📣 New historical data visualization! "How Fast Was the Mail?" is an interactive map showing how long information took to travel across the US between 1882-1908: cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ +

Looking forward to @ek27.bsky.social lecture at Wayne State next Monday, February 9, 2 pm, F/AB, 3339, on "Partnering with AI to transform Archival Sources into Research Data"! Here's the Zoom link for those not in Detroit: wayne-edu.zoom.us/j/9644839669...

I know I don't have a ton of media followers, but I'll put this out there anyway: if you need someone to comment/offer context on the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philly, get in touch. I just finished an entire book on Americans' fight over Washington and slavery.

Even though I absolutely hate reading AI writing, I am getting negatively polarized by the stunning incuriosity of so much of the professoriate about the objectively strangest technology in the last hundred years

Scholars affiliated with the Midrash Project embarked on a “transcribe-a-thon,” using eScriptorium, an AI platform tailored for use on historical manuscripts. religionnews.com/2025/12/17/a...

And the thing I’m most proud of doesn’t have a link to share yet, but it’s almost done! I’ve been leading a time of computer scientists and medievalists to create an HCR for Medieval Latin legal records, like those digitized at AALT (example below).

Since they have all deleted their original posts, I want to make clear that this was said in response to some AI enthusiasts arguing that existing AI could do the job of a historian in part because all existing information you would need to do history research was already on the Internet.

🚨 new article by Ruth Balint academic.oup.com/past/advance...

i feel really conflicted about the people who insist that the Humanities needs to be a 100% technology free space. I get you - I am very analog in my daily life, with my piles of paper and pens - but AI is also doing a lot of things you actually like and enjoy having. R's thread is right on

The collateral damage of people upset (often with good reasons) about generative AI is their digital humanities colleagues. It’s outpacing 2010 levels of vitriol, by a lot. The irony is we’re the best allies — we understand how the tech works and can translate between the doom and the hype. +

Gemini’s ability to read handwritten archival documents has importance beyond the humanities. It opens new frontiers for scientific research and collaboration with the humanities. foundhistory.org/seeing-old-s... #ClimateScience #DataScience #Agriculture #Archives #Research #LandGrant #AI

(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

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

I do take all of Dr Jackson's points but, as an archivist, handwritten text recognition is still an extremely exciting development. It will allow us to improve our knowledge of our collections and to make them available in ways that can make them more accessible, more useful to more researchers.

We’re thrilled to launch our new Humans of AI podcast! Prof. @melissaterras.bsky.social of @transkribus.bsky.social — a cooperative AI platform transforming how libraries, archives, and museums bring history to life. 🎧 share.transistor.fm/s/ce0399b5 📺 youtu.be/qK5x4j7jiuQ #AI #CulturalHeritage

This is incredibly cool. read.dukeupress.edu/american-lit...

This sums up a lot for me: “Historians have long extolled the “power of the archive.” Little did we know that the engineers would come along and plug it in...

This is btw the trajectory you would expect if you believe LLMs are—not an abstract protean principle called “intelligence”—but a cultural technology that animates the verbal machinery already folded up in libraries, allowing it to run by itself.

Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵

Excited to launch 150yearsofcare.org, a digital exhibition exploring the fascinating history of The Jewish Board, one of New York’s oldest and largest social service agencies. I want to highlight some great resources for teachers and scholars:

If you use a model dialogically, it’s effectively guiding you through the free-writing/revision cycle composition teachers recommend. I get why this mode of use isn’t very visible. All the rhetoric around AI has been that it’s “generative” and does the work for you. Things like the “Dear Sydney” +

Here's a great excerpt from Bernadette Whelan's chapter on rituals of packing & departure in the book "Rituals of Migration: Italians and Irish on the Move" edited by @kevinkenny.bsky.social ‬and @irpinaingiro.bsky.social published this week (June 15) by @nyupress.bsky.social @gihnyu.bsky.social

Hidden Heritages - a great resource providing access to digitised Gaelic and Irish folktales. The transcription was done automatically using @transkribus.bsky.social or crowdsourcing. A great example of the use of AI and NLP for the benefits of research and society.

Interested in hearing about a new alternative to Transkribus and eScriptorium? This Wednesday, from 15:00 to 16:30, there will be a virtual presentation of Calfa Vision by Baptiste Queuche, organized by IMAFO, Austrian Academy of Sciences.See the details: www.oeaw.ac.at/imafo/verans... #htr #atr #dh

This is truly a pathbreaking book: a book that answers crucial questions that have gone unanswered for a really long time. Highly recommend, and really looking forward to this talk.

I visited the Alan Turing Institute and the New Real in London last week for a workshop on "Doing AI Differently." So many interesting talks, and I spoke about my ongoing poetry work with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, Anna Preus, and Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, which you can view at 2:19 in this recording.

Interesting thread on public history, Reddit, and gaming…Didn’t think I’d be putting together those three in a sentence today

“Physical research and critical thinking about the nature of archives and qualitative data just got way more important.” 💯

I beg of you, nonfiction writers, breathe life into your prose! Ignore the professor in your brain that's always ready to mark something as too colloquial. Make it read like something written by an actual human you might want to talk to at a party!

arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190 we're still tinkering, but couldn't wait to share.

A reasonably effective workaround for this problem is for educators to create lessons and lesson plans for people to use as system prompts for the models Info in prompts almost always overrides info baked into the model weights, unless the model itself has been actively trained for misinformation

Given the vast volume of unedited manuscripts and the small pool of scholars to transcribe, collate, and edit them, AI models capable of doing a decent job of some of that work--at scale--could be really beneficial. Human eyes and brain are still needed, but more ground can be covered. #philology

Imagine — just imagine — Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Drayton Hall or Colonial Williamsburg doing this for a day. Can’t? There you have the core problem with the public history of the United States. Rudolf Höss’s villa opens to honour Auschwitz victims www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Higher education should always have been doing this BUT: now is the time to increase our partnerships with institutions within the communities we serve, demonstrating in everyday ways why universities and colleges matter to cities, states, towns and regions in which they are located (cont'd)

"The leading AI models are now very good historians" - by Benjamin Breen, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz resobscura.substack.com/p/the-leadin...

It’s #HandwritingDay so I thought I’d share a thread about Renaissance handwritten documents I worked with in the research that led to “Inventing the Renaissance,” and the best and worst scripts I’ve ever seen. 1/? (Continuing countdown to the release of my *absurdly fat* *absurdly orange* book!)

Some of the new OCR models for transcribing historical books, newspapers, &c. are genuinely mind-blowing—would have seemed like magic 10 years ago—& side note I think it would be unethical to ask people to spend years transcribing some of these materials—is that "the same" as ChatGPT?—I would say no

I do not see how we’re going to have productive academic discussions of "AI" until we stop accepting the marketing that lumps all machine learning methods & technologies into one amorphous thing called "AI"—so we get minimalist & maximalist responses that echo that marketing—we don’t have to do this

New paper, on how to build better tech for a better world: "The artificial intelligence cooperative: READ-COOP, Transkribus, and the benefits of shared community infrastructure for automated text recognition". A new history of building @transkribus.bsky.social, & coops can deliver responsible AI!

Part of the reason people are glum about AI is that researchers themselves represent the goal as full equivalence for human agency (“AGI”). While I get the theoretical interest, I think what most customers want (and what we’ve really produced so far) is closer to “prosthetics for thinking.”

The public schools are back open but there's still a large crowd of teens assembled outside the New York Hilton hoping for a glimpse of their favorite historians #AHA25

I don’t think either of them are on here, but I highly recommend this brilliant talk by Louis Hyman on AI tools for historians, with equally brilliant response by Matt Jones. It does everything it says on the tin and much more. /1

Archives are precious, but most of the stuff I work with hasn't even been collected by archives! Defend your local archives. Expand them. Donate things to them. Preserve the things others haven't!

Resharing this because I really think AI makes reasoning about culture more necessary and more powerful. And if you believe that in your gut, there's no reason to react defensively when people like Arpit Gupta say ill-informed things about the humanities.

In the new year I’m going to publish a history of the last 5 years of building @transkribus.bsky.social as an AI cooperative: shared ownership, shared resources, all profit reinvested into infrastructure. It turns out we can build a better tech world together, but that takes work & community.

(1/7) For a while we've been working on an ambitious problem: The National Archive of Mexico #AGN holds 58 linear km of documents. Only a drop of this ‘ocean’ has been studied due to many challenges. But great news: we are now unlocking this information! A thread 🧵 (1/8) #HTR #AI #CulturalHeritage