[Teever]

Great stuff. I've been doing some digging in this period of American history recently and it has lead me to brainstorm about similar applications of modern AI for historical analysis or presentation.

I think there's a lot of newly ripened low-hanging fruit right in fields like History now that LLM tools have either digested a lot of historical sources or can be used to build systems such as this for presenting that data in new ways that engage the reader.

One of the ideas I was thinking about was a map for presenting the provenance of an object or an idea.

It would be neat to be able to see a map that had markings on it that showed where someone first had an idea -- the apocryphal 'apple falling on their head' moment and then where they wrote their first draft -- maybe they mailed that draft to a friend who offered editing suggestions, then they travelled with a new draft to a distant town because of a neighbouring country invading where they were, then they sent it off to a printing press where a small run of pamphlets was made and they were distributed across a region to a few cities.

Seeing all those key moments for the genesis of an idea, invention, or object in a map with play/pause rewind/fast forward controls + the ability to put other things on the map ot watch their spread and visualize the flow and interplay of information over time would be fascinating and could lead to some really good insights.

[rayiner]

I love the idea of a map to study provenance. For example, consider the phrases “legislative power,” “executive power,” and “judicial power,” appearing in Articles I, II, and III of the constitution. The first is defined by reference to the subsequent article. But the second and third are not defined in the constitution. Apparently those terms were used as such in writing during the English Civil War, more than 100 years before the constitution was written. It would be very cool to have a tool that could trace these ideas back in time.

[vhwalke]

These are great thoughts. I may do some investigation into how the Federalist Papers spread, but even with AI, these may be significant research efforts. I need graduate assistants!