Cameron Blevins

Screenshot that reads: Introducing the Anthology for Computers and the Humanities Taylor Arnold, Maria Antoniak, Miguel Escobar Varela, Marie Puren, Mila Oiva , Amanda Regan, Lauren Tilton, and Melanie Walsh 1 Data Science and Statistics, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 2 Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.A. 3 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore 4 Laboratoire de Recherche de l'EPITA, Paris, France 5 History and Archaeology, University of Turku, Finland 6 History and Geography, Clemson University, U.S.A. 7 Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 8 Information School, University of Washington, U.S.A. Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.63744/HHsQG7hNWyxG Published: 25 September 2025

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that.

So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more.

Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort!

bit.ly/ach-anthology

Roundtable: Western History in the Generative AI Era Sponsored by the WHA Digital Scholarship Committee Location: Santo Domingo (Convention Center) Chair: Sean Fraga, University of Southern California Cameron Blevins, University of Colorado Denver The State of Generative AI in October 2025 Rachel Birch, George Mason University Mowing the Lawn with a Hammer: Pivoting from Codependency to Cointelligence with AI Tools Jason Heppler, George Mason University Tools with Thought: Generative AI as an Assistant in Historical Research Amanda Regan, Clemson University Bridging the Gap: Leveraging AI Tools to Lower Barriers for Historians Learning to Code Comment: Audience

Kick off your morning at #WHA2025 with some spicy takes on Generative AI and history from Sean Fraga, Rachel Birch, @jasonheppler.org, @regan008.bsky.social, and myself (8:15-9:45am, Santo Domingo Room)

If you're at #WHA2025 I hope you'll join @cblevins.bsky.social, @regan008.bsky.social, Rachel Birch, Sean Fraga and myself on Friday at 8:15 to talk with us about generative AI and History. I have a strong feeling I might be quite curmudgeonly, so come join us!

Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered."
culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...

The Library’s New Entryway An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward

New issue of my newsletter: “The Library’s New Entryway” — An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

As I said: a lot to chew over and really looking forward to talking more in October!

Take the AHA activity comparing an original article to an AI summary to see what it gets right/wrong. I would guess this is now a useless activity. GPT-5 can summarize an article so well that pushing back against it requires nuance, expertise, training, and experience that none of my students have.

These models are "better" than my students at so many historical skills. Understanding and incorporating wider historical context? Better. Close reading of individual sources? Better. Writing mechanics? Better. I hate it, but that's the reality of where we are now.

The past 6-12 months has also shifted my thoughts on teaching. I used to have some cautious optimism around finding productive uses in the history classroom. But today's tools are SO good that they blow up the entire learning process by removing all the friction that's necessary for learning.

Ex. ChatGPT 5 Thinking Mode can go off and write a pretty decent lit review of a subfield in ~10 minutes. Not comprehensive, it might miss some subtleties, but it's largely hallucination-free and really useful as a starting point. The same thing would have taken me hours.

Today's advanced models are basically doing graduate-student level work when it comes to some historical research tasks. Not perfect, not without limits - but if I'm being honest, probably more effectively than me as a grad student (and in a fraction of the time).

Advanced models have gotten so good that I now see more utility for research/writing and less for teaching. Take their limits you point to for, say, finding connections or as a writing partner. Just in the past few months I've found they've gotten vastly better.

Really looking forward to diving into this together at WHA! Even 8 months ago I would have agreed with all of this. But the rise of reasoning models, agentic capabilities, deep research, etc. has forced me to shift my position quite a bit.

Having sat with it for a bit, I'm still struggling with this document.

The document is at once very cautious, and effusive. The text of the guidance itself is pretty good--in fact, I think they point out a lot of ways in which generative AI is a terrible thing for doing history.

Mapping Lesbian History: Q&A with Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz Historians Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz use digital mapping technology to uncover a hidden geography of lesbian life in the 1970s and 1980s, tracing patterns of connection among lesbian women in...

Many of the places that loom largest in queer history—NYC’s Stonewall Inn, San Francisco’s Castro district—tend to focus on gay men & urban spaces. A fuller history is told by Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz.
@pcb-aha.bsky.social‬ www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/m...

Historian Friends! @shgape.bsky.social is holding a conference next June in that great GA/PE city, Chicago!

See link to CFP below!

What a memory @scottbot.bsky.social! The post office department occasionally published transit time for mail between major cities, that’s the closest I can think of. Ex. This one from 1882. Happy to dig up the other ones I have if you want to email me!

This is so cool, congratulations!!

For the @puddingviz.bsky.social, I explored which animals we gender, and why.

Come for the extremely cute interactive viz of animals, stay for the extremely nerdy etymology of the ladybug.

Story: pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

Wish I could be in Lisbon for #DH2025, but I'm glad to be able to present remotely! I'm about to share the work we've done to produce the Data Advocacy for All project - a toolkit of resources to help teach data advocacy: da4all.github.io

Many thanks to our editor Brenda Frink at the PHR, our talented research assistants, and the LC editors themselves for their support. But most of all: thank you to the brilliant Annelise Heinz for being such a wonderful collaborator. You can read the full article here: doi.org/10.1525/phr....

The article seems to be resonating: it also won the Barbara "Penny" Award from the Western Association of Women Historians (wawh.org/kanner-prima...) and the Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award for best article published in the Pacific Historical Review in 2024 (www.pcb-aha.org/awards/koont...)

Another young reader in Florida wrote, "I’ve never met another lesbian [or] been to a lesbian bar or bookshop." So every time a new issue arrived, "I grab my warm slippers, a bologna sandwich, a pack of smokes and dive into my easy chair for hours of emotional aerobics."

The magazine's expansive geography gave a sense of shared connection for readers who were otherwise isolated and lonely. As one closeted woman from a small town in upstate NY wrote, “I’ve felt so alone, but not since I read my first issue of LC! Now I realize I’m ‘separated,’ but far from alone.”

Map of locations printed in a subset of issues from Lesbian Connection between 1974 and 1989 in the contiguous United States, sized according to the number of times they appear.

A lot of LGBTQ scholarship has focused on: a) gay men, and b) big cities. By mapping 5,000+ locations across 26 issues from 1975-1989, we showed something different: a much more expansive and dispersed geography of lesbian readers that tilted towards rural areas and mid-sized cities

The magazine's reader-submitted content poured in from across the country. As one reader wrote, "When
I think of all of us in all those places, I can’t help but smile and feel the power! WOMYN! WE ARE EVERYWHERE!!" Our question: so where was "everywhere," exactly?

Lesbian Connection was (and is) the most widely circulated lesbian feminist periodical in North America. It served as a long-distance bulletin board - readers wrote in letters, announced events, advertised businesses, and even volunteered to serve as "Contact Dykes," or local guides for travelers

Thrilled our article won the Berkshire Conference Article Prize for best article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality! Annelise and I mapped thousands of locations from the magazine Lesbian Connection to study how women built a shared community in the 1970s and 1980s 🧵

Glad to hear it!!

Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism? Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not pro...

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +