Editors’ Summary: Paul Taylor, professor of health informatics at UCL, reflects on his lifelong relationship with programming and the rapid displacement of software engineers by AI coding tools. Drawing on personal experience using Claude Code and the fictional Mythos model, he traces how AI has moved from writing code snippets to autonomously developing, testing, and […]
Editors’ Summary: In Funerary Spectacle: Applied Digital Humanities in the Roman Forum (California Classical Studies, 2026), Christopher J. Johanson (UCLA) combines three-dimensional reconstructions of the Roman Forum with traditional philological analysis to reconstruct the funeral of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus (160 BCE) across its three stages: procession, eulogy, and gladiatorial games. By applying both close […]
Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author discusses the rise of a new field called ‘Historical Language Models’ or ‘Vintage LLMs.’ The largest such model to date, Talkie-1930, was released to the public on April 27. He argues that language models should be seen as historical texts themselves, and history is inherent to what LLMs […]
Editors’ Summary: This two-part selection seeks to better understand and categorize the expressions found in the Fatimid Geniza petitions, a rich primary source for historians of the Mediterranean in the 10th century. The study asks: how are emotional registers distributed across the formal parts of Fatimid petitions? Part one provides context and outlines the methodology […]
Editors’ Summary: This post considers how historians can make use of LLMs and NLP without flattening the individual stories that make up history. In the author’s words: “the challenge is how to do that without losing sensitivity to individual lives, how to move from large-scale datasets to arguments about trends like the rise of nonviolence […]
Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author considers a recent train advertisement in Norway as an example of the problem of floating motifs in LLM generated writing. She defines a floating motif as a motif appearing in AI-generated content that is out of place and detached from its original context. The new ad in Norway […]
Editors’ Summary: This paper analyzes AI-generated citations through a focus on the recurring non-existent citation “Education Governance and Datafication” attributed to Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva and identified in Williamson’s post Tracing the half life of a zombie citation. The author demonstrates that these hallucinated citations are not random inventions, but rather a combination of […]
Editors’ Summary: This post argues that digital reconstructions are not neutral or objective, but rather are shaped by “ghosts” or underlying patterns and assumptions in the data, which can often reinforce dominant narratives. Instead of accepting these reconstructions at face value, the author encourages using them critically and creatively to explore alternative possibilities. In doing […]
Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author provides a detailed overview of the functions of the new tool, LLMbench. Berry points to Google PAIR’s LLM Comparator as a useful tool for side-by-side evaluation of models from the perspective of model developers, but the tool lacked the ability to do comparative close reading. LLMbench is a […]
Editors’ Summary: This article highlights the process of turning the Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes, c.800–c.1800 into a TEI dataset. The authors demonstrate how the process of encoding the print manuscript, and of converting any print volume to a TEI dataset, involves close reading of the material. The Repertory, originally published in 2022, is […]
