Named Entity Recognition in the Black Box

Named entity recognition is a powerful tool for enriching archival metadata — but what happens when you open the black box? The State Archives of Zurich share findings from two NER experiments: a completed custom solution for the Central Series collection, and an ongoing LLM-based approach for the Zurich Council Manuals (1798 and earlier), offering hard-won insights into the promises and pitfalls of automated entity tagging.