"How do archives reach the public in the 21st century?" - @dorothyjberry.bsky.social asks this question to frame reflections on the Johnson archive digitization. #ff2025

Berry is taking us on a journey into the Johnson Publishing Company Archives to look at the pieces, people, and processes of a massive digitization project. #ff2025

www.getty.edu/projects/joh...

Me too!

Yes, will do :)

Yes, exactly. Open models, open training data, and reproducible pipelines are essential for future work in this space, but many people only have a level of digital literacy to use commercial services: this is a huge ethical issue that I am astonished not to see more care around.

I agree, but I also worry that we put way more disciplinary thought & energy into AI pedagogy issues, and its worth balancing that with convos about research practices. I think the argument for this is that we don't have professional norms (yet) for dealing with computational output.

I might be biased tho :) I'm writing, for example, from this year's Fantastic Futures conference... sites.google.com/view/ai4lam

👍 & perhaps a better way of putting this, which I think is what @scottbot.bsky.social is getting at: its about the source criticism of digital derivatives - something @timhitchcock.bsky.social & others have been saying we need for a long time. We need tools for sources we engage w/computationally.

I'm not saying such discussions need inevitably to lead to historiographic adoption of AI tools, but right now what we have is more like opposing political factions than careful evaluative frameworks. The frameworks we do have are mostly borrowed from other disciplines, not developed by historians.

But I think we would agree that doing work at a PhD or beyond level could not be done with translated sources, no? These are great for undergraduate teaching, or reading outside your main fields, but not for expert, original research.

I agree adopting open standards is key, but libraries + archives house collections & their curators are just as much experts in the materials as users arriving to work with them. Heritage institutions have a mission to preserve & provide access, & need to remain at the heart of conversations.

Yep, having this as a serious element of both undergrad and postgrad history degrees is essential, and yet still mostly lacking. Kudos to departments doing this by now!