The streams have been crossed. I mean those of my online life. On the one hand, I follow historical stuff here, especially on Substack. But I also got majorly into podcasts, where I admittedly avoid most historical stuff (other than the occasional “Fall of Civilisations” - see my summer post on suggested podcasting delights).
At some point, I started following the Generative Histories Substack here, which is run by a Canadian historian who does a lot of computer-aided transcription of handwritten documents. During our email archives projects, we had more opportunities to connect with archivists and historians who were using AI tools to transcribe archival sources. Since then, I have loosely followed progress in this area as we used Transkribus to process some files from The National Archives (TNA) in the UK.
The other stream
I also quite enjoy listening to the Hard Fork podcast from the New York Times (free to non-subscribers), which features Casey Newton from Platformer and Kevin Roose from NYT. And the streams crossed (yes, it’s a movie reference, I am that age) — Casey and Kevin were talking to Mark Humphries from Generative Histories about one of his recent post, highlighting that he came across a model that did amazingly well transcribing some tabular data (basically an account book in the old English money with the shillings and pence).
He thought this might be Gemini 3.0. Then Humphries was invited to talk about Gemini 3 on Hard Fork — honestly, that felt just slightly amazing following a historian blogging and then listening to him on a tech podcast. On a fairly arcane commercial issue of a sugar loaf purchase, no less.
They discussed on the podcast that this could be Gemini 3. Then Google released Gemini 3. Then Sunder Pichai went onto the Hard Fork podcast and more or less confirmed that he thinks that the case of the sugar loaf must be Gemini 3. Then Humphries published another blog confirming that Gemini 3 is indeed very good at transcribing handwritten documents. Then, with the inevitability that you might expect, I went to Gemini 3, uploaded a random file from the T70 TNA collection for the Royal Africa Company, and had it transcribe it.
After the paywall, the results of my little experiment…
