Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Sometimes, all it takes is a trip to Norway to confirm that everything is connected. From June 2 to June 11, I traveled with my faculty advisors from Storymodelers to Kristiansand, Norway, to participate in a workshop on the use of modeling as a method for teaching and learning. This workshop was part of an ongoing project at the University of Agder  titled "Modeling for Histories", which is currently in the early stages of testing and has not yet been publicly disseminated. The project is led by Dr. Apostolos Spanos (University of Agder) in collaboration with Dr. Alexandra Lazareva (University of Agder), Dr. Jose J. Padilla ( Old Dominion University ) and Dr. Erika Frydenlund (Old Dominion University). The goal is to explore how model thinking can support history education by helping students move beyond traditional linear narratives and develop a deeper understanding of complex relationships, actors, and processes that shape historical events. This blog is a summary ...

Figure 1. An Illustration of the transition from storytelling to advanced conceptualization. Image Generated by DALL-E. In my previous blog,— “ Do Large Language Models Agree on Entity Extraction? ”— I explored how different Large Language Models (LLMs) approach Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, highlighting the inconsistencies in entity identification and categorization. By leveraging techniques such as Sentence-BERT embeddings , and cosine similarity , I demonstrated how to unify outputs from multiple LLMs into a coherent and reliable list of entities, which is essential for tasks requiring consistent information extraction.  This blog transitions from entity extraction to a broader exploration of how LLMs move from narrative analysis to conceptual modeling and simulation . While extracting entities is a critical step in understanding narratives, the next challenge lies in structuring those narratives into meaningful models that can inform decision-making and support real...