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Gavin Beinart-Smollan

@beismo.bsky.social
2.1K followers 5.8K following 50 posts

Public and digital historian. PhD candidate at NYU. Writing about Yiddish family letters and the Lithuanian Jewish diaspora. Very amateur genealogist.

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Reposted by Gavin Beinart-Smollan
Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
📣 New historical data visualization! "How Fast Was the Mail?" is an interactive map showing how long information took to travel across the US between 1882-1908: cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ +
cblevins.github.io
How Fast Was the Mail?
Explore mail transit times via railway between major U.S. cities, 1882–1908.
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Thiago Krause @thiagokrause.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
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...
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John Garrison Marks @johngmarks.com · 23/01/2026
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.
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Bill @bill-of-lefts.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
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
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RNS @rns.org · 30/12/2025
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...
religionnews.com
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.
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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
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).
A screenshot of the model which includes the manuscript on the right and the extracted text on the left.
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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
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.
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Australian Migration History Network @amigrationhn.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
🚨 new article by Ruth Balint academic.oup.com/past/advance...
academic.oup.com
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
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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
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
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Roopika Risam @roopikarisam.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
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. +
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Tom Scheinfeldt @foundhistory.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
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
foundhistory.org
Seeing Old Science
Gemini’s ability to read handwritten archival documents has importance beyond the humanities
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MarineLives @marinelives.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
(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
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 04/11/2025
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] +
chronicle.com
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.
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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
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.
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information labs @informationlabs.org · 04/11/2025
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
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
This is incredibly cool. read.dukeupress.edu/american-lit...
read.dukeupress.edu
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...
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
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...
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 20/08/2025
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.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
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: 🧵
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
Excited to launch 150yearsofcare.org, a digital exhibition exploring the fascinating history of The Jewish Board, one of New York’s oldest and largest social service agencies. I want to highlight some great resources for teachers and scholars:
Students at the Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls school, c. 1980s
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 18/06/2025
If you use a model dialogically, it’s effectively guiding you through the free-writing/revision cycle composition teachers recommend. I get why this mode of use isn’t very visible. All the rhetoric around AI has been that it’s “generative” and does the work for you. Things like the “Dear Sydney” +
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Beatrice Alex @beatricealex.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
Hidden Heritages - a great resource providing access to digitised Gaelic and Irish folktales. The transcription was done automatically using @transkribus.bsky.social or crowdsourcing. A great example of the use of AI and NLP for the benefits of research and society.
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Cato Minor @catominor.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Interested in hearing about a new alternative to Transkribus and eScriptorium? This Wednesday, from 15:00 to 16:30, there will be a virtual presentation of Calfa Vision by Baptiste Queuche, organized by IMAFO, Austrian Academy of Sciences.See the details: www.oeaw.ac.at/imafo/verans... #htr #atr #dh
oeaw.ac.at
Text recognition for non-western languages in manuscripts: presentation of Calfa
Online Lecture on DIGITAL HUMANITIES at IMAFO-HI | by Baptiste Queuche
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
This is truly a pathbreaking book: a book that answers crucial questions that have gone unanswered for a really long time. Highly recommend, and really looking forward to this talk.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
I visited the Alan Turing Institute and the New Real in London last week for a workshop on "Doing AI Differently." So many interesting talks, and I spoke about my ongoing poetry work with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, Anna Preus, and Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, which you can view at 2:19 in this recording.
vimeo.com
Doing AI Differently: London Workshop
An International Initiative Integrating Humanities into the Core of AI Development. Doing AI Differently is led by The Alan Turing Institute, University of Edinburgh…
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Dr Alys D Beverton @alysbeverton.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Interesting thread on public history, Reddit, and gaming…Didn’t think I’d be putting together those three in a sentence today
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
“Physical research and critical thinking about the nature of archives and qualitative data just got way more important.” 💯
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Kate Carpenter @katecarp.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
I beg of you, nonfiction writers, breathe life into your prose! Ignore the professor in your brain that's always ready to mark something as too colloquial. Make it read like something written by an actual human you might want to talk to at a party!
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Meredith Martin @mmvty.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190 we're still tinkering, but couldn't wait to share.
arxiv.org
Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research
This paper presents a set of provocations for considering the uses, impact, and harms of generative AI from the perspective of humanities researchers. We provide a working definition of humanities res...
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 20/02/2025
A reasonably effective workaround for this problem is for educators to create lessons and lesson plans for people to use as system prompts for the models Info in prompts almost always overrides info baked into the model weights, unless the model itself has been actively trained for misinformation
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Tim Lubin @timlubin.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Given the vast volume of unedited manuscripts and the small pool of scholars to transcribe, collate, and edit them, AI models capable of doing a decent job of some of that work--at scale--could be really beneficial. Human eyes and brain are still needed, but more ground can be covered. #philology
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Tad Stoermer @tadstoermer.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
Imagine — just imagine — Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Drayton Hall or Colonial Williamsburg doing this for a day. Can’t? There you have the core problem with the public history of the United States. Rudolf Höss’s villa opens to honour Auschwitz victims www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
theguardian.com
The ‘house next door’: Rudolf Höss's villa opens to honour Auschwitz victims
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, House 88 with its chilling past has been turned into centre to combat hate
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Jeffrey J Cohen @jeffreyjcohen.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Higher education should always have been doing this BUT: now is the time to increase our partnerships with institutions within the communities we serve, demonstrating in everyday ways why universities and colleges matter to cities, states, towns and regions in which they are located (cont'd)
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 26/01/2025
"The leading AI models are now very good historians" - by Benjamin Breen, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz resobscura.substack.com/p/the-leadin...
resobscura.substack.com
The leading AI models are now very good historians
Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
It’s #HandwritingDay so I thought I’d share a thread about Renaissance handwritten documents I worked with in the research that led to “Inventing the Renaissance,” and the best and worst scripts I’ve ever seen. 1/? (Continuing countdown to the release of my *absurdly fat* *absurdly orange* book!)
Detail of some handwritten Latin. A note written in the bottom left margin of a book is in smaller, paler text than the bolder letters visible in the top right corner where the main text of the book is. At the top one can read a word which begins "Ne" and then has a bizarre squiggle, The next word is clearly "pro" then a strange line. The following words, to an expert eye, can be read as "sustitudine veterii alterum requirit ut neque hoc neque illud primus Cicero usus est sine altorum" but most of hte words are very hard to make out, many have omitted letters assuming you'll recognize the abbreviation, and only the word "Cicero" is really recognizable to a modern eye.
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 22/01/2025
Some of the new OCR models for transcribing historical books, newspapers, &c. are genuinely mind-blowing—would have seemed like magic 10 years ago—& side note I think it would be unethical to ask people to spend years transcribing some of these materials—is that "the same" as ChatGPT?—I would say no
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 22/01/2025
I do not see how we’re going to have productive academic discussions of "AI" until we stop accepting the marketing that lumps all machine learning methods & technologies into one amorphous thing called "AI"—so we get minimalist & maximalist responses that echo that marketing—we don’t have to do this
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Melissa Terras @melissaterras.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
New paper, on how to build better tech for a better world: "The artificial intelligence cooperative: READ-COOP, Transkribus, and the benefits of shared community infrastructure for automated text recognition". A new history of building @transkribus.bsky.social, & coops can deliver responsible AI!
open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 05/01/2025
Part of the reason people are glum about AI is that researchers themselves represent the goal as full equivalence for human agency (“AGI”). While I get the theoretical interest, I think what most customers want (and what we’ve really produced so far) is closer to “prosthetics for thinking.”
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Ian Petrie @icpetrie.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
The public schools are back open but there's still a large crowd of teens assembled outside the New York Hilton hoping for a glimpse of their favorite historians #AHA25
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Gavin Beinart-Smollan @beismo.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
I don’t think either of them are on here, but I highly recommend this brilliant talk by Louis Hyman on AI tools for historians, with equally brilliant response by Matt Jones. It does everything it says on the tin and much more. /1
youtube.com
The Uses of AI for Writing Economic History, Louis Hyman & Matt Jones
YouTube video by JRCPPF
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Dr Matt Lodder @mattlodder.com · 30/12/2024
Archives are precious, but most of the stuff I work with hasn't even been collected by archives! Defend your local archives. Expand them. Donate things to them. Preserve the things others haven't!
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 26/12/2024
Resharing this because I really think AI makes reasoning about culture more necessary and more powerful. And if you believe that in your gut, there's no reason to react defensively when people like Arpit Gupta say ill-informed things about the humanities.
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Melissa Terras @melissaterras.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
In the new year I’m going to publish a history of the last 5 years of building @transkribus.bsky.social as an AI cooperative: shared ownership, shared resources, all profit reinvested into infrastructure. It turns out we can build a better tech world together, but that takes work & community.
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Patricia Murrieta-Flores @patymurrieta.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
(1/7) For a while we've been working on an ambitious problem: The National Archive of Mexico #AGN holds 58 linear km of documents. Only a drop of this ‘ocean’ has been studied due to many challenges. But great news: we are now unlocking this information! A thread 🧵 (1/8) #HTR #AI #CulturalHeritage
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