It’s NEW BOOK DAY at the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. I am very excited to announce the publication of Shawn Graham’s Practical Necromancy for Beginners:A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students.

The buzz surrounding AI these days is nearly deafening and hardly a week goes by without some breathless utterance about the future of AI. One day AI is eliminating the need for teachers, the next it is streamlining our entire consumer economy, revolutionizing warfare, and turning us all into mindless drones. 

Shawn Graham’s new book will not help us predict the future, but it will cut through some of the hype and show how AI technology can help us understand the past in new ways. Practical Necromancy starts with a thoughtful guide to the history and inner workings of AI. The second part of the book offers some concrete exercises well-suited for students and curious faculty alike. The final section offers some wisdom to administrators who like the rest of us struggle with how to use AI most effectively on their campuses. 

The observations and exercises offered in this book continue in tradition of Graham’s 2019 book Failing Gloriously and Other Essays. Failing Gloriously has become one of the most downloaded books ever published by The Digital Press with nearly 5000 downloads since it first appeared. Practical Necromancy continues to advocate for the fearless experimentation central to Failing Gloriously. It is only through a fearlessness approach to AI that we can “break them, push them, prod them, make them give up the ghosts in their data.”

Download a copy of Graham’s new book Practical Necromancy for Beginners as well as a copy of Failing Gloriously and Other Essays for free here. Or help support the press with the purchase of a paperback.

The proper press release is below the fold!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Book on AI in Archaeology and History Encourages Students to
Push, Prod, and Break Large Language Model AIs

In the last few years, there are few concepts that generate as much hype, and anxiety, as AI. Higher education, and the humanities in particular, has shown particular interest in the impact of AI on teaching, learning, reading, and writing. Shawn Graham’s Practical Necromancy: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students offers a focused guide for historians and archaeologists who want to learn how to use AI in their research and their classrooms. Graham is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada. His book invokes the haunting figure of the necromancer, an ancient priest who could talk to ghosts. He advocates a kind of digital necromancy in our approach to Large Language Model (LLM) AIs and encourages us to “break them, push them, prod them, make them give up the ghosts in their data.”

The first part of the book is a survey of development of AI. Graham engages the reader with his conversational style and draws them through the complexities of how LLM AIs, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Athropic’s Claude work.

Graham explains that he wanted to offer a text that is “short, sharp, accessible, and something that at least would point the way into a deeper literature.”

The second part of the book offers a series of step-by-step, classroom-ready exercises that help the students get hands-on experience deploying AI to advance their own research and analysis. Graham emphasizes that process matters more than the final product.

The final part of the book speaks to administrators and skeptics who might see the potential and the pitfalls of LLM AIs.

Graham’s summarizes his book as follows: “I set out to explore what language models offered my history and archaeology students, but it turned out that the question was far too simple. This is a mistake I see a lot of us (administrators, especially) rushing to make: naïve implementation and use, taking their creators at their word and swallowing the myths of intelligence. The truth is much more complex, there’s a lot of nuance, and there’s a lot of material to unpack before we ever get to that stage of ‘how to use’.”

This is Graham’s second book with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. His first, Failing Gloriously and Other Essays has enjoyed nearly 5000 downloads since its publication in 2019 and was named the “Best Exploration of DH Failure” at the international, public-nominated Digital Humanities Awards in 2019.

Like all works from The Digital Press, the book is available as a free download and as a low-cost paperback here: https://thedigitalpress.org/practical-necromancy-for-beginners/