None of this is relevant to the argument above. There is no reason to believe these archives are equivalent to Shakespeare even if one were to agree with you that Shakespeare is that important to read.
reply> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
Nothing you wrote supports that argument.
None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.
Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.
replyLLMs actually do a very fine job of understanding the "mindset" embodied in historical sources, because historical documents themselves are a valuable source of highly diverse LLM training data. You can easily point pretty much any model to any random historical text, no matter how obscure (probably not an archival log entry, though) and ask "what is this text about in modern language, how might it be of interest or relevant today and what points would be considered especially outdated?" you will generally get very helpful answers. Even the thinking output is instructive.
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