I have been working with a team of five historians to develop a governed research environment for historical research. We are calling our research environment The Historian’s Desktop and propose to launch it into the Commons in early September 2026. generativelives.substack.com/p/the-histor...

The Historian's Desktop

A governed research environment for historical research. Designed by historians for historians

generativelives.substack.com

@adamchapman.bsky.social @justincolson.bsky.social @mpdavies.bsky.social @melissaterras.bsky.social @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social @ihrbritainseminar.bsky.social

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I have been history vibe coding now for four months. I am offering to coach and support any of you who want to take the plunge with a first history vibe coding project. generativelives.substack.com/p/history-vi... @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com

I have been history vibe coding now for four months. I am offering to coach and support any of you who want to take the plunge with a first history vibe coding project. generativelives.substack.com/p/history-vi... @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com

History vibe coding

An offer to coach any and all historians wanting to give it a try

generativelives.substack.com

May be of interest @dslc.io @historytoday.com @royalhistsoc.org @historians.org

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Claude Cowork has huge potential for historians. The next session of the ai + history collaboratory (March 31st 2026) will be a hands on session exploring how to install Cowork on your desktop and to write and test skill files to assist your research generativelives.substack.com/p/cowork-for...

May be of interest @tedunderwood.com @timhitchcock.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social @jwbaker.bsky.social @adamcrymble.bsky.social

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Claude Cowork has huge potential for historians. The next session of the ai + history collaboratory (March 31st 2026) will be a hands on session exploring how to install Cowork on your desktop and to write and test skill files to assist your research generativelives.substack.com/p/cowork-for...

Claude Cowork has huge potential for historians. The next session of the ai + history collaboratory (March 31st 2026) will be a hands on session exploring how to install Cowork on your desktop and to write and test skill files to assist your research generativelives.substack.com/p/cowork-for...

I’m sharing the product of five hours work with Claude Cowork spread over a day. I have been using Cowork now for ten days and this is my biggest project to date. The product is a static 5 annotation layer IIIF viewer for Ottoman Turkish. #ottomanturkish generativelives.substack.com/p/an-ottoman...

An Ottoman Turkish document viewer built with Claude Cowork

I’m sharing the product of five hours work with Claude Cowork spread over a day.

generativelives.substack.com

Those were the days!! First public fruit of my work with Claude Cowork. An interactive dashboard of the MarineLives Twitter archive. 13 years of data. 10,535 Tweets. You can check it out on the ai + history collaboratory GitHub site: ai-and-history-collaboratory.github.io/social-media... #history

Launching the ottoman-archive GitHub organisation for all historians and linguists interested in learning about a world culture where only 10,000 people can now read its written records github.com/ottoman-arch... @ottomanhistory.bsky.social

ottoman-archive

ottoman-archive has one repository available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

Our new short courses are a great way to learn about using different kinds of sources for researching and writing history. Whether you're researching one place, or something broader, this is the ideal introduction to using the built environment in history! #Skystorians

Victoria County History@vch-home.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Want to learn more about how we look at townscapes as a tool to understand urban & human histories of place? Join us on 4-6 March with expert guidance on a range of themes, exploring sources, what statutory protection means and how it works and access to the resources of @ihrlibrary.bsky.social. 🗃️

This is how I work on Ottoman Turkish with Claude (and Gemini) to visually capture, transliterate, translate, extract named entitities, and contextualise C19th and early C20th Ottoman Turkish documents. generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-th... #Ottomanhistory @ottomanhistory.bsky.social

May be of interest #Ottomanhistory @guel-sen.bsky.social @sariyannis.bsky.social @elifbengusuarik.bsky.social

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 7mo ago

NEW: Can LLMs open Ottoman archives to generalist historians? I show how AI transcription makes Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek & Armenian accessible—with auditable, scholarly results. Work in progress; feedback welcome! generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-the-ottoman-archive

I'm looking for scholars of Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Armenian to comment on and to test my approach, as well as generalist historians wanting to explore new content and archives @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com #history #ottoman #turkey

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 7mo ago

NEW: Can LLMs open Ottoman archives to generalist historians? I show how AI transcription makes Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek & Armenian accessible—with auditable, scholarly results. Work in progress; feedback welcome! generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-the-ottoman-archive

NEW: Can LLMs open Ottoman archives to generalist historians? I show how AI transcription makes Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek & Armenian accessible—with auditable, scholarly results. Work in progress; feedback welcome! generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-the-ottoman-archive

Opening the Ottoman Archive

You want to do granular research on the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, but don't read Ottoman Turkish. Do you throw up you hands or look for a new set of powerful tools?

generativelives.substack.com

Are you interested in languages, historical research and large language models? Then check out my new Substack Generative Lives generativelives.substack.com #history #languages #machinelearning #ai #llms

May be of interest to @ecoledeschartes.bsky.social cljournal.org @aclmeeting.bsky.social @melibrarynl.bsky.social

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I would like to make contact with Ottoman Turkish scholars to discuss a new approach to machine transcription, transliteration and translation of Ottoman Turkish, using early issues of Takvîm-i Vekâyi as the use case @turkishstudies.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social

I would like to make contact with Ottoman Turkish scholars to discuss a new approach to machine transcription, transliteration and translation of Ottoman Turkish, using early issues of Takvîm-i Vekâyi as the use case @turkishstudies.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social

Can Gemini 3 Pro Preview read this printed 1920s Ottoman Turkish (Right to Left) accurately? Yes. #transkribus

Here's a cryptographical challenge for people who have finished their shopping and are bored: generativelives.substack.com/p/message-in... #puzzle #cryptography #history #language @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @thiagokrause.bsky.social

Message in a Script

A cryptographical challenge for those who have finished shopping with time on their hands.

open.substack.com

What is the potential for LLM-enabled HTR with medium to low resource languages to help historians open up archives? My latest Substack article explores the edge case of mid-C20th handwritten Yiddish #history #languages #htr #ai #machine-learning generativelives.substack.com/p/mid-c20th-...

Mid-C20th Yiddish HTR

The potential for LLM-based transcription is clear, as amateurs and professionals experiment with Gemini 3 Pro's unique visually grounded capabilities. So how does Gemini perform in an edge case?

generativelives.substack.com

I am looking for a palaeographer and/or philologist who can read and comment on this image, and context, and who would be interested in commenting forensically upon some work I am doing. Source: EAP759/1 Sundarban Anchalik Sangrahashala Collection [18th-19th century] eap.bl.uk/project/EAP759

I interviewed film maker Derek Jarman in early 1980. I was twenty-three and he was thirty-eight. I have published part of this previously unpublished interview in my Generative Lives substack article "What's top of my mind". open.substack.com/pub/generati...

I have a new Substack article about the potential of Gemi 3 Pro to assist with machine transcription of medium and low resource languages #history #translation #palaeography #digitalhumanities @timhitchcock.bsky.social @dancohen.org @tedunderwood.com open.substack.com/pub/generati...

A New Lens into the Archive

You are in an archive. You find a document in a language you don't understand. You take a photo, input it into Gemini 3 Pro. 60 seconds later you have a transcription, transliteration, and translation

open.substack.com

Encouraging curious historians who like to experiment with tools and to build their own to subscribe to my Generative Lives Substack. New article later this week on Gemini 3 Pro and its remarkable capabilities with low resource languages. generativelives.substack.com/about @timhitchcock.bsky.social

(1) Announcing the AI + History Collaboratory monthly online programme, December 2025 to June 2026. We still have spaces.https://github.com/Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory/blob/main/README.md #history #ai #researchmethods

I have been engaging with Professor Mark Humphries, who writes the excellent Generative History substack. Mark has analysed the capabilities of Gemini 3 for HTR. In this Bluesky post I add to his findings. @timhitchcock.bsky.social #history #ai #llms generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-s...

Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson

Testing shows that Gemini 3 has effectively solved handwriting on English texts, one of the oldest problems in AI, achieving expert human levels of performance.

generativehistory.substack.com

MarineLives@marinelives.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Gemini 3 Pro in Consumer Bot mode can identify and markup text regions, identify lives, and label lines by region. Moreover it can pretty accurately transcribe English language C17th legal depositions, despite a complex layout. Follow link for the prompts I used gemini.google.com/share/c42566...

Gemini 3 Pro in Consumer Bot mode can identify and markup text regions, identify lives, and label lines by region. Moreover it can pretty accurately transcribe English language C17th legal depositions, despite a complex layout. Follow link for the prompts I used gemini.google.com/share/c42566...

I am relaunching the ai-and-history collaboratory I ran last December. First meeting Tuesday, December 9th 2025. Then roughly monthly by ZOOM. Let me know if you are interested. github.com/Addaci/ai-an... #ai #history @timhitchcock.bsky.social

GitHub - Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory: online forum with synchronous and asynchronous components for the discussion of the application of ai to historical research

online forum with synchronous and asynchronous components for the discussion of the application of ai to historical research - Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory

github.com

I am looking for a couple of beta testers who will take half an hour and try out a Socratic Research Assistant I have been building powered by Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview. The idea is to get much greater control over the persona, and inference approach of Gemini through the interface

Here's my agenda for the next three months: generative-ai, historical research and archival practice: generativelives.substack.com/p/whats-top-... #earlymodernhistory #history #archives #ai #ml

What's top of my mind?

My Generative Lives agenda for the next three months

generativelives.substack.com