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Gavin Beinart-Smollan

@beismo.bsky.social

Public and digital historian. PhD candidate at NYU. Writing about Yiddish family letters and the Lithuanian Jewish diaspora. Very amateur genealogist.

50 Posts2124 Follower5834 Folgt
John Garrison Marks@johngmarks.com · 9mo ago

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.

Elise Wang@elisewang.bsky.social · 10mo ago

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).

A screenshot of the model which includes the manuscript on the right and the extracted text on the left.
Erin Grievances@erinbartram.bsky.social · 10mo ago

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.

Erin Grievances@erinbartram.bsky.social · 10mo ago

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Heather Froehlich@heatherfro.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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

Roopika Risam@roopikarisam.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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. +

Roopika Risam@roopikarisam.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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. +

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 12mo ago

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] +

Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.

If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.

chronicle.com

James Elder@jameselder.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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.

Leon Jackson@drleonj.bsky.social · 11mo ago

You know what we won't need once handwriting recognition software has done its thing? Archivists, curators, conservators, catalogers, codicologists, or paleographers. We won't need archives either. We won't need diplomatics, editorial theory, book or media history, or material culture studies 🗃️🧵

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · last yr.

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.

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · last yr.

This is the world I hope we're getting: One where 1) progress is loosely sigmoid, not because there's any fixed cap, but because the initial overhang of human training data has been exploited, and 2) open models can come close to catching up, because of #1.

A line chart titled “Quality of solutions by some hypothetical metric where human experts are 1.0.” The vertical axis ranges from 0.00 to slightly above 1.00, and the horizontal axis runs from 2015 to 2035. Two sigmoid-shaped curves are shown: a blue “Closed models” line that rises steeply from near zero around 2021 to level off around 2028, and a red “Open models” line that starts similarly low but rises about two years later, leveling off around 2030. Both lines continue to rise rather than leveling entirely flat. The legend is in the lower right corner inside the plot area.
Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · last yr.

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: 🧵

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · last yr.

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” +

Beatrice Alex@beatricealex.bsky.social · last yr.

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.

Melissa Terras@melissaterras.bsky.social · last yr.

Newly launched- the Decoding Hidden Heritages project brings together over 5,500 Gaelic folktales from Ireland & Scotland, transcribed & made searchable using advanced AI. Congrats to Will Lamb, Bea Alex and wider team!

Cato Minor@catominor.bsky.social · last yr.

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

Text recognition for non-western languages in manuscripts: presentation of Calfa

Online Lecture on DIGITAL HUMANITIES at IMAFO-HI | by Baptiste Queuche

oeaw.ac.at

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social · 2y ago

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.

Doing AI Differently: London Workshop

An International Initiative Integrating Humanities into the Core of AI Development. Doing AI Differently is led by The Alan Turing Institute, University of Edinburgh…

vimeo.com

Dr Alys D Beverton@alysbeverton.bsky.social · 2y ago

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

AskHistorians@askhistorians.bsky.social · 2y ago

Our litmus test is instead whether a discussion is *productive*. In education, productive discussion is enabled by shared training, knowledge, reading and goals. Put a classroom of history students together in a room and it's reasonable to expect they can have useful (if imperfect) conversations.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan@beismo.bsky.social · 2y ago

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

Amalia S. Levi, PhD@amaliasl.bsky.social · 2y ago

An additional stage of #archivalsilences due to LLMs: illegible information that isn't even being excluded: it's simply not noticed. Great piece by @resobscura.bsky.social on the (insurmountable for the foreseeable future) limitations of AI in hist research. resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-legibil...

Kate Carpenter@katecarp.bsky.social · 2y ago

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!