The Florida Historical Society's Annual Meeting & Symposium: A Discussion on Selected Rooms

This week we attended the Florida Historical Society Symposium in Orlando, FL at the University of Central Florida. As part of Dr. Scot French’s class assignment, we had to attend two events that involves digital history. The goal of this was to reflect on the intersection of digital methods and the traditional history conferences so that we could create this blog post. I chose to attend Sarah Boye’s poster session titled “Walking Through History: Greenwood Cemetery Digital Walking Tour,” and Daniel Cox’s “AI For Arts and Humanities.” Both involve digital tools to a full extent, however they both utilized them in different ways. In this blog post I attempt to discuss these two different meetings and then discuss their importance and their use of digital tools in their project.

Sarah Boye – Walking Through History: Greenwood Cemetery Digital Walking Tour

Boye’s project involved looking at the history of Greenwood’s cemetery and focuses on a variety of topics related to it. These topics consist of: city and Greenwood cemetery origins, Orlando’s “strangers”, the Ocoee Massacre, Florida after the American Civil War, City/Semetery Segregation, origins of “the city beautiful”, local monuments, the birth of tourism in Central Florida, Sunland hospital, and Jonestown (the first historic black neighborhood). Boye is pulling from a variety of sources both physical and digitally, but in a conversation with Boye she said that the bulk of her research was involving digital sources. The digital sources that she used are the Florida state archives, family resources, census, land records, and vital records. The physical “artifacts” (the word she used on her poster), were regional archives, research libraries, Orlando city records, and pertinent historic sites. It is clear that Ms. Boye has done extensive research to ensure accuracy in her project. In addition, Ms. Boye is getting assistance through grants and financial assistance from the state such as a $50,000 Florida Division of Historical Resources Heritage Education Project Grant, state funds allocated by the Florida Legislature and federal funds apportioned to the state by the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service for the preservation and protection of this historic cemetery.[1]

Enough of this research talk: what is going on with this project?! The crux of this project lays with the digital walking tour. Using Clio as a platform, people are able to view the cemetery and all of its stories. Sarah told me that in her initial round, she asked the public what they want to know, what they think the history is, and many more questions. Once the tour was over, she then gave a survey asking the viewers if they liked it, what they liked about it, what they learned, what they still wanted to learn, etc. This is an ever-growing project that Ms. Boye has worked hard on.

I believe that this is a wonderful intersection of history and digital tools, demonstrating how history can be pushed into a larger audience with the use of digital tools. Being able do this from peoples phones makes it much more accessible to people to do from their home to avoid taking a journey, while still taking a virtual journey of an important area. I also find it amazing that they have additional topic-based tours that include different groups of peoples such as LGBTQ+ history and disability history. More importantly, in the future Ms. Boye said that they are working on even more digital tools to utilize such as podcast interviews, video presentations, workshops, and most importantly: 1:1 digital cemetery utilizing digital tools. Ms. Boye’s project is the quintessence of great use of digital tools in history.

Daniel Cox – AI For Arts and Humanities

Daniel Cox’s room was a much more interactive one, which made the meeting itself entertaining (as if his jokes weren’t enough). Cox expressed that one of his goals, not only in this meeting but in teaching others to use software, is that software is not as scary as it seems. While we have been shown in popular media how AI [Artificial Intelligence] could turn on us in movies such as the terminator or WALL-E, we were not prepared for computers to not be able to understand us. Since 2018, millions of searches on AI have increased, and the topic “AI anxiety” has also been increased. This AI anxiety includes topics such as will you be losing your job due to AI, who is watching us in this AI, and many more. But what Cox wanted to focus on is generative AI: the creation of various forms of digital content (such as photos or code) from AI and what the role of humanities is in all of this.

The main topic of this meeting was “recognizing ‘hallucinations.’” What does that mean? It involves being able to look at the discrepancies in either photos or texts that make it noticeable to us that the work was made by AI. For example, too many fingers that a person has in a photo, two different objects/peoples being meshed together that usually wouldn’t be, incorrect information; things that just don’t make logical sense, essentially. Cox emphasized that this is much easier to do with photos than it is with texts created from AI such as ChatGPT.

In the interactive portion, we used Adobe Firefly, ChaptGPT, and other forms of AI to attempt to look at the forms of hallucinations that could be created by the AI. This is where things got interesting: we did see the aforementioned too many fingers, there would be a staff being created and somehow intertwined with another object in the photo, inconsistencies in an object such as the newspaper, etc. It became much more difficult when we were looking at codes and chat. For example, we looked at causes of the French Revolution. While a lot of the information was correct, we see the hallucinations in the way the AI structured it. For example, the financial causes would be repeated more than once in the text, and also be separated from economic causes, which really could be combined together to be more efficient.

In conclusion, this interactive room was very informative on identifying when AI is being used. In reality, it is still extremely difficult to prove a case for, primarily for text-based generated AI versus photo-based. Universities are still debating how this should be used, if it should be used, if we can punish students we believe are using it, the difficult of actually proving a student is using it, etc. In addition, there have been ethical and copyright concerns raised by artists for their art being used without the permission. There are still many questions that are leftr unanswered and it may be years before we definitively have an answer, and even then, I predict there will be even more different types of AI created for different uses, and likely furthermore difficult to tell its usage.

[1] All information from this paragraph and the following ones in this sub-section were directly from discussion with Sarah Boye, or from her poster that she presented at the FSH.