AI everything! For a month! That’s one way to describe the talk I gave for Brown’s AI and Humanities Research group, part of the Center for Digital Scholarship. Less clickbaity: How might historians use AI in their research? I tried a variety of AIs—ChatGPT, CoPilot, JSTOR AI, among other—on projects I’m working on now. I also went back to some earlier projects to see what AI might have done for me. (My work is in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history.)…
Every year, the Providence Preservation Society sponsors a symposium on key issues in historic preservation. This year’s symposium, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 historic preservation act, asked: Why Preserve? From the introduction: The 2016 Providence Symposium, Why Preserve?, will bring together experts from across the nation as well as local stakeholders to examine why historic preservation matters to Providence and all communities. To be held at the iconic but threatened Industrial Trust Building, the Symposium will launch a…
I go to the American Historical Association annual meeting about once every ten years. The usual complaints keep me away: too big, too crazy, most of the sessions too far outside my interests. And the more specific complaint you’d expect from someone interested in public history and public humanities: too academic. Just everyone I talked to had similar complaints. Even more important: they always have. That’s one of the lessons from a fine talk at a fine session (now that…
