Dan's Digital History Site

As my senior year comes to a close, I am reflecting on all of the work I have done during my time as a student here at UMW. In this class, I have learned so much more about digital tools and how to access them, which is so unbelievably important to learn as someone who wants to pursue creative endeavors, such as writing. I also have a much better understanding of how to use WordPress, which used to be the bane of my existence when I had to use it for other classes.

I think one of the major skills I learned while being in this class was collaboration. Coordinating schedules and deadlines within a group so we can meet those deadlines is difficult, especially as college students who work part-time jobs and have other classes that take up their time. However, we persevered through all those issues and made it to the finish line, all due to our teamwork. We made sure to check in with one another and see what our progress was, as well as keeping each other in check when deadlines were more strict.

Overall, even though the project itself was experimental and there was a lot of gray area along the way, we learned a lot about collaboration, digital tools, and the history of such tools this semester. These lessons and skills I will carry with me in each future project I undertake for whatever career I find myself in. Thank you for this opportunity, and have a good summer!

After going through the many documents assigned for today’s reading, I still cannot help myself from having a negative opinion about the use of AI, especially in history education. I strongly believe that generative AI (creating information, images, and videos) is harmful to education, as it can allow anyone to create false information and spread it online. Additionally, the “ideas” that chatbots create are not their own, but instead generated by aggregated data from all other users of the chatbots, as well as online sources, it quickly analyzed before spitting out a response.

Regarding its use in historical analysis and education, I do think a lot of the cons outweigh the pros. We have already seen in the past decade the intense damage that social media and unregulated content creation can have on people, such as on Wikipedia and other websites. People being able to edit factual information and consider themselves experts on topics without proper academic training and instead utilizing online information, is ultimately more detrimental than beneficial in the far future.

However, I have also begun to see the positive applications of AI in specific aspects of historical analysis. This is mainly its use in transcription. In our group, we used Gemini to transcribe a file from the digital archives of UMW, and it did an impeccable job analyzing and transcribing the handwritten document. It didn’t add any new information that was untrue or unrelated. It completed the task and then asked if there was anything else for it to do.

I think this is the sole way AI should be utilized when it comes to education, because it relies on AI’s main strength, which is pattern recognition. It can analyze the structure and data of anything given to it and then give it back in an easier format to read. If we just asked it what it thought of the document, it would create false information or pull from outside sources. By narrowing an AI’s focus to a specific task, it can be a lot more beneficial to historians in the modern age, rather than being a terrifying concept. Giving AI unlimited access to anything it wants is the wrong way to go, but structuring it to have a sole focus and task, like any other machine, will allow us to continue the process of historical analysis unimpeded by outside sources.

My group’s project is focused on the application of generative AI systems in public history. We want to explore the ways it can be used in the process of analyzing public history. Using the scrapbooks, photo albums, and notebooks from the University Special Collections of Alumni history from their time as students, metadata, transcriptions, and a chatbot were created. Our objective is to teach the AI chatbot to focus on the past of college student life. An AI chatbot that we will build by assembling visual and textual bits of information from UMW student archives will be trained by entering metadata.

My job for the project will involve training the chatbot, which will be Gemini 3 Pro, and then integrating the metadata created by Emma and Sage into the program. This training will focus on having the Chatbot transcribe and review documents and photos, while completely restricting its access to the Internet, allowing the chatbot to concentrate solely on the information provided.

For this post, I reviewed the Programming Historian site and its various lessons. I was immediately overwhelmed by the massive catalog of lessons and the wide variety of coding systems they were discussing. I decided to start with the easy difficulty lessons, which included topics such as “Building a Static Website,” “Python Introduction and Installation,” and “Installing Python Modules with pip.”

After a lot of trial and error with other lessons – almost signing up for Premium GitHub, getting the wrong text editor for Python that made my Mac crash, and so on – I decided to just go with the module focusing on installing Python modules with pip. This was a failure, unfortunately, as the pip application could not download onto my Mac properly, and the guide on the pip website did not give me proper ways to fix it, so I had to delete the application instead.

Overall, I was definitely starting to think I was not cut out for coding and software. It made me more sure of my decision to be a Creative Writing major, but made me ashamed to think of myself as a Digital Studies minor. However, I am not going to give up. I am going to work on my comprehension of coding, as I think that was a huge part of why so many of these downloads went wrong. I’m confident that it didn’t do any damage to the Mac, as I ran some tests with some of the other apps on the laptop, and nothing strange occurred. I want to use more coding for the projects for this class, so I will take some time to really practice with everything.

For this blog review, I focused on “JSTOR” and “Famous Trials.”

JSTOR

• Content: The content of JSTOR is from many different articles from historical archives from across the 20th and 21st centuries. The point-of-view is from many different perspectives on thousands of topics. The content is communicated through the articles and magazines found within the database
• Design: The content is shown through a minimalist design, with white and red colors, as well as a collection of artwork on the opening page. When it comes to accessibility, it seems hard for me to figure out. It has advanced search and “search help” options, as well as the ability to immediately cite and save specific articles that come up through searches, but they do not have a plethora of audio or visual mediums. They do have a chatbot that will answer questions for you about the website itself.
• Audience: The intended audience for JSTOR is people looking for primary sources rather than having to search through countless other sources to find important data. For that audience, I think it handles its goals very well.
• Digital Media: As said before, they have a chatbot that can answer questions. They also now have a “research tool,” which is an AI interface on the right side of the article’s webpage that lets you ask questions about the article to the left. However, a good portion of articles on the site have the research tool blocked at the behest of the publisher of the article.
• Creators: I could not find any information about those who run JSTOR on their site, other than the fact that it is run by the ITHAKA corporation.

Famous Trials

• Content: This site includes information about some of the most iconic trials in human history, such as the trial of Al Capone in 1931, the George Floyd murder trial of 2021, and even the Trial of Socrates from 399 BCE. The documents, maps, images, and information span many centuries, giving its audience a wide variety of information to choose from.
• Design: The design of the site is lackluster and seemingly dated. There is an artpiece of a trial at the top and weirdly blue-shaded sections of the site at the bottom. The pages for the trials are filled with links and secondary images underneath the text. However, you can click to focus on specific kinds of trials on the home page, such as trials focused on religion or free speech.
• Audience: I believe the intended audience of this site is people interested in the history of judicial trials in all cultures. Although it primarily focuses on European trials, there is a great deal of trials focused on the interconnection of many cultures. It also gives an unbiased look at the history of these trials and emphasizes why these trials are considered among the most important trials in human history.
• Digital Media: The site, as said before, seems not to have been updated recently. There does not seem to be any newer forms of accessibility or technology for the audience to engage with, unlike JSTOR’s chatbots.
• Creators: The only creator acknowledged at the top of the main page is Professor Douglas O. Linder, who works at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law.

For the essay and image of a historical figure/event, I chose to use Copilot from the UMW AI tools, and also chose Malcolm X as my historical figure to plug in. The AI generated a quite realistic image of Malcolm X during his prime, but the essay was lackluster. It was repetitive with its wording and even some of its talking points. It also painted him as less of a controversial figure than he was during his time, stating that “even those who disagreed with him recognized his intellectual force and rhetorical mastery,” which was not at all the case when he was alive. For me personally, this reinforced my opinions about the usage of AI in both general use and its use in educational fields. As a creative writing student who is very passionate about his art, the idea of giving a machine the ability to generate art at a faster pace than a human is terrifying. It eliminates the need for creative arts and the humanities in most fields, and is causing younger people to not engage with creative endeavors, such as music, art, and writing. Art is the act of putting emotions into something tangible. Machines do not have those emotions, and therefore should not be given the ability to create art. It will not have the same feeling as something created by a human. Because of the rise of AI’s generative abilities, students are using them to create essays within seconds, not realizing that these tools are not all-knowing databases and have limited access to the internet. I do not think that AI should be the tool we use to do our homework for us.

For the transcription of the cemetery documents, I used Google Gemini. It was very good at transcribing, focusing on very specific details and even putting them into an actual table similar to the one on the document I uploaded. It also labeled key notations, such as references to the Veteran Reserve Corps and what the red ink on the page likely meant. This, in my opinion, is what AI should be used for. Its greatest skill is pattern recognition, which is what educational services should use it for. AI should be used to work on the tedious things we shouldn’t have to worry about, so that then block us from being able to do the things we need/want to do.

Looking through each of the digital databases for this week, one of my favorite aspects of these sites is their interactivity. Being able to move through each section of the site helped me gain more interest in what each site was focused on, whether it was basic history or the history of a specific region. The Gilded Age Plains City website has an interactive map for the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, that focuses on the history of murder trials there. The Valley of the Shadow lets you look at newspapers, interviews, and even church documents from Pennsylvania and Virginia during each part of the Civil War. What also surprised me is how old some of these projects and/or organizations that built these archives are. The Valley of the Shadow started in 1991, while the AHA has existed since 1884. This shows how much the advancement of digital tools has aided the pursuit of historical analysis and education.

I think when it comes to the projects we are focused on for this class, creating archives as big as these or just websites is not going to be possible, but we can look at the principles that they followed and the tools they used to give us a framework for what our projects can look like by the end of this semester.

For the Omeka examples, I looked at “New Roots” and “From Farms to Freeways.” Many of the other links on the Examples page were inaccessible or completely changed, with the “Intemperance Archive” now being some kind of gambling site.

“New Roots” had access to hundreds of interviews with Latin American citizens from the Southern United States, specifically in North Carolina. They also had varying themes of discussion, like activism and COVID-19, as well as Spanish and English versions for most pages.

“From Farms to Freeways” focused on the experiences of women living in Sydney, Australia, during the 1950s. One of the most interesting parts of the site is that they had a Google Maps feature that lets you pinpoint where specific stories came from in Sydney. You could click on the points on the map and read a transcript of an interview.

Hi! My name is Daniel Stell. I am a senior here at UMW, graduating in May with a degree in Creative Writing. I’m taking this class because it fulfills a requirement for the digital studies minor, but also because I have heard a lot about McClurken’s classes and his reputation as an exceptional teacher. 

I view digital history as the utilization of digital and technological tools from the modern era to analyze and share information about the past. This includes databases, the internet, and AI, which all provide new ways to access historical information. Digital Humanities is more of the supercategory above digital history, as it is the application of digital tools and the Internet to engage with literature, history, and the arts as a whole. Digital history falls under that category, but it is not the whole picture of what these digital tools can be used for.