71–80 of 104 posts
While interesting. Is it a 'Major discovery' ?
Hear perhaps here: https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
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More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important. There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way…
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books.
But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.
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Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore. I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Moza…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important. There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way…
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"
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> Lehrer did [sic] 97 FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
Unfortunately for Lehrer he embarrassed himself in his final words by misremembering how long Mozart lived
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important. There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way…
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
Also, to be pedantic, just taking about LLMs in this context is a tad reductive. There are many deep learning models involved in archival work that aren't language models.
I encourage you to read into this post for more context on what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675179
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I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
If you could automate transcription, it would be an enormous boon to researchers. Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books. But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.
this also means trusting the LLM to decide what things mean. but there is very likely a great middle ground of having LLMs take their best guesses and then verifying the output on significant finds. the risk is in LLM understating something important, false negatives, leading to putting stuff at the bottom of the pile that appears mundane but isnt
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You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important. There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way…
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
https://www.aaa.si.edu/documentation/digitizing-entire-colle...