10.) Rather than prompt our historical imagination about the full record of American history and its drama, the Founders Museum presents viewers with what we might call looking glass history--flattened, narcissistic, and ultimately uninteresting.

9.) I think historians are excited to celebrate and commemorate the 250th and we need creative approaches to history and storytelling, including animation and film, and possibly AI.

8.) The founders of the United States included enslaved people who formed and shaped the nation too. Men and women like the Bell family who among many other actions they took before, during, and after the Rev. attempted to hold the nation accountable to its ideals.

7.) The idea that Thomas Jefferson, Charles Carrol of Carrolton, the Lees would say nothing about slavery or use the term is preposterous. Their own writings made constant reference to slavery and enslaved people.

6.) The Founders Museum videos are like a parlor trick. They use AI to have the founders ventriloquize today’s political viewpoints.

5.) AI can be used to fabricate history, unmooring history from the evidence, the original sources historians use to write history.

4.) So AI is powerful. But it’s also dangerous. I feel like we’re playing with fire. One of the biggest dangers is to lose track of attribution—clearly and definitively marking what is being quoted and what is the source for a narrative.

3.) We used AI in the making of our Animating History film, The Bell Affair, about an enslaved family in Washington, DC, who sue for their freedom -- we automated the rotoscoping of hundreds of thousands of individual frames. Nearly impossible to do by hand. animatinghistory.unl.edu

2.) AI is an exceedingly powerful accelerant. It can automate historical research previously nearly impossible to do in a lifetime. see examples of historians using AI to make millions of handwritten index cards, such as medical or legal records, machine readable in a matter of minutes.

1.) AI makes it possible to dive into the entire corpus of human knowledge and return to the surface with a useful result. This will change the way historians work.

I'll add my thoughts and comments for the record here too!

We always knew you would! Welcome to the sub sub librarians!

Two of my favorite people! Wish I could be there Corey and Marcus!

We are really proud of EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW. Thank you to the awesome team at Nebraska, our Mellon graduate fellows, contributors, and our students and advisory council members. Check it out at: teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu

The collection features not only well-known cases like Scott v. Sandford but also and mainly hundreds of previously unpublished cases. These are stories of how ordinary Americans used the law.
teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu