Can AI Resurrect the Digital Tombstones in Our Archives?

For decades, digitizing history meant taking a picture and hoping for the best—a process that created what experts call "digital tombstones." Today, we are witnessing a massive shift from these static images to computable archives that AI agents can actually understand and reason across. In this episode, we explore the industrial-scale technology driving this change, from infrared page-flattening scanners to advanced vision-language OCR models that "read" context rather than just shapes. We also dive into the revolutionary Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how it’s allowing AI to research primary sources in real-time, bypassing the limitations of static training data and the "hallucination" problem. Join us as we discuss how the entire record of human civilization is being transformed into a living, queryable knowledge graph that empowers the next generation of researchers.