@adamchapman.bsky.social @justincolson.bsky.social @mpdavies.bsky.social @melissaterras.bsky.social @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social @ihrbritainseminar.bsky.social

History vibe coding An offer to coach any and all historians wanting to give it a try

I have been history vibe coding now for four months. I am offering to coach and support any of you who want to take the plunge with a first history vibe coding project. generativelives.substack.com/p/history-vi... @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com

May be of interest @dslc.io @historytoday.com @royalhistsoc.org @historians.org

May be of interest @tedunderwood.com @timhitchcock.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social @jwbaker.bsky.social @adamcrymble.bsky.social

Cowork for Historians: skills and workflows

Claude Cowork has huge potential for historians. The next session of the ai + history collaboratory (March 31st 2026) will be a hands on session exploring how to install Cowork on your desktop and to write and test skill files to assist your research generativelives.substack.com/p/cowork-for...

See also github.com/ai-and-histo... and github.com/ai-and-histo...

An Ottoman Turkish document viewer built with Claude Cowork I’m sharing the product of five hours work with Claude Cowork spread over a day.

I’m sharing the product of five hours work with Claude Cowork spread over a day. I have been using Cowork now for ten days and this is my biggest project to date. The product is a static 5 annotation layer IIIF viewer for Ottoman Turkish. #ottomanturkish generativelives.substack.com/p/an-ottoman...

Those were the days!! First public fruit of my work with Claude Cowork. An interactive dashboard of the MarineLives Twitter archive. 13 years of data. 10,535 Tweets. You can check it out on the ai + history collaboratory GitHub site: ai-and-history-collaboratory.github.io/social-media... #history

ottoman-archive ottoman-archive has one repository available. Follow their code on GitHub.

We now have a logo @will-smiley.bsky.social @ottomanhistory.bsky.social @turkishstudies.bsky.social @andottoman.bsky.social @gtot.bsky.social github.com/ottoman-arch...

ottoman-archive ottoman-archive has one repository available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Launching the ottoman-archive GitHub organisation for all historians and linguists interested in learning about a world culture where only 10,000 people can now read its written records github.com/ottoman-arch... @ottomanhistory.bsky.social

I would also LOVE to find online digital copies of the Ottoman government gazette in Greek and Armenian. Indeed in any language. Maybe you could ask followers to pop into local archives and image a few pages. I believe they exist Takvîm-i Vekâyi Othōmanikos Mēnytōr ...

Appreciated. Top priority at the moment is small amounts of ground truth (5 to 100 lines) paired with images of handwritten text from different periods and genres (bureaucratic; private correspondence; poetry...) and interaction with scholars who have use cases. We will turn stuff round quickly.

GitHub - Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory: online forum with synchronous and asynchronous components for the discussion of the application of ai to historical research online forum with synchronous and asynchronous components for the discussion of the application of ai to historical research - Addaci/ai-and-history-collaboratory

I convene an ai + history online collaboratory : github.com/Addaci/ai-an...

I am a research oriented public historian. Ex-McKinsey, , Ex-GSK, an entrepreneur multiple times, working for the Commons. Working with a San Francisco SW engineer pro bono and potentially two Ottoman Turkish scholars (Paris; Bonn) + an Armenian musicologist [Prague] www.linkedin.com/in/colin-gre...

Opening the Ottoman Archive You want to do granular research on the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, but don't read Ottoman Turkish. Do you throw up you hands or look for a new set of powerful tools?

Hence the theme of my Substack "Opening the Ottoman Archive" for gneral non-Ottamanists as well as extending language scope of specialists (Ottoman Turkish + Albanian + Bulgarian + Greek + Armenian + Modern Turkish + [in future EgyptianmArabic] generativelives.substack.com/p/opening-th...

I think in under a year

In the shortterm I aim to have a CCBY4 GitHub repository with co-created (machine/scholar) skill files which have been tested for a wide range of print & handwriting across genres + a readme. In medium term add an AI assistant. In longer term use MCP or connector t call skills files from LLM

In the past I have specified no modernisation in the transliteration. I wasn't clear this time. Did it modernise? To be clear this is 2 stage. Claude Opus 4.5 is doing transliteration, translation, NER, summarisation at full semantic settings vs Gemini at "camera" type no thinking settings

Where you could help me and my small team would be to generate some interest from say three or four scholars to submit handwritten text images of different genres and scripts C17th to C19th WITH groundtruth (even if just five or six lines) + virgin manuscript images. We will turn around quickly.

Are you surprised at the combined Gemini/Claude performance? Do you find the Named Enity Extraction useful?

Did Gemini get the first line wrong or not?

If I had a digital persoarabic script rendition of image (not just Will's gold standard transliteration and translation) I could try one shotting it against the image, then giving Gemini for visual capture a new image in the same script. Possibly use it to change capture file

Three comments before any feedback from @nabilal-tikriti.bsky.social This is only the second C17th handwritten Ottoman Turkish text I have tried and the first in this specific script. This is a zero-shot approach (no groundtruth from similar documents paired with images). It can only get better.

It is exactly this input I need to improve the visual capture skills file (and also the semantic processing skills file adapted to the genre and period). Let me share the visual capture instruction file, which was developed for C19th print not C17th handwritten. Gemini is called in Google AI Studio

@will-smiley.bsky.social @nabilal-tikriti.bsky.social

I gave Will's transliteration and translation to Claude and asked for forensic analysis

(3) Here are the sumamry instruction and files I gave Claude to do the semantic analysis and Claude's Socratic comments afterwards to accompany the structured JSON model output

(2) Here is the semantic processing of the visual capture of the perso-arabic 5 lines (which no doubt could be improved). Important to understand I do NOT read Ottoman Turkish and am approaching this as a computational linguistics/HTR problem

(1) In the spirit of complete honesty let me post the visual capture (using Gemini). It struggles with line 2. I will then post an extract from the skills file I have used for semantic processing using Claude Opus 4.5. Then series of pastes of the output (pt2). I can rerun the capture and improve

Give me thirty minutes

Can you put it back? I am interested in the manuscript image. I want to try to machine transcribe it for @nabilal-tikriti.bsky.social . Or Nabil DM me and I will give it a try