Penn GSE

Beyond Chat: Using Claude Code as a Research & Creative Partner

Stian Håklev · April 10, 2026

Slides
45 min + discussion

Beyond Chat: Using Claude Code as a Research & Creative Partner

From chat windows to AI agents. Case studies in app development, literature analysis, intelligent reading, and AI-powered code review.

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Technical presentations
Projects shown in the talk
Language Learning

Alif

Arabic learning app with morphology-aware spaced repetition, AI-generated sentences, and root extraction. Built over 7 weeks with 1,300 vocabulary words.

610 commits
Intelligent Reading

Petrarca

An intelligent reading companion with OCR, voice recall, and a knowledge atlas. Turns books into interconnected, searchable knowledge.

Literature Analysis

Hirsch Argument Atlas

AI-powered systematic analysis of E.D. Hirsch's 10 books (1977–2024). Extracted 10,232 claims and discovered 656 cross-book argument clusters.

Total LLM cost: $2.50
Developer Tools

AI-Powered Code Review

Automated PR walkthrough generation with cognitive science-informed design. Produces detailed, pedagogical HTML walkthroughs of pull requests.

Research tools for Claude Code
Claude Scholar
Semi-automated research assistant covering the full academic lifecycle — ideation, literature review, experiments, analysis, and publication. Integrates with Zotero and Obsidian.
Zotero MCP
Connect Claude Code to your Zotero library. Semantic search at passage level, discuss papers, get summaries, analyze citations.
arXiv MCP Server
Search and analyze arXiv papers. Downloads PDFs, extracts full text, supports batch queries and structured metadata extraction.
Semantic Scholar MCP
Access the Semantic Scholar API with 200M+ papers. Search, retrieve citations, find related work.
PubMed MCP
Search PubMed / NCBI for medical and life sciences papers. Essential for learning sciences, cognitive load, and ed-psych research.
Obsidian MCP
Connect Claude Code to your Obsidian vault. Search, read, create and update notes — turn your knowledge base into a queryable research database.
Notion MCP
Official Notion integration. Full read/write access to databases, pages, and blocks — query and update your research project management directly.
Chart MCP
Generate publication-quality charts from data — 25+ chart types including bar, scatter, heatmap, and network graphs.
Claude Code + Browser
Run claude --chrome for full web interaction — navigate pages, fill forms, extract data from any site.
My tools
Further reading