iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Cameron Blevins

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/09/2026

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

Free-text evaluation of answers to character modeling and constrained generation questions. This is just one of several scores Chronologic-EN can produce; we focus on it here because it's both the hardest test and the one most relevant to simulation of the past. Frontier models reach 72%; Talkie-1930 is stronger than several larger competitors, but not at the frontier by this measure. Note that this score has improved ~45% in the last two years, but still falls perceptibly short of ground truth.

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I'd encourage historians to read this post from @jimclifford.bsky.social. Even if you ethically refuse to use generative AI (which I understand) I think it's important and useful to keep tabs on how quickly this tech shifts and its potential impacts on the work we do as historians.

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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"Surviving the Textpocalypse" (after @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social) is the other course I'm teaching now, co-envisioned with @shsalter.bsky.social. We pushed ourselves to ask what we could really change, and how we could ever-so-slightly inflect the future. 1/ github.com/laurenfklein...

github.com

GitHub - laurenfklein/2026-textpocalypse: Class info and labs for Fall 2026 ENG 790/QTM 490: Surviving the Textpocalpyse

Class info and labs for Fall 2026 ENG 790/QTM 490: Surviving the Textpocalpyse - laurenfklein/2026-textpocalypse

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This MIT report on AI and teaching is rightfully getting lots of praise: aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/. There's a ton to like, but it exemplifies a trend I see on Bluesky around AI + pedagogy conversations: they tend to leave out online learning entirely.

Screenshot of MIT report on AI and education:
3.1.4. Build structured in-person social learning
into subjects
Because Al tools are disrupting longstanding patterns of social learning at MIT, every subject should include a regular in-person social component (not just sitting in lecture or recitation and quietly taking notes). Instructors should intentionally structure such interactions to achieve desired learning objectives and maintain quality, even in large classes.

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Amanda Regan, Ph.D. @regan008.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Johns Hopkins + the AHA are hosting the AI and History Conference 2026 -- Oct 15-16 in Baltimore. Whatever your take on AI (excited, skeptical, curious, already using it), there's a place for you in this conversation. Learn more at: proflouishyman.github.io/ai_conferenc...

proflouishyman.github.io

AI and History Conference 2026

A practitioner-focused conference for historians using AI and computational methods, October 15–16, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University.

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Reposted by Cameron Blevins

Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Spent a good amount of this summer digging through a 20+ person team of teachers' free-text annotations, learning what "scaffolding" and "push for rigor" means, and iterating on this pipeline. We find that AI tutors, by default, frequently over-scaffold and rarely push for rigor.

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The whole thread is worth a read, demoing what it would look like for a student using Claude for Education to begin writing a research paper. This isn't learning.

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.org · 14/07/2026

A new essay: “Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship” — Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/peri...

newsletter.dancohen.org

Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship

Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Thrilled that "Expanding Queer Cartographies" has won a Digital Justice Development Grant from @acls1919.bsky.social! Our project will digitize & map thousands of women- and lesbian-friendly bars, restaurants, bookstores, etc. that appeared in the lesbian travel guide Gaia's Guide (1970s-1990s) +

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

🎙️ We're thrilled to release Listening to Auraria's Past, an audio walking tour of Denver's old Westside neighborhood that was razed by the city in the 1970s to build a downtown campus for higher education. This tour tells the story of the displaced community that lived there: aurariahistory.org +

aurariahistory.org

Listening to Auraria's Past

A Historical Tour of a Displaced Neighborhood

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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Built a useful GLAM model this week: flags blank index cards before expensive OCR. Cheap, scales, adapts. IMO the technical barrier is now very low, the main one is knowing how. So I wrote this up as a chapter: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-for-glam/patterns/index-card-classifier.html

Two archival index cards side by side. Left, labelled "blank": a bare card with only a punch hole near the bottom centre. Right, labelled "content (not-blank)": a typed catalogue card with shelf number, book title, date, and a library form stamp.

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Rebecca Wingo @rebeccawingo.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Are you tired of the same old, same old in your US History II survey? Feeling stuck in a rut? Annoyed that your students won't read long articles? Have no fear -- "US History in 15 Photographs" is here to save the day!

book cover of us history in 15 photographs

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Jim Clifford @jimclifford.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

I'm launching a new project with @joguldi.bsky.social today: Working Papers in Critical Search. Today we're publishing the first working paper: "Why a Working Paper Series on Critical Search Now" #digitalhistory #digitalhumanities working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-001-in...

working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io

Why a Working Paper Series on Critical Search Now – Working Papers in Critical Search

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Google Slides' new "Beautify this slide" AI tool is comedic gold. Don't think I could have made an uglier, more illegible slide if I tried:

Results of clicking "Beautify this slide" for Google Slides.
Text of slide:
Please fill out your FCQ
for this class by 11:59PM tonight!
https://colorado.campuslabs.com/
Currently only 65% response rate - if you get to 85% everyone gets 4 extra points on Final Exam
Complete assignment: “Did you fill out the FCQ for HIST 1362?” on Canvas (part of Participation grade)

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 02/05/2026

Got to present this early draft paper today at a neat workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social. It's my attempt to grapple with the need for struggle and friction in learning in a world where LLMs remove all that friction. Read the whole thing at stats.andrewheiss.com/pinky-lychee/

AI for Me, Not (Yet) for Thee? Desirable Difficulties and Deliberate Friction with LLMs

Author: Andrew Heiss

Affiliation: Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University

Latest version: May 1, 2026

Details: This is a short position paper written for the Toronto Data Workshop’s 2nd Colloquium on Applications of AI, “Notes on the Future of Quantitative Social Science,” held at the University of Toronto on May 1, 2026.

Abstract: I am simultaneously a critical skeptic of large language models (LLMs) and their role in the learning process, and a reluctant and wary user of those same tools in my own work. This essay is an attempt to work through this tension by examining how LLM-based tools shape and reshape the foundations of expertise required to use them. If learners can generate working code through a Google search, if they can upload a blank problem set template and get a completed assignment in seconds, and if they can design, carry out, and analyze research projects in minutes, how can they build the expertise that is required to work with LLM output? Relatedly, if experienced researchers spend the bulk of their time reviewing LLM output and not working through code themselves, what happens to their expertise? The answer to these questions, I argue, is to deliberately introduce difficulty and friction in quantitative work, allowing learners to build expertise and helping experienced researchers maintain it.

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Paul Röttger @paul-rottger.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

New paper w/ UK AISI: Millions of people now use AI to help them write and communicate. In three experiments (14k participants, 3m+ human ratings) we show that AI writing assistance systematically distorts writer personas – their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. 🧵

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I'm proud that Responsible Datasets in Context (RDIC) also won a DH Award for Best Training Materials. This is a project with @electrostani.bsky.social, @miriamposner.com, Sylvia Fernández, and Anna Preus. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com

responsible-datasets-in-context.com

Home

Responsible Datasets in Context

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Fun to see that "Bears Will Be Boys," which I wrote with folks from the @puddingviz.bsky.social, won a 2025 Digital Humanities Award! pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

screenshot of Bears Will Be Boys essay that shows the title and a smiling cartoon bear with thick black glasses

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Generative AI has forced me to think a lot more concretely about all the discrete components of doing historical work - and where the value of those different pieces lie

I think we need to stop asking whether Al is "good" or "bad" for historians, or trying to discuss how to police our students who we think are "cheating", and start asking more specific questions. For which of our many tasks has Al already crossed the threshold of
"good enough"? Which parts of our labour process are being cheapened, which are being reorganised? And what happens to the formation of future historians if the junior work through which expertise is built gets outsourced to machines?

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Christopher McKnight Nichols @cmcknichols.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Just confirming that Made by History will now be back up and running in the next few weeks with a new home and new partners at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Exciting! So, if you have pitches, now's the time to start sending them to madebyhistory@inquirer.com 🗃️ #MadebyHistory #HistoryMatters

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Interesting parallels here in the “flow” of vibe coding vs. gambling

One thing many of us love about computer programming is our experiences of flow. On the surface, vibe coding can seem to induce a similar flow. However, it often violates the same characteristics of flow that fail with gambling:
• Vibe coding does not provide clear clues of how well one is performing (and even provides misleading losses disguised as wins).
• The match between challenge level and skill level is murky.
• It provides a false sense of control in which people think they are influencing outcomes more than they are.
With vibe coding, people often report not realizing until hours, weeks, or even months later whether the code produced is any good.

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Anastasia Salter @anasalter.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Gave a talk today on some of the pragmatic ways I use agentic tools in my work, including for building tools and using local models. I recorded some simple examples and shared everything here: anastasiasalter.net/PragmaticAge... (the site itself is a silly example 👾)

anastasiasalter.net

Pragmatic Agentic AI in Digital Humanities

A guided tour through agentic tools for humanities scholars

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.org · 06/04/2026

New issue of my newsletter: “Vibe Analysis” — Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work Featuring good work by @sarahebull.bsky.social, @jasonheppler.org and @cblevins.bsky.social newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/vibe...

newsletter.dancohen.org

Vibe Analysis

Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work

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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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Lauren Tilton @nolauren.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Join @taylor-arnold.bsky.social and me for a postdoc to expand distant viewing! 2 years. Awesome liberal arts college. Great city. Option to teach 1-2 courses a year for extra pay. Thanks to Mellon for the opportunity! Happy to answer any questions. richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

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Lincoln Mullen @lincolnmullen.com · 09/03/2026

A few months ago I realized my rare and valuable skill—writing code as a historian—was still valuable but no longer rare. Now I'm thinking about what it means when the technical barriers to digital history drop away.

lincolnmullen.com

Behind, ahead | Lincoln Mullen

A historian reflects on how agentic AI coding tools have changed the possibilities for digital history, making once-rare programming skills widely accessible, and argues that digital history should be...

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Katie McDonough @kmcdono.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

How are historians rethinking environmental and social history via improved OCR of imperial archives? Join us this Wednesday 3pm UK time to hear from @jimclifford.bsky.social and @historyjacob.bsky.social - registration link below.

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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 20/01/2026

Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

A bar chart showing the electricity use of several daily activities with the subtitle "The 'typical query' is not a useful way to think about coding agents' energy use." The bar for a 'typical ChatGPT query' is not even visible. My median Claude Code session is somewhere between the average US household per minute and toasting bread for three minutes. My median day with Claude Code is something like running a dishwasher.

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Katie McDonough @kmcdono.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Join the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental #DH Seminar on March 11 @ 3pm UK (online) for a talk by @jimclifford.bsky.social & @historyjacob.bsky.social: "Solving OCR: Using olmOCR to Follow Commodities across the British World" www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/solving-oc... #dhist #ocr #envhist 🗃️

eventbrite.co.uk

Solving OCR: Using olmOCR to Follow Commodities across the British World

Join the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental DH Seminar for a talk and discussion with Jim Clifford and Jacob Polay (Saskatchewan).

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I gave a short talk at Cornell yesterday on my science-of-science work investigating how AI is being used by researchers and how we should go about crafting policies in response. Blanket policies are hard, privacy is important, we need more measurement. Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1gNTK...

In early 2024, researchers were already heavily using AI for work
- Survey of 816 verified authors via Semantic Scholar
- 81% of researchers reported using LLMs in their workflow
- Top uses: information seeking & editing
- Rare for data tasks: 6973% never use LLMs for data cleaning or generation

The measurement problem
LLM content has risen sharply in both review and non-review papers.
Review papers do have a higher prevalence rate.
But non-review LLM papers outnumber review papers 6x.
CS.CY Computers & Society) faces potential 50% cuts compared to CS.CV (Computer Vision) would only face 3%

Interdisciplinary researchers — who move between cultures and write in the “borderlandsˮ — are experts at adapting their writing. LLMs currently are not.

Private information can appear in unlikely prompts

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Models are now expert math solvers, and so AI for math education is receiving increasing attention. Our new preprint evaluates 11 VLMs on our QA benchmark, DrawEduMath. We highlight a startling gap: models perform less well on inputs from K-12 students who need more help. 🧵

Title, author list, and two figures from the paper.
Title: The Aftermath of DrawEduMath: Vision Language Models
Underperform with Struggling Students and Misdiagnose Errors
Authors: Li Lucy, Albert Zhang, Nathan Anderson, Ryan Knight, Kyle Lo
Figure 1: On the left is a math problem, where students are asked to draw x < 5/2 on a number line. The right side shows two example student responses that differ in correctness. DrawEduMath pairs each math problem with one student response, and prompts VLMs to answer questions about the student response.
Figure 2: VLMs consistently perform worse on answering DrawEduMath benchmark questions pertaining to erroneous student responses. Performance on non-erroneous student responses is labeled with specific VLMs’ names; that same model’s performance on erroneous student responses is directly below.

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

This whole thread is great. I've been focusing so much on how AI can short-circuit learning that I haven't been considering the flip side of spurring motivation by expanding what ppl (in my case, students) think they're capable of doing

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Anastasia Salter @anasalter.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I find this to be the most depressing example of agentic AI adoption out there (as someone who does see real value in agentic coding tools for DH), but I'm even more depressed by the "abandon Canvas" solutions I see folks posting in response. This impacts anything involving a computer, period. (4/5)

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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Ran the same OCR models on 68 pages of historic newspaper. Every model hallucinated or looped. DeepSeek-OCR-2, LightOnOCR-2, GLM-OCR – all melt down on dense newspaper columns. You can try yourself using this @hf.co dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/dav...

Image with historic newspaper on the left and output from OCR models sampled on the right. The output on the right shows okay starting text and then a lot of repetition.

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

After years of teaching Civil War & Reconstruction, I've finally given up. You win, students: it's succession.

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 21/02/2026

A lesson about networks that I’m kind of proud of: at the beginning of the year, I gave my 200 students a dumb survey: fav books, foods, etc. I told them they could use pseudonyms and that I’d share their responses with the class. We’ve been using that data in various ways: to make points about +

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

So much to chew on in @resobscura.bsky.social's latest on the effects of Gen AI on writing and how that connects to vibe coding: resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-ha... +

resobscura.substack.com

What is happening to writing?

"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI

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Ruth Ahnert @ruthahnert.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.

eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society | Cambridge Core

Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

"Just point Claude Code at some files and see what it can do." I wanted to test this on a historian's workflow so I used a small 4 pg. PDF from my dissertation research that never made it into my book: an 1882 table of how long it took the mail to travel between different cities. +

Sample page from a table from 1882 postal guide of time of transit of mails between major US cities

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Jonathan S. Jones @jonathansjones.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

A lot happening with VMI again. For those interested to learn more about the Lost Cause at VMI, when I taught there, my cadets and I made a digital history project documenting this history in unflinching detail 🗃️ locatinglegacies.org/s/VMI/page/h...

locatinglegacies.org

Locating Slavery's Legacies @ Virginia Military Institute · Home · Testing

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Nicholas Guyatt @nicholasguyatt.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Friends, can I ask you to spread the word that we have a THREE-YEAR postdoc in American history at Cambridge up for grabs - ANY field, but applications are due March 1 so don't delay - apply, apply, apply! networks.h-net.org/jobs/69790/u...

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Hollis Robbins @anecdotal.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

AI will transform what the university sells and how it sells it. That is why it is the alligator closest to the boat. I welcome the AI alligator, because mentorship paired with expert judgment is the only defensible value proposition left. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

insidehighered.com

AI-Forced Restructuring Is Top Risk for Higher Ed (opinion)

AI-forced restructuring is the biggest risk colleges face.

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American Historical Association @historians.org · 28/01/2026

In “Scientific Analysis of Renaissance Recipes,” @stefanhanss.bsky.social and his research team show how scientific analysis and historical contextualization of biochemical information of early modern recipes reveals new insights into early modern medicine and material practices. #AHR

doi.org

The Scientific Analysis of Renaissance Recipes: Proteomics, Medicine, and the Body in the Material Renaissance

Abstract. Collaborations between the humanities and sciences allow for novel insights into the material world of Renaissance recipe cultures, and in partic

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BYU Redd Center for Western Studies @byureddcenter.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

The annual BYU Redd Center funding season is here and we have INCREASED the $$$ amounts! PLEASE share this as broadly as possible. We accept applications from ANY discipline for projects focused on the intermountain states of AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, & WY. tinyurl.com/2026ReddAwards

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