This is how I work on Ottoman Turkish with Claude (and Gemini) to visually capture, transliterate, translate, extract named entitities, and contextualise C19th and early C20th Ottoman Turkish documents. generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-th... #Ottomanhistory @ottomanhistory.bsky.social

May be of interest #Ottomanhistory @guel-sen.bsky.social @sariyannis.bsky.social @elifbengusuarik.bsky.social

I'm looking for scholars of Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Armenian to comment on and to test my approach, as well as generalist historians wanting to explore new content and archives @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com #history #ottoman #turkey

NEW: Can LLMs open Ottoman archives to generalist historians? I show how AI transcription makes Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek & Armenian accessible—with auditable, scholarly results. Work in progress; feedback welcome! generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-the-ottoman-archive

Are you interested in languages, historical research and large language models? Then check out my new Substack Generative Lives generativelives.substack.com #history #languages #machinelearning #ai #llms

May be of interest to @ecoledeschartes.bsky.social cljournal.org @aclmeeting.bsky.social @melibrarynl.bsky.social

I would like to make contact with Ottoman Turkish scholars to discuss a new approach to machine transcription, transliteration and translation of Ottoman Turkish, using early issues of Takvîm-i Vekâyi as the use case @turkishstudies.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social

Can Gemini 3 Pro Preview read this printed 1920s Ottoman Turkish (Right to Left) accurately? Yes. #transkribus

Here's a cryptographical challenge for people who have finished their shopping and are bored: generativelives.substack.com/p/message-in... #puzzle #cryptography #history #language @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @thiagokrause.bsky.social

What is the potential for LLM-enabled HTR with medium to low resource languages to help historians open up archives? My latest Substack article explores the edge case of mid-C20th handwritten Yiddish #history #languages #htr #ai #machine-learning generativelives.substack.com/p/mid-c20th-...

I am looking for a palaeographer and/or philologist who can read and comment on this image, and context, and who would be interested in commenting forensically upon some work I am doing. Source: EAP759/1 Sundarban Anchalik Sangrahashala Collection [18th-19th century] eap.bl.uk/project/EAP759

I interviewed film maker Derek Jarman in early 1980. I was twenty-three and he was thirty-eight. I have published part of this previously unpublished interview in my Generative Lives substack article "What's top of my mind". open.substack.com/pub/generati...

I have a new Substack article about the potential of Gemi 3 Pro to assist with machine transcription of medium and low resource languages #history #translation #palaeography #digitalhumanities @timhitchcock.bsky.social @dancohen.org @tedunderwood.com open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Encouraging curious historians who like to experiment with tools and to build their own to subscribe to my Generative Lives Substack. New article later this week on Gemini 3 Pro and its remarkable capabilities with low resource languages. generativelives.substack.com/about @timhitchcock.bsky.social

(1) Announcing the AI + History Collaboratory monthly online programme, December 2025 to June 2026. We still have spaces.https://github.com/Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory/blob/main/README.md #history #ai #researchmethods

I have been engaging with Professor Mark Humphries, who writes the excellent Generative History substack. Mark has analysed the capabilities of Gemini 3 for HTR. In this Bluesky post I add to his findings. @timhitchcock.bsky.social #history #ai #llms generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-s...

Gemini 3 Pro in Consumer Bot mode can identify and markup text regions, identify lives, and label lines by region. Moreover it can pretty accurately transcribe English language C17th legal depositions, despite a complex layout. Follow link for the prompts I used gemini.google.com/share/c42566...

I am relaunching the ai-and-history collaboratory I ran last December. First meeting Tuesday, December 9th 2025. Then roughly monthly by ZOOM. Let me know if you are interested. github.com/Addaci/ai-an... #ai #history @timhitchcock.bsky.social

I am looking for a couple of beta testers who will take half an hour and try out a Socratic Research Assistant I have been building powered by Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview. The idea is to get much greater control over the persona, and inference approach of Gemini through the interface

Here's my agenda for the next three months: generative-ai, historical research and archival practice: generativelives.substack.com/p/whats-top-... #earlymodernhistory #history #archives #ai #ml

I am starting a Substack called Generative Lives. This offers a user's perspective on generative-ai and its potential application to historical research and archival practice. The Substack is free and seeks to encourage hands-on experimentation. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Hello BlueSky. I haven't been active for a while. I am looking for examples of museums, libraries and archives doing interesting things with generative ai and would welcome suggestions of websites to look at. #earlymodern #archives #libraryscience

Did ships get bigger in the C17th? Yes. Contact me if you would like access to the data and would like to discuss. And of course the devil is in the detail, but this is a relatively and well defined large dataset #earlymodern #marinehistory @thiagokrause.bsky.social @brodiewaddell.bsky.social

A potential use of AI image analysis which could be done at scale as part of an analysis of historic literacy? I loaded images of 140 signature, initial(s), mark(s) into NotebookLM & interrogated them palaeographically (with zero training). @thiagokrause.bsky.social @timhitchcock.bsky.social

Looking for a Turkish speaker who would be willing to sample a couple of minutes of a Turkish podcast generated by Google NoteBook LM Plus [podcasts in 50 languages, handles 300 sources, very useful mindmaps]. Can send .wav file or give NB access @thiagokrause.bsky.social @timhitchcock.bsky.social

Looking for two or three Early Modern marine historians, marine archaeologists, and knowledgeable enthusiasts interested in exploring novel, as yet unpublished 5,000+ ship database [SOLM-QUANT] for C17th commercial (and naval) ships - Get in touch to learn more #marinehistory #earlymodern

I have been busy these last four months. Now looking for a publisher. Any suggestions. Can supply draft chapters and appendices for anyone interested in taking a look. @timhitchcock.bsky.social @brodiewaddell.bsky.social

Enrollment is now open for the 4th edition of the Master's in Computational Social Sciences at UC3M! No prior knowledge of programming or stats is needed—perfect for social sciences grads. Questions? Contact us or ask to be connected with our student ambassadors! Please, share!

We have a nice new shiny organization card for MarineLives on Hugging Face, where you can find models and datasets huggingface.co/MarineLives

I am working with @beismo.bsky.social to fine-tune two small large language models to correct raw machine transcription of Yiddish in Hebrew script. We plan to show the results this coming Tuesday at our next ai-and-history-collaboratory @timhitchcock.bsky.social @mark-l-thompson.bsky.social

Do you wonder what "fine-tuning" a large language model means? How could it help in historical research? Next Tuesday during our weekly one hour ai-and-history-collaboratory we are going to run some code and train a small large language model called mT5 github.com/Addaci/marin...

Great to see our ai-and-history-collaboratory is having some impact. And thanks to @mark-l-thompson.bsky.social for his participation. The topic for next Tuesday is fine-tuning large language models for use in historical research github.com/Addaci/marin...

Interested in learning to use large language models for historical research? We have a Colab notebook which guides non-coders through using APIs to interrogate data github.com/Addaci/Aurel...

We have a Google colab notebook as background to session two of our ai and history collaboratory. If you are interested please try some of the exericises - no code required github.com/Addaci/marin...

We are holding the second session of our ai-and-history collaboratory on Tuesday, December 3rd 2024 at 4 pm London time. We will be learning how to use APIs to control large language models for historical research. github.com/Addaci/marin...

Curious about our ai-and-history-collaboration? We hold one hour ZOOM dropin sessions each Thursday at 4 pm London time. Direct mail us if you are interested in finding out more. github.com/Addaci/marin...

1/ The first session of the eight session ai-and-history-collaboratory took place yesterday. Great turnout and stimulating discussion of how to prompt large language models in the context of historical research. github.com/Addaci/marin...

Our ai-and-history-collaboratory kicks off this Tuesday for the first of eight sessions. This Tuesday we are discussing Prompt Engineering. github.com/Addaci/marin... #skystorians #machinelearning

Great article on training librarians in digital humanities

An exceptionally helpful post by @burtenshaw.bsky.social I have changed session 4 of our ai-and-history collaboratory to tackle data broadly, including creation and use of synthetic data github.com/Addaci/marin...

The slides and video from my talk yesterday at the IHR Digital Seminar on ai and history ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2024/09/tues...

I wrote the book I wish I’d had when I was starting out. It’ll be available as paperback or ebook next month. Sharing the Amazon link here because it includes the reviews / testimonials from the back cover. #history #AcademicWriting 🗃️ www.amazon.com/Craft-Histor...

Fascinating primary source on Dutch/Venetian relations in early C17th. I am going to read this carefully and cross-reference against our growing High Court of Admiralty Corpus from the 1610s and 1620s #skystorians #earlymodern

I am compiling a list of potential sources of English language history related training data & metadata to fine-tune large language history domain models. They have varying licencing terms. What am I missing? @danielvanstrien.bsky.social github.com/Addaci/marin...

1/ Six more slides from my talk next Tuesday - the order may change, but let me talk you through them

This has to be the most fun post I have seen today. If I were a seagull I would definitely head south!

I am mulling over the messages I want to convey when I talk this Tuesday about ai+history. I'm not sure I am going to make friends (or I am right) but here goes @tedunderwood.me @michielree.bsky.social @javiercha.bsky.social @timhitchcock.bsky.social @bschmidt.bsky.social @zoeleblanc.bsky.social