If my grandfather had managed to get his story "Barnwoggler's Invention" published in 1926, he would have set the scene for ChatGPT and the rest a century later. But in the story it all actually works: Barnwoggler builds a machine that can generate publishable academic prose on any subject. https://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/2021/12_31_barnwoggler-redux-a-1920s-vision-of-library-and-research-automation.html#barnwogglers-invention #RobertCBinkley #AI #DigitalHumanities

Scholarly filing systems: "I have been organizing my notes on Belgium today. It is a great problem to decide whether to fold the big sheets of paper up into a 3"x5" size and stick them in with the cards, or to keep them in a separate file and use cross reference cards." #RobertCBinkley, diary, 24 May 1925 (I don't know which he did)

(something Facebook reminded me I posted a couple of years ago about #RobertCBinkley): Thing I just learned: when my grandfather was in London in Oct.-Nov. 1919 collecting wartime materials for the Hoover War Library at Stanford, the Hoover team's offices were in Carter's Hotel in Albemarle St. That's where the Marquess of Queensbury stayed when he was in London, and where he was arrested on Oscar Wilde's charge of defamation, after the marquess left the notorious calling card ... [1/2]

we could train a model to produce abstracts for nineteenth-century newspapers. This would project the value created by hundreds of WPA workers across another generation of research. I wonder how far we could take that.

LInks:
Terras keynote: https://web.cvent.com/event/811e389e-78de-46cd-877d-b20b9ae9ed85/websitePage:4c94db0f-6c6b-4e4e-a150-7e5ce400b72a?RefId=17%20NOV%20Session%2002
Poster: https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-5shd-gp89
Annals of Cleveland digitization demo: https://www.wallandbinkley.com/projects/2019/annals-of-cleveland/

#RobertCBinkley #WPA #DigitalHumanities #MachineLearning

(just to post about something other than Mastodon or Twitter): Facebook reminded me of this post from last year:

Connections: me ⇒ my dad ⇒ his dad #RobertCBinkley ⇒ his student and friend Marika Hellstrom, who (hung out with Wilhelm Reich and then) married ⇒ Stetson Kennedy, activist and KKK infiltrator, subject of a song by his buddy ⇒ Woody Guthrie, which was recorded by ⇒ Billy Bragg ⇒ everybody else

#introduction I've been a techie #academic #librarian since 2001: link resolver, ezproxy, #digitization, #digitalpreservation. Now I'm in the #DigitalScholarshipCentre, teaching & consulting on anything digital & scholarly. I'm a #philologist underneath (Ph.D. on #medievalLatin lit). My research is half #digitalscholarship / #digitalhumanities tools, half a blog / #biography on my g'father #RobertCBinkley (d.1940), who pioneered a lot of what I do, but in the twilight of the #predigital age.