German Historical Institute Receives Volkswagen Stiftung Grant for AI-Based Research

The grant, awarded to the GHI and its partners at the Department of Germanic Studies of the University of Texas at Austin, will support the project “Let the People of the Past Speak! Turning Migrant Letters of the 19th Century into Speech.” Drawing on letters sent to and written by nineteenth-century German migrants to the United States, gathered by the institute’s Migrant Connections project, the project will leverage artificial-intelligence tools to extrapolate from transcriptions of migrant letters produced by citizen scholars, linguistic questionnaires completed in the late nineteenth century, and recordings of German dialects from the mid-twentieth century to create a text-to-speech interface capable of reconstructing the sound of historical German and German-American dialects.