Little Compton; it’s so beautiful! and so far away! Last year I published an article on how that commonly-held Rhode Island belief came to be. “So Near, Yet, Oh, How Far”: Creating Little Compton as a Summer Destination” (Rhode Island History, Fall 2025) was based on a talk I gave at the Little Compton Historical Society’s annual meeting the preceeding year.
Yesterday, looking to test out Claude’s new prowess with making videos, I gave it the article and the slides from the talk. Take this article and these slides, I asked, and make me a 90-second video.
Here’s the result:
And here’s the script and notes:
It’s pretty impressive. It made sense of the story, picked the right images, used only Whitman’s words for her script. I especially like that it gave a full list of credits for the poems and the images.
But what to do with this kind of thing? I’m not sure. If there were a dozen of them on the Historical Society website, would that make for intresting content? Put them on the LCHS youtube page? Be amused by the possibilities and move on?
