Thomas Smits

Hi there! 👋 I am an Assistant Professor of Digital History & AI at the University of Amsterdam. I study how visual media have shaped public understanding of the world. My work sits at the intersection of media history, environmental history, and the computational humanities: I use multimodal AI to analyze large historical image collections at a scale that was previously impossible. I am currently using AI to analyze colonial aerial photographs and maps of Indonesia to reconstruct how land was used and transformed under Dutch colonialism