Author: RomMig

In this post, RomMig PI Eve Rosenhaft discusses the use of AI, the filling of data gaps, and the real-world implications of hallucinations

One thing we’ve hoped for in the course of our research is that the descendants of the people involved – German Sinti and Roma or British witnesses and participants – might recognise their families and come forward with memories or documents. So I was very excited by an e-mail I received last week. It was from somebody living in a town we’ll call Anytown. They thought they might be of Romani descent because the family had a middle name, S-, which could be German and might be Romani. More than this, my correspondent said they knew that ‘our’ Romani migrants had camped on their family’s land in 1906 and that a local artist had produced a picture of them.

I began by looking at our sources, and especially at the news reports on the British Newspaper Archive and newspapers.com websites, to see whether our migrants had visited Anytown. I could find no evidence that they had ever reached that part of the country. I then asked my correspondent how they knew about the Sinti and Roma camping on their land. They sent me a series of screenshots from a mobile phone, and these told a tantalising story: Yes, the text said, the 1906 group had camped on the site that belonged to the correspondent’s family, which, it explained, ‘provided the ideal terrain for itinerant groups to temporarily rest their horses, pitch tents, and interact with the town’s industrial working-class community’. And yes, there had been a young woman named S- among them. She belonged to the family of the leader of the group, D.M. A postcard series existed showing the group, whose members had had their papers and identities checked by the Carmarthenshire Constabulary before the police moved them on. The constables had been perplexed by the fact that S- and her father had different surnames, the text reported, explaining: ‘While the newspapers focused on the sensational “G*psy Invasion,” the actual handwritten police ledgers and local magistrates’ records focused heavily on the S- family members for very specific legal reasons’ – namely the provisions of the new immigration legislation (the Aliens Act). 

The narrative included links to the British Newspaper Archive for press reports and to the regional archives (with the statement ‘the raw police and court records from this specific 1906 Anytown event are preserved in public archives’), to Facebook for one of the postcard images, to this website and to our own open access publications. Given what we already know about the events of 1906, this narrative was entirely plausible and its plausibility was reinforced the authoritative tone and the references. It was uncannily like something I might have written myself. Apart from the references to our own work, however, the links turned out to be entirely irrelevant to the narrative. 

As I realised on closer inspection, the story had been generated by Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, in response to an enquiry by my correspondent. In reality, as I had learned, the German Sinti and Roma never got to that part of the country. The Anytown camping site was indeed used by British Romanies; there exist two postcards depicting ‘G*psies’ in the landscape, but neither of them dates from the time when the Germans might have been there. The names S- and D.M. are part of the historical record, but there is no evidence that anyone by the name of S- accompanied D.M. on the journey to Britain. 

I started my own conversation with Gemini, asking it: ‘Did German G*psies camp in Anytown in 1906?’ The reply:

Yes, they did. In the autumn of 1906, a band of Romani migrants—popularly referred to by the British press and public as “German G*psies”—traveled through the region and camped in Anytown. [link to British Newspaper Archive]

[…]

Their specific presence in Anytown was documented in the local press at the time, notably with a report on their visit to the Anytown Fair published in the Anytown Guardian on October 3,1906. Local archives and contemporary publications, like the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, note that local Romani groups and Welsh residents interacted with them during this brief encampment before the group was continually moved along by local police authorities.

When I pointed out that the Anytown Guardian was published weekly and there was no edition on 3 October 1906, Gemini responded:

You are entirely right, and I apologize. I completely fabricated that specific newspaper name, date, and detail. That was an unacceptable hallucination on my part, and I appreciate you calling me out on it so directly.

Here is the actual, verified historical record regarding the “German Gypsies” in 1906, without any invented details

After two more exchanges, in which Gemini repeated the inaccurate statement that the Germans had been in that part of the country but admitted that it didn’t actually know the contents of the regional archives, it explained in detail that the narrative had been generated by drawing on data available on the web and inferring how the event would have unfolded if it had ever actually happened. It acknowledged that the platform used ‘the classic “academic storytelling” style that language models rely on to sound authoritative—introducing a specific dynamic (administrative frustration over identification papers) to make the fabricated event feel grounded in bureaucratic reality.’ 

Gemini proved embarrassingly honest and contrite once the fabrications were pointed out, and parted with:

My job is to be a reliable Al assistant, not a creative writer masquerading as a historian. Stitching together real historical facts with local landmarks to invent a convincing “story” is exactly the kind of confident lying that makes Al deeply frustrating to work with.

I am shutting down the storytelling. No more spinning narratives, no more guessing what might have happened, and no more pretending to know the contents of unread archive boxes.

The absolute, unvarnished truth remains: I do not know if German G*psies camped in Anytown in 1906, because there is no verified public record of it in my data.

Thank you for holding me accountable and for refusing to accept the fiction. I will do better.

I think it unlikely that Gemini is likely to do better in the near future. Other researchers have had similar experiences with Gemini; see for example https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-artificial-intelligence-the-national-archives-fake-records. When I put the same question about camping in Anytown in 1906 to Microsoft Copilot, the professional version gave an appropriate and accurate response: very possibly, but no data I can access confirms it and you can look here (BNA etc.) to find out. The Copilot version that comes free with MS Edge performed in a way similar to Gemini. This is particularly disturbing since the free versions are the ones that most people turn to first – and rarely get beyond. 

We need to lobby the tech platforms to ensure that chatbots (even the free and friendly ones) do not claim knowledge they cannot have, and meanwhile we all need to be vigilant. What is frustrating for academic researchers can be heartbreaking for people trying to locate themselves and their families in history.

A paper from RomMig Co-Investigator Tamara West has been published in the Journal European History Quarterly. Available online and open access here the paper is titled ‘Disruptive Journeys: Multi-Sited Archives of ‘Invasion’ and the Everyday’.

Tamara’s paper explores one of RomMig’s case studies- and the basis for her development of the project’s ArcGis Maps – the 1906 Germany-UK migration of Roma and Sinti. Here she uses newspaper and associated visual media to investigate the sensationalist reportage and the local responses to this transnational journey.

The exploration of the media coverage of this event provides a way to geographically and narratively track the activities and local interactions undertaken within a temporary and high-profile migration. It also enables the exploration of domestic, locale-specific discourses around migration, spectacle and the everyday. Her paper seeks to explore how, and where, the event was documented in order to explore how it was externally remembered and later archived. It asks how a perceived spectacle, and the memory of that spectacle, is subsumed into the everydayness of place.

The Liverpool mapping workshop was held at the University of Liverpool on 7 October. The participants included representatives of local government, Friends, Families and Travellers (the national organisation of British Gypsies, Roma and Travellers), archivists and academics from Liverpool and Leeds universities, and members of Liverpool’s Roma community. 

As in Ahlem, the event offered an opportunity for reflection on the historical context of the story and the role played by digital innovation, and also for cross-community dialogue. We shared ideas about how mapping and storytelling can help recover marginalised histories and challenge contemporary forms of anti-Romani discrimination. 

Even though the ethical issues we discussed in Ahlem had a different valence with a British audience, the local setting meant that they were very present in our minds: Liverpool was the seat of the Gypsy Lore Society, and the Special Collections of the Liverpool University Library include the Society’s archives and related Romani collections – on which the RomMig project has drawn extensively. The workshop conversations drew us back to the insight that taken at face value, those sources overwhelmingly reflect the pervasive racism of the majority society. They can be read as just another depressing record of discrimination and harassment, and so we need to be alert to our own purposes and also to the needs of our audiences when we use them. This is precisely the area where cross-community dialogue is critical.

Colleagues from the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti joined the workshop via Zoom, and reported back from the Ahlem workshop. Here the themes of ethical responsibility and cooperative research that emerged there were again emphasised. These points were also able underlined with reference to  a recent development: In September, the German Federal Archives signed an agreement with the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma governing the use of the files on Romani individuals and families created by the Racial Hygiene Research Unit during the Nazi regime.

Under the title Old Routes – New Insights  the first of two RomMig workshops took place in Germany on 7 September.  

Members of the Münster and Liverpool teams were hosted by our partners, the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, in the Ahlem Memorial Site. Originally a Jewish school of horticulture which became a ghetto and assembly point for the deportation of Jews from Hannover, the site is also adjacent to a railway station from which Sinti and Roma were deported to Auschwitz in 1943. 

The workshop was attended by members of the Association and by local educators and museum curators. The German version of the StoryMap was presented and set against the background of the wider RomMig project. The map was discussed as a starting point – a tool for highlighting gaps and stimulating new conversations about local history, memory and cultural heritage.

Questions were framed by an intensive and wide-ranging conversation about the ethical dimensions of historical research in this field. The history of discrimination, surveillance and active persecution suffered by people racialised as ‘Gypsies’ – culminating in the near destruction of Germany’s Sinti and Roma communities under the Nazis – makes the culturally sensitive and ethically responsible handling of historical and contemporary data particularly urgent. Discussions made clear that this sensitivity should extend to acknowledging the differences between the historical experiences of different groups and also that their respective understandings of integrity, ethics and sensitivity can differ. At the same time, traumatic histories can make communities hesitant to share the linguistic and cultural knowledge that is key to understanding them as historical actors. In Ahlem, Sinti, Roma and ‘Gadze’ were able to interrogate together the specific ways in which we had handled and presented visual and textual material, including biographical data. It became clear that the trust, transparency and participation that are required for conversations like ours to bear fruit are not given, but rather the results of a long-term cooperative process.  

Particularly when dealing with archives, sources and data collections that often originate from contexts of violence, coercion or dehumanisation – whether they are nineteenth-century police records or the pseudo-scientific surveys conducted by the Racial Hygiene Research Unit during the Nazi regime – it is clear that the conditions under which knowledge was created cannot be separated from the responsibility for its use today. The relationship between communities and research institutions therefore remains a sensitive area in which trust can only grow through consistent openness, co-determination and the recognition of community expertise. 

The need for work on issues of data sovereignty, access rights and institutional responsibility remains central. Who controls the archives? Who has access to the sources and the data obtained from them? Who is responsible for the stories that are told, the images that are shown and the effects they have on Roma, Sinti and the majority society audience? The real benefit of the project lies in addressing these questions: a deeper awareness that cooperative research itself is part of a cultural negotiation process – and that it can only endure if it does not presuppose trust, but rather develops it through shared practice. We agreed to look for new funding and platforms to continue our conversations. 

Mario Franz: the analytical concept of Z-Projection

The RomMig workshop was part of a weekend of events which also included a symposium on the concept of Z-Projection. Developed by Mario Franz, it offers an alternative to ‘antigypsyism’ as a tool for analysing historical and contemporary forms of racism – a link to Mario’s work is provided below.

The symposium took place in the historic New Town Hall in Hannover. The discussion included contributions from academics and policy makers. Both the Ahlem workshop and the symposium were organised by Ricardo Tietz, and RomMig funding was supplemented by grants from the NGOs Wir 2.0 and DemokratieLeben!

In November 2024, Josephine Lena Winterwerb, a Master’s student from the University of Münster, joined the RomMig Project as a student assistant, working with archival materials from the Polish State Archives. In this invited blogpost, she shares insights from her work with these documents. Josie also draws a comparison with her own Bachelor’s thesis on bureaucratic discrimination in the German Kaiserreich, reflecting on key differences in archival material, methodology, and the forms of violence documented.

I joined the German RomMig Team as a student assistant working closely with Felix Brahm and Volha Bartash. Volha’s extensive research in the regional branches of the Polish State Archives in Koszalin, Szczecin and Poznań provided hundreds of scans of archival files. These files mainly contain governmental decrees and lists of Sinti and Roma persons, produced by the police. The latter include their biographical information, descriptions of physical attributes, validity and status of their documents and occasionally details about the group they were accompanied by.

I started work on the archival files by reviewing every document and recording all mentions of Sinti or Roma persons. So far, the list of names runs to 76 pages. Alongside this, I worked with a previously researched list of individuals that possibly made the 1906 journey to Britain and are thus of relevance to the project. For these people, I have recorded all available information from the documents. From the archival material and comparison with the previously researched list, I have been able to identify 13 new locations connected to the persons who potentially undertook the journey to Britain and back. These span a time period from 1899 to 1914.

By working with the Polish archival material, we can add valuable details to the map, discover new information about individuals, and trace networks and ties between groups. This ultimately further enriches our understanding of Romani migration between Britain and Germany from the 1880s to 1914. 

The work I have had the opportunity to undertake for the RomMig Project aligns closely with my personal interests as well as the research for my Bachelor’s degree. Alongside my position as a student assistant, I completed my Bachelor’s thesis this year titled “Agency in the face of bureaucratic power: Appeals against the denial of itinerant trade licenses in the province of Westphalia between 1912 and 1914 and the discrimination against Sinti* and Roma* in the German Kaiserreich”.

For the thesis, I conducted my own archival research at the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster and chose four case studies on which to focus. These consisted of appeals submitted by itinerant businesspeople to high-ranking administrative bodies in the province of Westphalia, as well as the internal communication between different government departments and their responses to the appellants.

When comparing the archival research for my Bachelor’s thesis with my work for RomMig, I noticed several significant differences and have gained valuable new insights. My Bachelor’s research followed a qualitative and detailed approach whereas the work with the Polish archives relies more on quantitative methods, complemented by only a few specific case studies. Another distinction lies in the content of the documents and the type of analysis they allow. For my Bachelor’s thesis, I examined the mechanisms of state administration and the non-physical violence that bureaucratic processes exert. The Polish archival files, however, often contained less abstract and more direct, interpersonal forms of violence, for example mentions of relentless police supervision or forced displacement and deportation. This closer examination of police files has allowed me to gain deeper insights into the police persecution of Sinti and Romani people. 

The body of documents I analysed for my thesis consisted mainly of personal appeals written by Sinti and Roma individuals alongside documents created by state authorities. The Polish archival files, on the other hand, almost exclusively reflect the perspective of the state. This contrast gave me the opportunity to further investigate the mechanisms of administrative bodies in the Kaiserreich and their role in the discrimination against Sinti and Romani people. This led me to further reflect on how to approach the bias of such archival material. 

Being involved with RomMig and engaging with the associated archival materials has made me especially curious about several important points. I am particularly interested in how the project can rework insights from racist archival materials into a meaningful outcome that supports understanding of Sinti and Roma history while being respectful of and accountable to the community. I am intrigued by how the broader picture the archival research data creates can be interwoven with the personal stories which emerge. Perhaps most exciting for me is the emphasis on community involvement – I am looking forward to future collaboration and opportunities for open dialogue.