Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Summary
An analysis of a Substack post about Using Opus 5.5 to uncover a previously unnoticed Dutch archival record of hunting dodos dating to 1615. The piece highlights how frontier AI models can aid historical research through corpus selection, embeddings, and semantic search, while noting epistemological challenges and the limits of AI in assessing historical significance. It also discusses broader implications for historians and researchers using AI agents to surface archival evidence.