Cameron Blevins
@cblevins.bsky.social
Digital History | US History Professor at CU Denver 📖 Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West 📖 cblevins.github.io
Johns Hopkins + the AHA are hosting the AI and History Conference 2026 -- Oct 15-16 in Baltimore. Whatever your take on AI (excited, skeptical, curious, already using it), there's a place for you in this conversation. Learn more at: proflouishyman.github.io/ai_conferenc...
AI and History Conference 2026
A practitioner-focused conference for historians using AI and computational methods, October 15–16, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University.
proflouishyman.github.io
Spent a good amount of this summer digging through a 20+ person team of teachers' free-text annotations, learning what "scaffolding" and "push for rigor" means, and iterating on this pipeline. We find that AI tutors, by default, frequently over-scaffold and rarely push for rigor.
Ai2@ai2.bsky.social · 2w agoToday we're introducing a preview of TutorMoments, a framework that measures whether AI tutors can make one of the hardest calls in teaching: when to step in and help a student, & when to hold back and let them do the heavy thinking. 🧵
The whole thread is worth a read, demoing what it would look like for a student using Claude for Education to begin writing a research paper. This isn't learning.
Jane Rosenzweig@janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 2w agoThis is part of the Claude edu, so it might be reasonable to think it s going to walk me through a thinking process/scaffold things for me but not do the work for me. It asks,"which angle do you want to run with?" Just in case anyone is wondering: this is not how writing is taught. /4
A new essay: “Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship” — Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/peri...
Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship
Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin
newsletter.dancohen.org
Thrilled that "Expanding Queer Cartographies" has won a Digital Justice Development Grant from @acls1919.bsky.social! Our project will digitize & map thousands of women- and lesbian-friendly bars, restaurants, bookstores, etc. that appeared in the lesbian travel guide Gaia's Guide (1970s-1990s) +
American Council of Learned Societies@acls1919.bsky.social · last mo.ACLS announces the recipients of the 2026 ACLS Digital Justice Grants. $800,000 in grants will fund community-led and publicly engaged digital projects across the US.
🎙️ We're thrilled to release Listening to Auraria's Past, an audio walking tour of Denver's old Westside neighborhood that was razed by the city in the 1970s to build a downtown campus for higher education. This tour tells the story of the displaced community that lived there: aurariahistory.org +
Listening to Auraria's Past
A Historical Tour of a Displaced Neighborhood
aurariahistory.org
Built a useful GLAM model this week: flags blank index cards before expensive OCR. Cheap, scales, adapts. IMO the technical barrier is now very low, the main one is knowing how. So I wrote this up as a chapter: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-for-glam/patterns/index-card-classifier.html
Are you tired of the same old, same old in your US History II survey? Feeling stuck in a rut? Annoyed that your students won't read long articles? Have no fear -- "US History in 15 Photographs" is here to save the day!
I'm launching a new project with @joguldi.bsky.social today: Working Papers in Critical Search. Today we're publishing the first working paper: "Why a Working Paper Series on Critical Search Now" #digitalhistory #digitalhumanities working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-001-in...
Why a Working Paper Series on Critical Search Now – Working Papers in Critical Search
working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io
Google Slides' new "Beautify this slide" AI tool is comedic gold. Don't think I could have made an uglier, more illegible slide if I tried:
Got to present this early draft paper today at a neat workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social. It's my attempt to grapple with the need for struggle and friction in learning in a world where LLMs remove all that friction. Read the whole thing at stats.andrewheiss.com/pinky-lychee/
New paper w/ UK AISI: Millions of people now use AI to help them write and communicate. In three experiments (14k participants, 3m+ human ratings) we show that AI writing assistance systematically distorts writer personas – their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. 🧵
I dumped some feelings in a blog post about teaching DH right now. mackenziekbrooks.info/update/2026/...
AI feelings
A few weeks ago, toward the end of the semester, I left my classroom, walked into sunshine and 80 degrees, and started crying. The weight of the semester was...
mackenziekbrooks.info
I'm proud that Responsible Datasets in Context (RDIC) also won a DH Award for Best Training Materials. This is a project with @electrostani.bsky.social, @miriamposner.com, Sylvia Fernández, and Anna Preus. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com
Home
Responsible Datasets in Context
responsible-datasets-in-context.com
Fun to see that "Bears Will Be Boys," which I wrote with folks from the @puddingviz.bsky.social, won a 2025 Digital Humanities Award! pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...
Generative AI has forced me to think a lot more concretely about all the discrete components of doing historical work - and where the value of those different pieces lie
Lucas Poy@lucaspoy.bsky.social · 4mo agoA new post on my Substack with some thoughts on the impact of generative AI on academic labour lucaspoy.substack.com/p/if-you-are...
Just confirming that Made by History will now be back up and running in the next few weeks with a new home and new partners at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Exciting! So, if you have pitches, now's the time to start sending them to madebyhistory@inquirer.com 🗃️ #MadebyHistory #HistoryMatters
"Student AI Bill of Rights" is a nicely scoped document from @studentdefense.bsky.social. It raises some interesting questions around enforcement/implementation + defendstudents.org/all/student-...
Student Defense Unveils “Student AI Bill of Rights,” Calls For Adoption From Higher Education Institutions — Student Defense
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 3, 2026 MEDIA CONTACT press@defendstudents.org 303-646-7816 Student Defense Unveils “Student AI Bill of Rights,” Calls For Adoption From Higher Education Inst...
defendstudents.org
Interesting parallels here in the “flow” of vibe coding vs. gambling
Rachel Thomas@math-rachel.bsky.social · 7mo agoVibe coding is the creation of large quantities of complex AI-generated code. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much code must be AI-generated... yet results are far from what was promised 1/ www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...
Gave a talk today on some of the pragmatic ways I use agentic tools in my work, including for building tools and using local models. I recorded some simple examples and shared everything here: anastasiasalter.net/PragmaticAge... (the site itself is a silly example 👾)
Pragmatic Agentic AI in Digital Humanities
A guided tour through agentic tools for humanities scholars
anastasiasalter.net
New issue of my newsletter: “Vibe Analysis” — Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work Featuring good work by @sarahebull.bsky.social, @jasonheppler.org and @cblevins.bsky.social newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/vibe...
Vibe Analysis
Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work
newsletter.dancohen.org
📣 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/ +
How Fast Was the Mail?
Explore mail transit times via railway between major U.S. cities, 1882–1908.
cblevins.github.io
Join @taylor-arnold.bsky.social and me for a postdoc to expand distant viewing! 2 years. Awesome liberal arts college. Great city. Option to teach 1-2 courses a year for extra pay. Thanks to Mellon for the opportunity! Happy to answer any questions. richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...
A few months ago I realized my rare and valuable skill—writing code as a historian—was still valuable but no longer rare. Now I'm thinking about what it means when the technical barriers to digital history drop away.
Behind, ahead | Lincoln Mullen
A historian reflects on how agentic AI coding tools have changed the possibilities for digital history, making once-rare programming skills widely accessible, and argues that digital history should be...
lincolnmullen.com
Lincoln asks, what if generative AI has reduced the technical barriers to doing digital history? Similarly I ask, with an example, what if vibing Just Works?
Behind, ahead | Lincoln Mullen
How agentic AI coding tools have changed the possibilities for digital history, making once-rare programming skills widely accessible, and with an argument that digital history should be judged by the quality of its ideas, not the difficulty of its implementation.
lincolnmullen.com
How are historians rethinking environmental and social history via improved OCR of imperial archives? Join us this Wednesday 3pm UK time to hear from @jimclifford.bsky.social and @historyjacob.bsky.social - registration link below.
Katie McDonough@kmcdono.bsky.social · 6mo agoJoin the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental #DH Seminar on March 11 @ 3pm UK (online) for a talk by @jimclifford.bsky.social & @historyjacob.bsky.social: "Solving OCR: Using olmOCR to Follow Commodities across the British World" www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/solving-oc... #dhist #ocr #envhist 🗃️
Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...
Join the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental #DH Seminar on March 11 @ 3pm UK (online) for a talk by @jimclifford.bsky.social & @historyjacob.bsky.social: "Solving OCR: Using olmOCR to Follow Commodities across the British World" www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/solving-oc... #dhist #ocr #envhist 🗃️
Solving OCR: Using olmOCR to Follow Commodities across the British World
Join the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental DH Seminar for a talk and discussion with Jim Clifford and Jacob Polay (Saskatchewan).
eventbrite.co.uk
I gave a short talk at Cornell yesterday on my science-of-science work investigating how AI is being used by researchers and how we should go about crafting policies in response. Blanket policies are hard, privacy is important, we need more measurement. Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1gNTK...
