Are we living in an “age of AI”—or deciding to call it one? Harvard Law asks historians how eras are made, why diffusion matters, and how historical memory cuts through hype. clp.law.harvard.edu/knowledge-hu...

The Unfolding of a New Era - Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession

When you pull up the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to search for how often sequences of words appear in digitized books over time, and plug in “age of AI” or “era of AI,” you see the sam...

clp.law.harvard.edu

AI didn’t save me from work. It replaced repetitive Canvas labor with cumulative intellectual work. Lesson for universities: use machines to reduce paperwork—and the savings to bring humans back into the room. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/how-ai-sav...

How AI Saved One Professor from Drudgery

Implications for Administrators

computationalhistory.substack.com

What happens when AI breaks our ability to establish what actually happened? I talked with Shae about Wikipedia across 300+ languages, AI’s English-language bias, provenance, and why we need a right to a verifiable past. Historians and archivists belong in the AI conversation.

Well, this was dangerous. A preorder sale led me to @joshspecht.bsky.social on property, @jeannasmialek.bsky.social on Maria Edgeworth, and Andrew Whelan on destroyed records and power. @duttonbooks.bsky.social’s THE WAR OVER RENT connects all three. PREORDER25

Turning Points is out—and our Trento conversations are in print. My chapter asks: Was that anecdote typical? What did the archive omit? The digital turn didn’t make interpretation obsolete. It made its problems newly visible. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... @toffolosandra.bsky.social

A good excuse to preorder books! B&N is offering 25% off all preorders for Rewards Members through Sept. 11 (+10% for Premium Members). That includes The War Over Rent, Data by Design, and The Father of the Man. Preorders matter to authors. Code: PREORDER25 ❤️📚

The idea that rent should simply go up and up is much newer than we tend to imagine. The last time it was promoted with abandon, it helped bring a country to the brink of revolution. Cover reveal today! joguldi.substack.com/p/the-rent-w...

The Rent Wasn’t Always Like This.

A new book and a cover reveal!

joguldi.substack.com

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, we’re asking whether historians can tell a common national story. I think the better question is: Where do historians actually agree? #America250 #AI #History #HistoricalConsensus open.substack.com/pub/joguldi/...

America at 250 Needs Better Questions

As America debates whether historians can tell a common national story at 250, we’re finally developing tools to ask a different question: Where do historians actually agree?

open.substack.com

Louis at Computational History republished our Working Papers in Critical Search launch today. @joguldi.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/computat...

Journals Are Dead. Up with Github. Up with Transparent Research.

Why we created a site for Working Papers on Critical Search

open.substack.com

What if climate change, AI, democratic decline, and inequality are all versions of the same problem? My latest essay: open.substack.com/pub/joguldi/... (computationalhistory.substack.com⁠)

The Future Is Built

If AI is remaking everything, what are the dependencies that ensure human survival?

open.substack.com

I'm so excited to announce, with Jim Clifford, a Working Paper Series on Critical Search. We'll be publishing our own and others' experiments with AI, design, and pedagogy in a format built to reward quick turnaround and rapid ideation -- forging a track from lab to the world of journals.

Jim Clifford@jimclifford.bsky.social · 5mo ago

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...

What if the first great generation of data activists were not in Silicon Valley, but nineteenth-century Ireland? open.substack.com/pub/joguldi/...

Historians warned against cherry-picking. But now others are making big historical claims at scale—and shaping public debate. We need a response. Critical search. Disciplined selection. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/beyond-che...

Beyond Cherry-Picking: Scaling Historical Arguments

Why Historians Must Enter the Age of Big Claims

computationalhistory.substack.com

Coming in 2027 from Dutton: THE WAR OVER RENT. A history of tenant struggle, data activism, and how ordinary people used records, maps, and evidence to challenge concentrated power. Booking talks from Dec. 2026 onward: AI, tech ethics, urbanism, housing, civics, universities.

AI’s hardest problems — retrieval, ground truth, alignment — aren’t just technical. They’re historical. The future of trustworthy AI may depend on historical methods. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/ai-needs-h...

AI needs historians as much as historians need AI

Digital history did not fail in isolation—it failed just before the world discovered how much it needed it.

computationalhistory.substack.com

Digital history didn’t fail; it stopped short. It built archives, not cumulative research programs. Now AI is asking the questions DH left unresolved. Computational history is what comes next. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/the-lost-p...

The Lost Promise of Digital History

And why computational history is now needed more than ever

computationalhistory.substack.com

Look around, the case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever.

Richmond Eustis@reustis.bsky.social · last yr.

If you were forced to bet on which university courses of study still will be relevant in 50 years, languages, literature, history, philosophy, and arts are all pretty good wagers. They have an excellent track record over the past thousand years or so.

I can't stress enough how studying philosophy at a liberal arts school prepared me for my career. Logic problems, organizing abstract concepts, neural nets and models of cognition, language and conversation, the nature of experience. Honestly expected never to see a trolley problem again tho.

Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · last yr.

Look around, the case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever.

3 tabs opened, a note-pad with a to-do-list in front of you, and a pair of spectacles handy. Surfing on the #earlymodern internet in 1622. #skystorians

Is it too late to give Sacha Baron Cohen an Oscar for this? Not a damn lie told. 🇺🇸

This is cool. Johannes Uhl and colleagues use historical maps and settlement data to generate a dataset of the approximate date of every road in the United States. Check it out: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16625 @jhuhl.bsky.social

So. Less ability to forecast hurricanes, and a crippled FEMA so you can’t get federal aid for the damage…

Michael Lowry@michaelrlowry.bsky.social · last yr.

A huge blow was dealt to hurricane forecasters this week as a critical tool was abruptly terminated by the Department of Defense and NOAA. The immediate discontinuation of data from three weather satellites will severely impact hurricane forecasts this season and beyond. More ⬇️

Now if only they would publish the data on their findings so that we could understand the work of government and the sacrifices of public servants. Because every past government committee in a democracy committed to transparency publishes its findings, right??

Mehdi Hasan@mehdirhasan.bsky.social · last yr.

“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

Exciting new threshold in dh!

Amy Earhart@aearhart.bsky.social · last yr.

I’m so excited that my book is now out in the world. It pulls together my scholarly training in African American literature with my turn to digital humanities. I’ve also published the complete data dataset of 100 years of AFAM and am lit anthologies that is the backbone of the book.

Profound personal statement about the power of the humanities, the risks associated with losing the university as a bridge to social mobility, and how much is at stake as we abandon the infrastructure of research. Thank you for writing this, Karin. We need the long form version.

Karin Wulf@kawulf.bsky.social · last yr.

"My father, an early and prominent computer scientist, passed away more than two years ago. Since then I’ve been trying to make sense of how rapidly the world that helped make him, and in turn the one he helped shape, is unraveling." 1/ scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/06/26/d...

I wish more of my neighbors in Western North Carolina realized this.

Robert Reich@rbreich.bsky.social · last yr.

Trump has gutted FEMA grants to build storm-resistant infrastructure in flood and hurricane-prone communities.  Two-thirds of counties that have lost funding voted for him in 2024.  Trump is even telling his own voters they're on their own. https://www.cbsnews.com/femagrantcuts/

I do love that it was helpful to a China scholar, Tom! I’ve been hearing the same thing from sovietologists as well. Thanks for weighing in!

Tom Hancock@tomhancock.bsky.social · last yr.

Fascinating interview with @joguldi.bsky.social novaramedia.com/2025/06/13/h... part near the end on going beyond communism vs capitalism to classify modes of development during cold war is especially relevant to China

Super powerful Sunday meditation on America in despair by theologian Diana Butler Bass @dianabutlerbass open.substack.com/pub/dianabutle…

Chicago

This is a remarkably thoughtful essay about standing ruins in urban landscapes today and what they mean -- a portrait of Austin's long battle to attract IT, and about international bulldozing as a way of life in our wasteful economy.

Michael Erard@michaelerard.bsky.social · last yr.

My interest in ruins that are not ruins goes back a long way...I went looking for an old piece about grackles and turned up this: www.austinchronicle.com/news/2001-11...