Last week, I was corresponding with my friend Laura Morreale about the results of Gemini transcription on this Crusader-era manuscript. The differences between the AI results and Laura’s are fairly interesting: there are some mis-readings, like y for ii, but about half of the differences are reasonable editorial decisions. Gemini represents long s as the character ſ and retains the abbreviation of […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
Making AI Energy Use More Transparent
We recently hosted a webinar by our friend Jon Ippolito from the University of Maine's New Media program. We'd been looking for resources on how to evaluate and judge energy usage by LLMs since last summer's SAA panel questions started with a pointed "question" on the ethical use of AI, given the energy consumption. Jon […]
AI With Historical Instincts?
Ben recently made the following observations on BlueSky, and we thought they were interesting enough to share with all of you: I stumbled across something interesting during a live demo in yesterday's webinar. Not having anything prepared, I tried a page in the Queens University Archives' Riel Resistance Collection. The hand was extraordinarily difficult for me, even though […]
How Good HTR is Changing What & How We’re Transcribing
In a recent discussion on BlueSky, Ben and Scott Weingart (and others) had a conversation about the explosion of possibilities that might come from good, cheap, AI transcription. Scott asks “how the bias of the spotlight of what’s searchable will reshape how people will engage with the past. That is, how will history be remembered and […]
Environmental Impact of AI
At the Society of American Archivists conference last August, I joined a panel on artificial intelligence. The first question from the audience came quickly and, frankly, with a little heat: "How do you justify using energy-intensive tools like AI when the climate crisis is only getting worse?" That moment stuck with me. The archivists in […]
How Do You Know Whether AI Is "Good Enough"?
Yesterday we deployed two new features to help you evaluate Gemini 3 (and eventually others) results against human transcribed or corrected text. First, we’ve developed a comparison screen that shows the differences between an AI generated page transcription and human created ground truth: Next, we calculate statistics, again comparing the AI draft against the human […]