A few updates from me, after a few weeks of being too rarely at my desk to contemplate anything as luxurious as diary writing…

Exhibit

Stamen are now on board as our designers, and I shared all but the trade directories data with them last week. We will be having weekly meetings every Tuesday, and you can keep up to date with meeting minutes here: Exhibit Meetings

Once again I’d like to thank all the fellows that got involved in the story sprint a few weeks ago - these historic narratives have really helped to explain who and what we are to external audiences. Stamen sent over a priority list of stories they’d like further data for on Wednesday, which Max, Alex F, Daniel and I have been pulling together and sharing with the designers on Box. In truth, I don’t yet know what the designers are planning with this huge range of different data types, but I look forward to knowing more soon!

Book writing begins

OCR chapter - We had a productive (and efficient!) kick off for this chapter this week. We will be focusing on case study writing ahead of the 19th August deadline, to allow all co-authors to closely collaborate on the introduction and conclusions of the chapter once the case studies are in-situ. OCR is such a massive part of the work we’ve done, and I’m sure a chapter where we come together to reflect on what this means for digital humanities and historians more generally will be rich.

GPT/RAG chapter led by Jon - Anna Maria, Nayomi and I have been accepted to an upcoming Special Issue of AI & Society to talk about our work with GPT, RAG, and the ethical considerations that follow. Much of this work will help inform the chapter for the book, including a literature review about RAG which I’ve promised to provide and will be starting as soon as possible (any relevant reading, please do send my way!)

Crowdsourcing chapter led by Alex F - I’ve written my first four pages for this chapter, which is lovely to be able to say! I’ve written reflections on the ‘transforming personal researchers notes’ study, especially on the involvement of volunteers and potential to use them more often in similar work. This chapter seems like a really nice space to celebrate the social machine and the role of people in digital work.

Pollution chapter led by Max - Not much to report ahead of our catch up later today, but I look forward to reflecting on my (mis)adventures with neo4j in this chapter - especially the data cleaning where I found my historian sensibilities did not align so easily with beautiful graph creating!

The **Computer Vision chapter ****kicks off next week. Although Kaspar and I have discussed this a little, in our catch up about Heritage Weaver (below).

Ongoing investigation work

Circulars/RAG - Nayomi has spent much of this week finishing up the pipeline, which I look forward to experimenting with next week. The big news is the pipeline will now have a front end, which will mean we can certainly provide it as an interactive ‘talk to the circulars’ activity at the end of project conference.

Heritage Weaver - Kaspar and I had a catch up to agree our immediate goals for this work. We’ll be focusing on fine tuning what we have and testing it with a small group of peers around September, allowing us to write reflections on the tool itself for the book ahead of the September deadline and feed in user feedback for the October one. We’re parking our experiment with a smaller museum catalogue, simply because smaller museum catalogue’s don’t tend to have many relevant images! If this work were to continue in another form, it would be nice to return to the question of how to integrate different types of information from smaller institutions.

Environment workshop - Keep an eye out for notifications about the environment workshop on the 5th August. This will be a space to reflect on what we think about the environmental legacy of the project, and how we want to discuss that in an upcoming publication. Thanks also to everyone that filled in the survey!