solutions for humanities projects: open-source platforms, infrastructure integration, APIs, and website content management. Our focus is the realisation of effective, engaging and sustainable digital research.
Systemik currently supports a portfolio of humanities research platforms, web content management solutions and associated consulting and support services. Our solutions are clustered around content transformation and relationship graphing with integrated models for text analysis, mapping and image annotation. Systemik forte is the realisation of elite scholarship as immersive and engaging research experiences.
Ian is the founder and director of Prakaś Foundation (prakas.org), a non-profit association established in 2005 to support digital scholarship in Buddhist studies and Sanskritic languages. Prakaś provides funding, strategic planning and program management for platform developments.
Ian completed his MA in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies at the University of Sydney in 2010. His 2021 PhD dissertation 'Buddha Bodies and the Benefits of Relic Establishment: Insights from a Digital Framework for the Analysis of Formulaic Sequences in Gāndhārī Relic Inscriptions' continued his focus on methodologies for the analysis of donative inscriptions and characterization of the ritual practices and religious significance of relic establishment in Gandhāra.
Abstract:
The significance of generative AI for humanities research methods is poorly understood, and greatly underestimated—generally limited to anecdotes about where it makes mistakes and how students are using it to cheat.
The affordances are quite astonishing. Where AI can generate near perfect Sanskrit, translate and analyse grammar expertly then research practice has changed radically. Where AI acts as a master’s level assistant able to instantly research, collate, analyse, and present, then then the practice of a digital humanist has changed radically.
The methodological challenge is what to ask, how to ask it, and how to validate responses. As humanities researchers, we are ground truth. We need to engage with generative AI is as active collaborators rather than passive consumers—building workflows that accept or reject outputs, embedding emendations back into model training to align with scholarly standards.
This presentation will explore how generative AI is being integrated across a range of humanities research workbenches we support:
Glycerine, a IIIF annotation workbench: has integrated an open-source Image AI and IIIF annotation pipeline, supporting iterative, scalable workflows for training models in image segmentation, captioning, and semantic tagging.
TLCMap, a workbench for mapping history and culture: has implemented an open-source mapping pipeline to extract and geolocate Australian place names from large texts. Researchers can review, amend, and validate results.
Omeka S, a graph-based content management system: we are designing modules that embed writing, translation, annotation, and visualisation tasks—powered by generative AI—directly into researcher workflows.