Robert Aspenskog is a doctoral student in Library and Information Science. He holds a BA in history from the University of Gothenburg, an MA in Digital Humanities from the University of Gothenburg, and an MA in history from Umeå University. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as a research assistant at Lund University.
His doctoral project, MenuData: Metadata, Knowledge Organisation, and Human–AI Co-Creation in Computational Analysis of Historical Restaurant Menus, aims to enable large-scale historical analysis of approximately 20,000 digitised restaurant menus (1840–2000) through the development of an AI-based workflow for automatic extraction and structuring of information from digitised ephemeral print. The workflow is grounded in human–AI co-creation, where dialogic code generation with chatbots (so-called vibe coding or distant coding) enables researchers in the humanities and cultural studies to develop and implement advanced digital research methods without requiring deep programming expertise.
As a result, the humanities researcher is relieved of extensive technical implementation and can instead focus on the core work of the humanities: formulating research questions, developing methods, and interpreting historical and cultural material. The dissertation is therefore methodological on two levels: at a meta level, it analyses human–AI co-creation as a method-development practice, from which emerge concrete, reproducible code-based methods that enable advanced cultural analysis without the need for deep technical expertise. The project is part of the WASP-HS research cluster AI Futures of Culture and Memory.
