Six Ways that I Have Used AI Over the Past Year (Part 2)

Last week, I started a post on six ways that I have used generative AI over the last years. This is in response to a conversation over on social media about whether there is any value in generative AI for the historian. I tend to say that historians have uses for generative AI and I offered a handful last week. Here is a little handful more. 4. Text Cleaning. Last week, I mentioned that I used generative AI to transcribe my personal handwritten notebooks. The other thing that I’ve done with generative AI is prepare text for various kind of text analysis and even <gasp> for teaching. First, for texts to be used in analysis they have to be pretty tidy. Simple things like running headers, page numbers, corrupted OCR, and other text artifacts can baffle text analysis processes. It seems like Claude can do a good job removing these artifacts, catching places where the OCR seems suspect, and preparing text for things like BERT analysis or topic modeling or even just simple word frequency or…