Speaker: Prof Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo
Abstract: Each new layer of mediation between us and the historical record, from the finding aid to the digitized database to the language model, provides seemingly more comprehensive answers than the one before it. In so doing, however, it has made the limits of the record harder to see. Tools have struggled to reveal what information they have not retrieved.
Those gaps are rarely neutral, and AI deepens them. A source is silently refused by a safety filter, and nothing marks the gap. A confident answer fills a silence the record never actually contained. The real risk is not the error you can catch but the absence you never see. A trustworthy discovery system, this keynote argues, is not the one that answers most confidently, but rather the one that can tell you what it did not retrieve, and why.
Bio: Ian Milligan is a Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently Averting the Digital Dark Age (Johns Hopkins, 2024), and co-editor of the journal Internet Histories. As PI of the Archives Unleashed project (2017–2023), he led an interdisciplinary, multi-institution team whose work is now offered as a service by the Internet Archive. On 1 July 2026 he becomes the inaugural Director of the School of Social, Political, and Historical Research at Waterloo, a new school bringing together seven departments across the humanities and social sciences.