Evil Jim O’Donnell (@eatyourgreens.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy)

Practical Necromancy for Beginners Download | Purchase For more go here! Shawn Graham, _Practical Necromancy for Beginners: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students_. Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2025. **Many feel bewildered and quietly embarrassed that they don’t know more about how AI technology works, where it came from, or even how to get started. Start here.** _Practical Necromancy_ represents Shawn Graham’s vision for how we should treat large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence applications. Graham advocates approaching these technologies as a necromancer. In antiquity, the figure of the necromancer lay outside the boundaries of official religion, talking not with gods but with the mournful echoes of ghosts. _Practical Necromancy_ explores ways of surfacing the ghosts that lurk in AI technology. Graham suggests that the most useful thing we and our students can do with LLMs is to break them, push them, prod them, make them give up the ghosts in their data. We think through making and putting things together. It’s always the process that matters, not the final product. Through short essays, hands-on exercises, and suggestions for how one might build one’s own course, _Practical Necromancy_ is meant to give us a starting point, a way in, a place to push from. _Practical Necromancy_ is especially timely as the language and hype around AI is deliberately meant to make you feel as if the computers from Star Trek are just around the corner. The message is quasi-religious: the future will be glorious. This book will help you step outside the official religion and start conversations with the ghosts lurking in these new machines. **Shawn M. Graham** is Full Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada. https://thedigitalpress.org/portfolio/practical-necromancy-for-beginners/