Sessions

A printing house around 1600: people at work, a boy watching, a man in a fur robe talking it over with the pressman. The sessions run the same way: watch, work along on your own laptop, or stop us to ask about anything, as often as you like.

Jan van der Straet (Stradanus), Impressio Librorum, from Nova Reperta, engraved by Joannes Galle. Museum Plantin-Moretus, public domain.

We work through a few exercises on screen and talk about what the tool is doing as we go. Follow along on your own laptop or just watch. Ask questions constantly or never say a word. Skeptics, critics, the curious and the enthusiastic all have a place here, and we’re hoping to learn from each other.

What to bring

  • Lunch. It’s a brown bag series.
  • A laptop, if you want to follow along, with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot open in a browser tab. A free account is enough. No laptop is fine; you can watch.
  • Something of your own to try it on. Each session’s page says what, such as a paragraph of your writing or a photo of a handwritten page. If you don’t have anything suitable, the session page has examples you can use instead.
  • Nothing you shouldn’t share. Leave out other people’s unpublished work, student writing with names attached, and anything under embargo or an IRB protocol.

All sessions

Each session’s page keeps the exercises, the prompts and the replies we got, so you can try them again later or catch up on one you missed.

  1. AI as Editorial AssistantFred Gibbs Use AI as an eager but inexperienced editor: tell it what to look for and who the reader is, then save your rules so you don't have to repeat them. Materials
  2. Transcribing Handwritten DocumentsJonathan Seyfried Another task where you can check the work, because the page is right in front of you. We try AI on handwritten sources, compare its readings with the originals, and look closely at where it goes wrong. Materials
  3. Audit Trails for AI Agents Read into a topic with an AI agent, map the articles’ ideas and relationships, and keep a record of what you checked and chose to read next. This week
  4. Mapping with AIFred Gibbs Use AI to build three kinds of maps, from a quick pin map of your notes to archival data drawn over a historic map, and check where it puts each place. In 3 weeks
  5. Building Websites with AIAllie Love Start from a free website template, ask AI for changes in plain language, and learn to read what it changed so the site stays yours. In 4 weeks
  6. Local LLMsJonathan Seyfried Run an AI model on your own computer so you can work with unpublished or sensitive material without sending it to anyone's servers, and see what you give up in exchange. In 6 weeks

Have a topic request? Tell us and we’ll add it to the list.