Publications and public scholarship by Jacob Polay.https://jacobpolay.ca/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/10/14/llm-saskatchewans-settlement-history/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/10/14/llm-saskatchewans-settlement-history/AI and Collaboration series. Lead author Jessica Jack, with Chloë Farr and Jacob Polay. How a language model helped join datasets built for narrower questions into a typology of Saskatchewan's smallest settlements.Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/10/07/named-entity-recognition-large-language-models/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/10/07/named-entity-recognition-large-language-models/AI and Collaboration series. Lead author Jacob Polay, with Chloë Farr and Jessica Jack. How a knowledge graph and GraphRAG, built from 20,000 early modern documents, can help historians read a corpus far too large to read page by page.Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/09/30/building-ai-tools-historical-research/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/09/30/building-ai-tools-historical-research/AI and Collaboration series. Lead author Jacob Polay, with Chloë Farr and Jessica Jack. Why historians should build their own tools instead of choosing off-the-shelf ones, using named-entity recognition for early modern documents as the example.Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/09/23/ai-enabled-document-transcription/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/09/23/ai-enabled-document-transcription/AI and Collaboration series. Lead author Chloë Farr, with Jessica Jack and Jacob Polay. On the new wave of AI transcription tools for printed and handwritten sources, and why outputs built to train language models often fall short of what historians need.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/07/13/the-archive-is-not-a-toy-the-hidden-problems-of-a-vintage-ai/https://activehistory.ca/blog/2026/07/13/the-archive-is-not-a-toy-the-hidden-problems-of-a-vintage-ai/A critique of Talkie-1930, a "vintage" language model trained on pre-1930 text. It argues that the model aestheticizes a narrow, elite, colonial archival record, presents a legally motivated corpus cutoff as historically meaningful, and deploys a research tool as a public chatbot without adequate framing.Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-004-ocr-benchmark/https://working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-004-ocr-benchmark/Working Papers in Critical Search, 2026.Thu, 01 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://jacobpolay.ca/writing#circumventing-the-garbler/https://jacobpolay.ca/writing#circumventing-the-garbler/Intersections, 2025.Wed, 01 Jan 2025 12:00:00 GMT