100 years puts me at my great-grandparents generation, but I know what they were doing: Tobacco farmer Tobacco farmer Tobacco farmer Tobacco farmer My grandparents would have been approximately 10 years old, but they would have been pulling leaves or tying hands with the adults, depending on gender.

Revan@revan.eurosky.social · last wk.

Enough “what would you do on the commune questions” If you got sent back 100 years and were given your grandparent’s job, what are you doing?

I've been worrying about cognitive atrophy and moral disengagement from #AI use for a while, but it really bit me today. My dev machine is in the shop, and so Sara and I were using her laptop to run some Claude Code sessions. One session was for a one-off script to run analytics and report in CSV

Hey fellow DOGED-friends: did you get the message from the NEH that they're setting up a process for reinstatement? This seems like significant progress. Thanks to the staff at NEH who are doing the work behind the scenes to address the mistakes others imposed on their agency

How efficient is AI at transcribing a deluxe medieval manuscript? That's the wrong question! Some thoughts from a conversation with medievalist @lauramorreale.bsky.social and a letter from the pope. app.bentonow.com/share/bX0mnj...

The difficult part of any technological infrastructure that has been incorporated into an institution is that generally the institution has hollowed out whatever services and roles that technological was brought in to modify or replace, so uncoupling is an expensive and messy prospect.

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...

Introducing Gemini 3.0 Support in FromThePage

YouTube video by fromthepage

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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…

Tom Scheinfeldt@foundhistory.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Think about: - Scientists' lab notebooks with abandoned experiments that might be promising with today's technology - Rejected grant proposals addressing problems we can now tackle - Field notes from geological surveys - Medical case files, engineering reports, meteorological observations

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.

Introducing Gemini 3.0 Support in FromThePage - FromThePage Blog

When Ben sent me Mark Humphries’ report on testing a new, unreleased Gemini model, I got scared. And excited. Mark is a historian and digital humanist who’s gone deep on analyzing AI tools for textual...

content.fromthepage.com

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...

Is That Transcription Really Human? - FromThePage Blog

Last month, someone asked this question on the Genealogy and AI Facebook group:If volunteers use AI to transcribe documents, is that OK? I have strong opinions, but want to explain them. First off, th...

content.fromthepage.com

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