This site is a companion to William J. Turkel, Exploring Global Twenty-First-Century History with Generative Artificial Intelligence, McGill-Queens University Press, under review, 2026. I demonstrate how to create a complete, cloud-based historical research environment designed for the Chromebook-plus-cloud researcher. (A Chromebook is the minimal requirement; everything will also work on a more powerful laptop or desktop computer.) All code runs in the browser so you do not have to install anything on your local computer. The site contains prompts, inputs, outputs, code, screenshots and research notes for a top-down 'vibe coding' approach using the Google Gemini ecosystem. The steps build on one another mostly in the order shown below. All work was done in Google AI Studio unless otherwise noted.
You can interact with these tools at two levels, depending on your technical comfort and research needs.
All prompts, system instructions and "Personas" are available in this GitHub Repository.
- Use Case: You want to build your own custom apps from scratch or adapt my apps to different historical or contemporary domains.
- How-To: Use my prompts in the Research Notes section of each app as a suggested process to create your own. If I used the prompts in Google AI Studio, you will probably get the best results doing the same (although they can also be adapted to work with Google Antigravity, Claude Code or other such tools). If the prompt is for System Instructions or a Persona, you can experiment with pasting them into the "System Instructions" field of any LLM (e.g., Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) or of some specialized tools (Gemini Notebook).
For those who wish to modify the application logic or user interface, each tool includes a dedicated Application folder on GitHub containing the source code and an AI Studio metadata file.
- Use Case: You want to troubleshoot, extend, or fork a specific research tool.
- How-To: Download the
.zipproject file from the GitHub folder (either in the root of the folder or the Application subfolder). At this point you have three options. If you upload the ZIP file into an AI Studio prompt, it will create a similar but not identical app. If you put the ZIP file into your own GitHub repository and then upload from there, AI Studio will probably create an app that is closer to the original. Your third option is to dig into the code and use portions of it to create the exact application you want. Because Gen AI models and environments change rapidly, exact replication is typically difficult.
Determining the vital events of the first two decades of the 21st Century
- Wikipedia Vital Events Extractor
- Wikipedia Vital Events Inbound Links
- Wikipedia Vital Events Clusters
- Wikipedia Vital Events Alluvial Diagram
- Wikipedia Vital Event Neighborhood
- Wikipedia Vital Event Subnetwork
- Wikipedia Vital Events for a Cluster
- Wikipedia Vital Event Cluster Subnetwork
- Wikipedia Vital Event Cluster Timelines
- Wikidata SPARQL Query Using Gemini
Developing source collections and metadata
- Annotated Bibliography of Open Access Books
- PDF Downloader
- H-Net Books Reviewed
- Syllabus Collection
- Clean Syllabus Collection
- Overview of Open Access Journal
- Survey Dataset Explorer
- Internet Archive Texts
- Book Summaries and SRPs
- Searching Book Summaries
Tools and techniques for verification, source auditing, and multilingual exploration
- 9/11 Commission Report
- 9/11 Blackberry Chain
- Two-Level Verification App in Gemini Canvas
- Multilingual Explorer
Analyzing large text collections for patterns, trends and structures
Useful building blocks for more sophisticated applications
Prompts
Workflow hacks
Setting up Gemini and NotebookLM to do research and revision for the book