It is only week 2, and we have been introduced to many programs and tools for finding, translating, and organizing. As an elder millennial, I have been trying to downsize the amount of tech I use, and in the last week I have been introduced to so many new things. As Putnam argued, while there are many new technological advancements, there are also downsides. I wanted to ask the class what they thought about all these tool options. For me, the discussion of all the different LLMs made me wonder about the competition among them and whether there will be a single master one in the end. We checked out at least three in class: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and I believe we could also include Transkribus into that list. Each had its strengths and weaknesses, it appeared. As someone who tries to keep things as streamlined as possible, I do believe there can be too many cooks in the kitchen, especially if the kitchen is on the set of Iron Chef. What I mean by this is, and maybe I am just naive to these competing models, but how are you supposed to find one that works best? As these tools are supposed to help find resources more easily, especially for research, it seems counterintuitive to have to use a million different options to do a job that is supposed to make the task at hand easier to manage. For me, I was introduced to ChatGPT first, and that is the one I have stuck with for the most part. It has been very helpful in the research tasks I have used it for. Is it the best? Not sure. Are there options that could be better? Not sure. Do you all take the time to use multiple LLMs to see which one gives you the best results, or do you stick to one and hope that the information it delivers isn’t better elsewhere?

Another question I wanted to ask was how everyone else’s professors have treated the use of AI in your classes? Are some staunch anti-AI, or do some embrace it selectively for certain uses? In my experience, my professors were much more aware of it than I was. When I learned what it was, everyone was anti-AI. On the first day of the semester, syllabi were always like, “Do NOT use this at all because if we find out you did, which we will, you will be expelled and exiled forever!” Now it seems they are much more accepting of its uses and capabilities in limited quantities for research and outlining. In my case, it’s been particularly useful with outlining and correcting my grammar (which I’ve always been terrible at).

On to another thought…

This quote is from the Jonathan Blaney and Judith Siefring article.

Jonathan Blaney and Judith Siefring, “A Culture of non-citation: Assessing the digital impact of British History Online and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no 1 (2017).

“Dalbello et al. have studied the digital citations in five journals in Classical Studies and English and come to the same broad conclusions as the present article: “supporting argument by means of electronic document [sic]…is not considered to be evidentiary… and… [t]hese citation practices point to the still invisible nature of the electronic document that is now ubiquitous in supporting the actual research practice” [Dalbello et al. 2006, 4].”

This quote stuck with me while I was reading this article. I keep getting hung up on the notion of tech replacing analog. Maybe it is because I was coming of age when we were taught analog practices and saw the rise of tech replacing more and more analog research and methods. Because of this, I wanted to ask: Do you agree or disagree with the idea of a digitized primary source being considered and in the argument from the quote possibly being cited as an original text?