About

Daggerobelus is an on-going Digital Humanities project that aims to explore how state-of-the-art agential AI can help scholars better understand, decode, and analyze extensive early modern archives. The name of this project, Daggerobelus, is a reference to the typographical symbol to denote a footnote or annotation. In that spirit, we consider Daggerobelus primarily a project in annotation of historical archives. That is, Daggerobelus annotates historical archives in order to ask questions, add notes, provide context, or make connections that do not immediately exist in the text.

Another central goal of Daggerobelus is to use opensource frameworks that make this methodological process reproducible for other scholars. The entire repository for Daggerobelus is available on GitHub. GitHub also allows other users to make updates to the codebase and track who makes the changes—another form of annotation found in this project.

Daggerobelus started as part of a Digital Humanities project for Professor Sara McDougall’s course Sex and Crime Before 1800 at the CUNY Graduate Center in the fall of 2025. And our first project, the Lorainne Witchcraft Trial, was born out of serendipitous experimentation between Nate Baker, Sarah Bonanno, and Jack Lukic in Austin, TX.