Bonjour a tous!
This week we discussed digitization and data, noting warnings from historian Lara Putnam not to let the ease of access to digitized data from around the world become “drive-by transnationalism,”1 and advice from Sophie Ziegler to be more than data brokers in our research, but rather “caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility.”2 On the first point, our class had no trouble listing a number of red flags accompanying increased digitization and access to data, including that it’s easier for nefarious individuals to remove access on a destructive global scale. On my part, I tend to believe that increased access is always a good thing, but comes with increased responsibility on the part of historians and others to, in this case, conduct due diligence and adequately protect data and its users. We should be focused on increasing our understanding of cultural context as historians. And we should be thinking of data and user protection and redundancy. That’s just good practice and as tech evolves we need to evolve with it. On the second argument by Sophie Ziegler, having spent more than 10 years embedded in feminist community, I continue to appreciate the affective aspects of feminist work, but have tended to focus more on the structural and systems-level realities that make feminist ethics possible: processes, systems, policies, budgets, etc. What I mean is that even when you have strongly held values and want to bring a feminist affective ethic to your archival work, it will be difficult to do if you’re overworked, underpaid, sexually harassed, forced to come into work every day to a windowless cube, and get only 7 days of vacation a year.
In class, we also experimented with AI tools like Gemini and Claude, and Transkribus, noting that Gemini and Claude produced much more accurate transcriptions of handwritten documents than Transkribus. I will also note that I’m hoping Dr. Otis makes available the hilarious – with due respect to her ancestor who I’m sure did not mean it to be hilarious – story of the “square-faced, lithe-limbed, clean-souled” Hugh Sherwood. I am not currently working on a project with handwritten sources, but experimented with handwritten notes from the National Council of Negro Women that I found in previous research but set aside because I couldn’t make out their meaning. Here’s what I got:
Claude (free version)
Voted: Report be “accepted” with great thanks and appreciation and referred to Committee for [Report?]
Mrs Mallory
as long as we as [shapes?] “poking” that is not magnificent
my dreams we have in view
Mrs Osborne: we who have come and a long way what the UCW has [?] borne. During past 15 years, [began?] as a [beacon?] around the world to be next by [kin?] given [?]
This has been made possible by women united
[several signature-like scrawled lines, largely illegible]
Transkribus (free trial)
a déjech
Neither is great but Claude made an effort. Looks like I’ll have to pay for a more sophisticated version if I want to use it in future research.
- Putnam, Lara. 2016. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review (Oxford) 121 (2): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377. ↩︎
- Ziegler, S. L. 2020. “Open Data in Cultural Heritage Institutions: Can We Be Better Than Data Brokers?” Digital Humanities Quarterly (Providence) 14 (2). Available at: https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/14/2/000462/000462.html ↩︎
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