New issue of my newsletter: “The Library’s New Entryway” — An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

Having sat with it for a bit, I'm still struggling with this document. The document is at once very cautious, and effusive. The text of the guidance itself is pretty good--in fact, I think they point out a lot of ways in which generative AI is a terrible thing for doing history.

Many of the places that loom largest in queer history—NYC’s Stonewall Inn, San Francisco’s Castro district—tend to focus on gay men & urban spaces. A fuller history is told by Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz. @pcb-aha.bsky.social‬ www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/m...

Historian Friends! @shgape.bsky.social is holding a conference next June in that great GA/PE city, Chicago! See link to CFP below!

For the @puddingviz.bsky.social, I explored which animals we gender, and why. Come for the extremely cute interactive viz of animals, stay for the extremely nerdy etymology of the ladybug. Story: pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

Wish I could be in Lisbon for #DH2025, but I'm glad to be able to present remotely! I'm about to share the work we've done to produce the Data Advocacy for All project - a toolkit of resources to help teach data advocacy: da4all.github.io

Thrilled our article won the Berkshire Conference Article Prize for best article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality! Annelise and I mapped thousands of locations from the magazine Lesbian Connection to study how women built a shared community in the 1970s and 1980s 🧵

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +

Appreciated the opportunity to speak with @npr.org about the devastating cuts to the incredible @neh-odh.bsky.social. Why is our govt canceling grants to start an AI Center that supports our national priorities? Cutting the arts and culture programs that are fundamental to a flourishing democracy?

New issue of my newsletter: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/aski...

@mellymeldubs.bsky.social kicking off our Working With Data for Social Change one-day symposium with a discussion of Responsible Datasets in Context (www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com), or as they informally call "the anti-Kaggle"

📣 Join the Data Advocacy For All team for a one-day symposium "Working with Data for Social Change" this Friday, March 14th, in person (CU Boulder) and over Zoom. For more information and a link to register: da4all.github.io/symposium-20...

We’ve posted a job ad to join our team at LC Labs. I am very proud and excited about the work we have planned. Please share. I’ll also mention that we are part of the legislative branch and this is a partner-supported project. www.usajobs.gov/job/832669800

You know this historian with a thing for things loved talking about vast early American history and material culture in the latest issue of the WMQ! Grateful to the Early Modern Studies Institute at the Huntington-USC and the WMQ for the forum. Available now on Project Muse (DM for copy)

The realm of "ChatGPT-proof" assignments continues to shrink. Your typical student isn't going to be using this for awhile, but we're not that far away from a first year undergrad being able to produce a graduate-level research paper with minimal understanding of the topic or material

Since folks asked for it, a reflection on week two of my "Data for the Rest of Us" course. This week was on data identification—a working definition, and then an activity putting it into practice called "Is It Data?"

Just published! A new @proghist.bsky.social lesson by @jaschaschmitz.bsky.social, Malte Vogl, Aleksandra Kaye & Raphael Schlattmann. doi.org/10.46430/phe... Thanks to Luling Huang and Leif Scheuermann for their reviews, and to @cosovschi.bsky.social for editing.

Just realized that the unessay assignment page I've used the past few years has lots of helpful examples of student unessays from other professors....all of which were posted on Twitter threads that no longer exist

I'm teaching an undergraduate Intro. to Digital History course this semester, for the first time. My big plans were vastly improved by the resources/ideas/assignments shared by @cblevins.bsky.social and Maeve Kane (maevekane.net), and several others who keep their pedagogy stuff public. Thanks!

📢 Did you know you too could write a #DigitalHumanities lesson for @proghist.bsky.social? Our English journal is seeking lesson proposals here: https://tinyurl.com/en-proposals-2024 -> Submit until 31 January! All our lessons are Open Peer Reviewed and #DiamondOpenAccess. #CallForPapers

This summer @videntesmsi.bsky.social in collaboration with the UCCS Digital Humanities Center will be hosting an @nehgov.bsky.social digital humanities advanced institute on accessible and low-cost multispectral imaging. Applications are now open. grants.uccs.edu/illuminating...

My semi-annual request for nominations for the digital history reviews section. Self-nominations welcome. www.oah.org/publications...

Reminder that we are looking for papers using LLMs for humanities research, for a special issue of the Computational Humanities Research Journal. Deadline January 31st! #NLP #DigitalHumanities #CulturalAnalytics

Fellow #academicsky profs working on syllabi & looking for assignments that AI can't complete--check out my book hunt assignment. Students have to search for & check out a book from the library. It was a hit with my survey course this fall! /1 cassandragoodhistorian.com/2024/11/12/t... 🗃️

Update: the application deadline for the NEH's Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program has been extended to Jan. 10, 2025.

What happens when you combine the best open-source HTR model (Qwen 2 VL) with the best open-source zero-shot classification NER model (Knowledgator's fine-tune for Gliner)? Caracal. Try it now on Hugging Face : lnkd.in/e5bUZm-w #CulturalHeritage #DigitalHumanities #MachineLearning #HTR #NER

Attention historians of the United States! The American Yawp is a decade old, and it’s time for some updates! Our team is hard at work preparing a second edition, and we want your feedback! Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief form and re-skeet! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

The proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2024 #CHR2024 https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/ are a great snapshot of exciting #DigitalHumanities work in a huge range of fields

Taking a break from grading on #DayofDH2024 to redesign our Data Advocacy For All website. I know zero Javascript/CSS, but used a combo of Claude + Github Copilot to get a fully functioning, clickable button interface for filtering and searching resources.

New blog post! Updated for 2024, my favorite example of why alphabetical ordering is bad for geographic features -- US presidential results since 1828. The left image shows regional patterns in a geographic ordering that the right (alphabetical) simply loses. benschmidt.org/post/2024-11...

Interesting demographic and census analysis revises the death toll from US Civil War from 750,000 down to 698,000 (+/- 50k). www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/h... Analysis by Joan Barceló, Jeffrey L. Jensen, Leonid Peisakhin, & Haoyu Zhai

Simulating human behavior with AI agents promises a testbed for policy and the social sciences. We interviewed 1,000 people for two hours each to create generative agents of them. These agents replicate their source individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109

As so many people arrive here, let me just say, “Hello & welcome” & ask that you submit nominations of Digital History projects to the JAH. Projects can be of all sizes and shapes but be related to American History. We are also looking for book-equivalent DH projects. www.oah.org/publications...

A *lot* has happened on Bluesky since I posted this thread (welcome new followers!), so I’m sharing it again. 🗃️ A new digital archive of fan (and hate) mail from the WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast, open for research and perfect for teaching media literacy or history, is online now:

An AI in Education feed! Thanks, @leonfurze.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/did:...

Any #skystorians doing campus history, audio/walking tours, or other local public history who want to join a panel for #WHA2025 in Albuquerque? I'd like to share our work here in Denver on Recovering Auraria's Past: aurariahistory.org. Email me if you're interested: [email protected] 🗃️

Interested in exploring history with tools like data analysis, GIS, and computer vision? Clemson’s Digital History PhD program equips students with digital skills essential for a wide range of careers. 📅 Don’t miss the Dec 1 deadline for Fall 2025! https://buff.ly/3Z4ffNe

Imagine that!

One annoying thing about historical research is looking up how long it took to get from A to B in the US by train in 1880 and then looking it up now and realizing it was faster in 1880.

For the next time someone attempts to equate ‘the South’ with the Confederacy. 🗃️ From Jonathan Lande’s new book, Freedom Soldiers.

For the Monday morning crowd: I am beyond excited to announce that—after years without—we have a new tool for searching & downloading the Viral Text Project’s data about 19th-century newspaper reprinting—if there’s a text you’re interested in tracing, you can see if we've identified reprints of it

AMERICAN COUP: WILMINGTON 1898 Broadcast Premiere: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 @ 9/8c | #AmericanCoupPBS simultaneously streaming on all PBS branded platforms including PBS.org and the PBS App www.pbs.org/wgbh/america...

UCLA is hiring an assistant or associate professor of Transcultural DH! recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09943

New post, “A Large Language Model Walks Into an Archive…” explores how historians can use off-the-shelf LLMs to work with primary sources 📜 cblevins.github.io/posts/llm-pr...