Thomas Smits

Dr. Thomas Smits is a faculty member at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, specializing in Digital Humanities, Visual Culture, and Computational History. His research bridges artificial intelligence with historical image analysis, focusing on media history, colonial visual representations, and algorithmic approaches to archival studies.

Recent publications highlight his work on multimodal datasets, generative AI in protest memory reconstruction, and the ethical implications of machine learning for historical research. Smits employs computational methods like CLIP and computer vision to analyze large-scale visual collections, including magic lantern slides, historical advertisements, and news images.

• Key research areas: Digital Humanities, Visual Memory, Algorithmic Analysis, Colonial Media, Gender Studies, Historical Epistemology.
• Methodological focus: Stochastic modeling, multimodal machine learning, distant reading of visual datasets, and AI-driven archival enhancement.