Thread by @D__Hutchinson

Attention #twitterstorians! I'm pleased to share a new digital history experiment:

Nicolay: Exploring the Speeches of Abraham Lincoln with AI

This app is part of Honest Abe's Information Emporium by @AbrahamHGibson and a great team of digital scholars.

honestabes.info/fireside-chats/

Nicolay allows users to explore some of Lincoln's most important speeches. (Many thanks to the @Miller_Center for their work in sharing their corpus of presidential speeches)

Nicolay uses semantic search & large language models (OpenAI's ChatGPT & GPT-4) to enable users to ask questions about Lincoln and receive answers supported by quotations drawn from Lincoln's speeches.

You can learn more about how AI and natural language processing allows for interactive exploration of historical documents via this tutorial video. The video explores techniques like text embeddings, prompt engineering, and prompt chaining.

As with other AI implementations, this technology features some compelling strengths but also some notable limitations. Always pair AI analysis with human review to ensure accuracy and trustworthiness.

Nicolay was designed using @LangChainAI and @streamlit - many thanks to their development teams and user communities for creating such great tools for LLM programming.

The project's Github repo features code, prompts, speeches, and text embeddings.
github.com/Dr-Hutchinson/…

Learn more about John George Nicolay, the man who inspired this app, and his outsized role in preserving Abraham Lincoln's legacy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Geor…,

Also check out @JoshuaMZeitz's great book "Lincoln's Boys", which explores Nicolay and his fellow Lincoln secretary John Hay and their work in shaping the historical memory of Lincoln's life and presidency.
amazon.com/Lincolns-Boys-…

My deep thanks to @AbrahamHGibson and the rest of the Honest Abe's Information Emporium team: @CindyErmus, Jerry Gonzalez, @rebeccaglo_474, Ali Atabey, Brian Davies, Andrea Varga, Wing Chung Ng, & Matthias Hofferberth.

https://twitter.com/AbrahamHGibson/status/1651571385058074624