Gavin Beinart-Smollan

Looking forward to @ek27.bsky.social lecture at Wayne State next Monday, February 9, 2 pm, F/AB, 3339, on "Partnering with AI to transform Archival Sources into Research Data"!
Here's the Zoom link for those not in Detroit:
wayne-edu.zoom.us/j/9644839669...

I know I don't have a ton of media followers, but I'll put this out there anyway: if you need someone to comment/offer context on the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philly, get in touch. I just finished an entire book on Americans' fight over Washington and slavery.

Even though I absolutely hate reading AI writing, I am getting negatively polarized by the stunning incuriosity of so much of the professoriate about the objectively strangest technology in the last hundred years

AI is enlisted to rescue Jews' cultural heritage and give new life to ancient languages (RNS) — Researchers are using a very modern tool to transcribe and read hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts from the lost age of Eastern European Jewry.

Scholars affiliated with the Midrash Project embarked on a “transcribe-a-thon,” using eScriptorium, an AI platform tailored for use on historical manuscripts.
religionnews.com/2025/12/17/a...

A screenshot of the model which includes the manuscript on the right and the extracted text on the left.

And the thing I’m most proud of doesn’t have a link to share yet, but it’s almost done! I’ve been leading a time of computer scientists and medievalists to create an HCR for Medieval Latin legal records, like those digitized at AALT (example below).

Since they have all deleted their original posts, I want to make clear that this was said in response to some AI enthusiasts arguing that existing AI could do the job of a historian in part because all existing information you would need to do history research was already on the Internet.

The Jewish Refugee Family and Concerns Over Intermarriage in Australia After 1945∗ Abstract. Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was conceptualized as a ‘problem’ by the Australian Jewish establishment after the Second World War. From

🚨 new article by Ruth Balint
academic.oup.com/past/advance...

i feel really conflicted about the people who insist that the Humanities needs to be a 100% technology free space. I get you - I am very analog in my daily life, with my piles of paper and pens - but AI is also doing a lot of things you actually like and enjoy having. R's thread is right on

The collateral damage of people upset (often with good reasons) about generative AI is their digital humanities colleagues. It’s outpacing 2010 levels of vitriol, by a lot. The irony is we’re the best allies — we understand how the tech works and can translate between the doom and the hype. +

Seeing Old Science Gemini’s ability to read handwritten archival documents has importance beyond the humanities

Gemini’s ability to read handwritten archival documents has importance beyond the humanities. It opens new frontiers for scientific research and collaboration with the humanities.

foundhistory.org/seeing-old-s...

#ClimateScience #DataScience #Agriculture #Archives #Research #LandGrant #AI

(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

Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It. If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

I do take all of Dr Jackson's points but, as an archivist, handwritten text recognition is still an extremely exciting development.

It will allow us to improve our knowledge of our collections and to make them available in ways that can make them more accessible, more useful to more researchers.

Very interesting. It would probably be more accurate to say that lower resource languages are a problem regardless of Latin or non Latin script.

And even more so for non Latin scripts.

Low resource languages are still a big problem for handwriting recognition. I work on Yiddish—all of the generative models currently return gibberish or pure hallucination when given a handwritten Yiddish letter. It’s a very interesting and exciting problem and one I think we can solve.

We’re thrilled to launch our new Humans of AI podcast!
Prof. @melissaterras.bsky.social of @transkribus.bsky.social — a cooperative AI platform transforming how libraries, archives, and museums bring history to life.
🎧 share.transistor.fm/s/ce0399b5
📺 youtu.be/qK5x4j7jiuQ
#AI #CulturalHeritage

Literary Forensics as Method: Chemical Analysis, Food Stains, and Readerly Encounters with Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks Abstract. Much of the study of cookbooks relies on guesswork and reading between the lines that are written down—the type of guesswork that requires cookbooks be read alongside other types of texts ra...

This is incredibly cool. read.dukeupress.edu/american-lit...

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

…And it turns out that a huge amount of what we seek from a human person can be simulated through this Frankensteinian reanimation of our collective dead letters. What a discovery!” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

This sums up a lot for me: “Historians have long extolled the “power of the archive.” Little did we know that the engineers would come along and plug it in...

This is btw the trajectory you would expect if you believe LLMs are—not an abstract protean principle called “intelligence”—but a cultural technology that animates the verbal machinery already folded up in libraries, allowing it to run by itself.

Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵

Thank you, that’s very kind! I don’t have anything serious at the moment, mostly just playing around, but I will definitely let you know.

I guess I’ll have to try that, thank you! It’s always an effort vs results calculation of course. No GPU currently.

(I tried to put through a 340-page pdf of archive photos which I guess was a mistake). Is there an easy workaround for this?

I'm trying it out and so far it's great on crappy iPhone archive photos. But I'm getting a lot of "Expired ZeroGPU proxy token" error messages, and the model card does say "Despite its 1.7B parameter LLM foundation, dots.ocr is not yet optimized for high-throughput processing of large PDF volumes"

The United Hebrew Charities building, 1906

Interactive timeline: 150 years across 30+ predecessor orgs, with links to archival collections for further research: 150yearsofcare.org/150-years-of...

Screenshot of video interview with Pierre Thomas, former Executive Program Director at The Jewish Board

Oral histories: Video interviews with veteran staff, trustees and clients, exploring 40 years of change - AIDs epidemic, social justice movements, residential care, Medicaid evolution 150yearsofcare.org/voices-people/

Headshot of Madeleine Borg, social reformer and philanthropist who advocated for the decriminalization of juvenile mental health treatment and founded the Jewish Big Sisters movement

Mental health pioneers: profiles of mid 20th-century leaders and their clinical contributions with rich multimedia archives 150yearsofcare.org/architects/

Illustration of Lena Adler and children, with pages from their National Desertion Bureau case file in the background

Case file deep dive: The remarkable story of Morris and Lena Adler through their National Desertion Bureau file 150yearsofcare.org/deserted-fam...