In just under two hours, we're hosting @jonippolito.net in a webinar presenting his research on the environmental impact of #AI use compared with other common digital technologies. Register for "How Green is your Prompt" webinar here: content.fromthepage.com/april-2026-w...

Final thought on Paul Ehrlich: I happened to see him speak twice, once at HS graduation in ’90s and once at conference sponsored by Fortune (!?) in ’00s. Both times he offered same, disproven “population bomb” warnings he’d made for decades. As joke goes, he predicted ten of the next zero famines.

I stumbled across something interesting during a live demo in yesterday's webinar. Not having anything prepared, I tried a page in the Queens University Archives' Riel Resistance Collection. The hand was extraordinarily difficult for me, even though it was late 19th-century North American script

📌 Where to find us: 🔍 Browse our digital collections -- thousands of rare maps, manuscripts, postcards, and more, all free and online collections.newberry.org ✍️ Help us transcribe historical documents on Newberry Transcribe (no experience needed, just curiosity) nt.newberry.org

We're 75 minutes away from our webinar on responsible AI use in FromThePage--the challenges we face from AI and how we're addressing (some of) them: content.fromthepage.com/feb-2026-web...

Quick blog post noting some thoughts on 'Documenting AI-created/enhanced records in catalogues/metadata/displays' - I'd love to know who's already doing it, and how? www.openobjects.org.uk/2026/02/docu... #AI4LAM #MuseTech

I am very excited to report that a project I have been working on for 3+ years is finally seeing the light of day! Along with @byzcapp.bsky.social and Jesse Torgerson, we debut a new annual section in Digital Philology that proposes the dataset as a new genre of publication. odfms.hcommons.org

This is the first time we've been willing to add LLM-supported transcription to FromThePage. Last week's webinar: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhqR...

I'm not ready to discard the entire ecosystem we've built around making data openly available to possibly, hopefully slightly impair commercial AI training. Users uploading data (they often don't have the right to relicense for AI training) into AI models is a drop in the ocean.

My worry here is that tabular, numerical info is much easier to decipher and standardize, so it gets turned into a dataset without…

In four hours we will present our experiments integrating #gemini AI #transcription into the #crowdsourcing platform #FromThePage content.fromthepage.com/dec-2025-web...

"From a transcribers point of view I will be very unlikely now to continue devoting time to working on straightforward handwritten documents without an AI draft as a starting point ." She plans to attend our webinar this Thursday and might be willing to talk about her experience.

An update: after a week of testing, the same volunteer is now very happy: "I have been very pleased to use the AI facility in transcribing Nicholas Piper Log books for Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society." ...

It looks like we passed another milestone on FromThePage last week:

But it really feels like libraries & archives as a field suddenly just went from "we aren't generally attempting to do automated handwriting recognition because it's at the edge of what's possible" to "oh boy now we have another doable but labor-intensive collections enhancement task on the backlog"

People who like to transcribe tend to be hands-on types, or puzzle solvers, or people who read between the lines. Transcribing is a way of thinking. It is not for every project, but for some projects, it can be crucial.

As someone with FtP projects, I think there are still several good reasons for people to choose transcribing. The goal is not necessarily to record the words, but to find meaning. Sometimes that comes from reading the words, other times it comes from closely reading each mark.+

I have never felt that AI is a threat to transcription projects. Transcription is such a fulfilling experience and the words run through you in ways that reading alone can never do. Meeting up with scribes of the past will always be thrilling.

Introducing #Gemini 3 Support in #FromThePage content.fromthepage.com/introducing-... We're still developing capabilities and guardrails now, but plan to present it all at a webinar December 11.

Yesterday, Google released Gemini 3, which has gotten really interesting reviews from Mark Humphries: generativehistory.substack.com/p/the-sugar-... Also yesterday, we shipped an integration between FromThePage and Gemini, allowing transcribers the option of starting with an AI draft.

Should a volunteer use #AI to help them transcribe pages for a #crowdsourcing project? That question got me thinking about why, exactly, my answer is "no" and what kinds of purposes different transcriptions may be used for. content.fromthepage.com/can-voluntee...

We did a serious analysis of our experiments adding AI coding agents (Codex, Github Copilot Agent) to our development process at FromThePage for a group of friends in software yesterday, which I thought I'd share here as well. After a couple of months of experiments, the results are very mixed.

A little feature we shipped yesterday in FromThePage: you can now reference a work by page ranges, so fromthepage.com/unclibraries... shows a single two-page letter from the fifty-page folder uploaded as a single work!

What's the Character Error Rate of a Volunteer? Analyzing accuracy in cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects | @benwbrum.bsky.social | #DH2025

Sara and I were interviewed for the SAA Archives in Context podcast! archivesincontext.archivists.org/2025/06/27/s...

Sitting in coffeeshop listening to three strangers at the bar getting into a detailed conversation about the different accents of Louisiana in both English and French. It's a good start to the day.

Come hear Dreanna Belden share about "One Great Document: a Woman’s Perspective on the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 Visit to Yorktown and Norfolk," during our lightning talks at next week's ADE Annual Meeting.

Does Oxford University Press no longer publicize conference discounts or holiday sales?

I'm really enjoying the inaugural Alliance for Texas History conference at Texas State University. Best session I've attended so far? It's a toss-up between one on a freedman blacksmith and another on highway construction through African-American neighborhoods in Houston roadstaken.org #ATxH

Our first transcribathon event is today!

Crowdsourced transcription platform FromThePage has long championed public participation in historical research. Find out how they used Transkribus' AI technology to help their volunteer transcribers in this Success Story 👇 blog.transkribus.org/en/fromthepa... @benwbrum.bsky.social

Like many other #NEH -funded projects. the #sferaproject received notice yesterday that our grant has been cancelled. It's not yet clear what that means for the project, but we hope to have more info soon. Meanwhile, here's a screenshot of what they cancelled (our website-in-development):

A total of 44,091 manuscript pages have now been completed by Transcribe Bentham volunteers, with a further 361 in progress, and 10 awaiting review 👏

Excited to learn that our proposal for the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries was accepted! I still can't believe how lucky I am to have an amazing digital library conference an hour's walk from my house. #TCDL2025

Has anyone experimented with automated hand or script identification using #HTR or multi-modal #LLM AI tools? It would be interesting to locate pages within a corpus written in multiple hands--especially if the scripts were different enough to indicate different social classes of writers.

ISAC (formerly OI-UChicago) is offering an eight-week course in #Hieroglyphic #Luwian online through their continuing education program, May 29-July 24. I took the Sumerian class they offered a couple of years ago and was impressed -- it's well worth the $400. www.eventbrite.com/e/introducti...

At some point in the next few years, I'd like to take a course on Old English. As a 50-year-old with a career, it'll probably need to be online. The "Ancient Language Institute" offers one, but I've never heard of them. Any advice? #classicists? #medievalists?

August 24(?), 1790 exerpt from the log of the sloop Dolphin, kept by Capt. Benjamin Paddock, Jr. on a whaling voyage from Nantucket to the Bahamas and down to the West Indies, 1790-91. fromthepage.com/nharl/ships-...

This call permits commercial subcontracting! Needless to say: reach out to me if you are in need for a tool builder experienced in all things #DigitalHumanities, #IIIF, image- and text annotation, web maps, and #UI/#UX for #DH 🙂

Hello all manuscript fans! As we are approaching St Brigit's day, why not transcribe some of Cogitosus' Vita S. Brigidae in her honour? Images from the Cambrai manuscript ready to go here -> fromthepage.com/nicolev/eih-... #Brigit #medievalsky @historytcd.bsky.social @researchireland.bsky.social

We are offering two FREE, online semi-intensive short courses in #Phoenician and Punic #language in April 🏛️ 🏺 Elementary course info: ics.sas.ac.uk/events/eleme... Intermediate course info: ics.sas.ac.uk/events/inter... Share and Apply by 22 March!

One bright spot in my life is that "What's the Character Error Rate of a Volunteer?", my short paper for #DH2025 was accepted. If nothing happens, I'll see a lot of you #crowdsourcing #digitalhumanities people in Lisbon.

GLAM folk, got perspectives on 'Participatory Science' (or citizen history, citizen science, crowdsourcing) to share for a special edition of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (CSTP) Journal? Abstracts to forms.gle/tZmaSEPixgAU... - by February 28 More: participatorysciences.org/2024/11/07/c...

Is there a location for the 2025 #dlfforum?

Another option is to include a range, e.g. 1480-1490, but that suggests that the date can't be 1479 or 1491. It's a real problem that most Library databases aren't equipped to solve yet.

My DigiKult keynote has just gone live! 'Hold steady: centering the human in the hype of AI' was my view of the potential and pitfalls for AI in libraries, museums and archives as of early October 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voDWMB-903k&list=PLKrB8_QR_fyHm79rosJ8LDZOjiri07JXR&index=8 #AI

Using AV in class? AVAnnotate is hosting bi-weekly conversations about using AV in class. The first session (1.21 at 2pm CT) is working with AV archives: links, IIIF manifests, transcriptions, basic tags, structuring assignments. RSVP for the Zoom link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I just opened Blueskye and read this out to my wife. Where else could I find this? I love this site!

Historian and paleography friends! I have a hybrid Spanish-Nahuatl document I am trying to catalogue. It is brief. It look like possibly a property claim? If you have a moment to help me make it a title and approximate date, I'll thank you with a bevvie at our next conference.