History on the Internet – Digital Humanities Now

Editors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI

Editors’ Summary: In “The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI,” published on Active History, Jacob Polay, Chloë Farr, and Jessica Jack critique talkie, a language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 English-language print sources and marketed as both a forecasting experiment and a chatbot “from 1930.” The authors argue that […]

CFPs & Conferences

CFPapers: Pandemic Methodologies Twitter Conference 2021

In the past year, archives and libraries have closed (either permanently or periodically), non-essential international travel has been heavily discouraged or impossible, and anyone who can has been encouraged to work from home. In these circumstances, historians have had to adapt how they do research, perhaps relying more heavily on digital methods or developing more […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Is Google Home a History Calculator?

In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague, Peter Stearns, who “proposed the idea of a history analog to the math calculator, a handheld device that would provide students with names and dates to use on exams—a Cliolator, he called it, a […]