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.)…
How best to make journal articles accessible? Over the years, I’ve published a few dozen essays, in a range of journals, books, encyclopedias, newsletters, and blogs. A recent discussion with folks from the Brown University Library about the Brown Digital Repository got me thinking about how accessible they were, and how to make them more accessible. And so I spent some time trying to figure out what was on the web, what was open to the public, and what to…
I spent the last two weeks of June at Beautiful Data, a workshop funded by the Getty Foundation and run by Harvard’s MetaLab. I’m not sure why the name, “Beautiful Data”: but it seems fair, given that the workshop address both data about beautiful things and data made beautiful by its utility. The question for the workshop was what we might do with the newly available data about the collections in art museums. The workshop was pretty intense. Twenty two…
By popular demand, the full text of the article about the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum that appeared in the New York Times in 1852. It’s a very odd article. More about it, and the Naval Lyceum, in my article, brand new in Museum History Journal.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done serious scholarly, research-intensive historical research and writing. I’ve spent the last twenty years or so teaching, advising and administering, and writing for a general audience. But I recently had the opportunity to write an article, using some of the new technologies of scholarship. This is a report on what’s changed, and what’s remained the same. Some background: I had done a lot of research for an exhibition and a talk at the…
