Bauer's History

  To say the least, history is always around us, and this is no less true when it comes to visual media. This autumn, Netflix has launched what I hope will be a blockbuster series in the form of   House of Guinness . The series portrays the life of the famous Irish brewing family and the political conflicts of late 1860s Dublin. History is often used as a kind of projection surface for our own fantasies and ideas about how the past might have been. To recreate history on TV therefore means, to some extent, that we colonize — in this case — 19th-century Ireland with people who think in modern ways. What we see on screen is thus not the past as it actually was, but our contemporary conception of it. As a historian, I love historical series and movies. Even though they never truly portray the past accurately, they still provide entertainment and, to some degree, represent the past as we  want  it to be, rather than how it  actually  was. Another interesting as...

It has now been around two years since I first started using AI as part of my teaching, and the technology still feels very much in an exploratory phase. In many ways, it reminds me of the early days of the internet — a time when nobody quite knew what it would be good for. Since those days of Hotmail, when sending a digital postcard to a friend felt revolutionary, digital technology has quietly become woven into everyday life. I suspect the same will happen with AI once the current hype has settled. For researchers, however, I think the possibilities are already here — especially through the development of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) , a technology that could fundamentally change how we approach historical research. HTR does exactly what its name suggests: it turns handwritten text into machine-readable text. The first steps in this direction were taken as early as the 1960s, when computers learned to read printed text with clearly separated characters. Yet, it is only with the...

In a previous post, I described some career reflections a couple of years after my thesis defence. Overall, I am very grateful for my PhD education, since I think that both the seminars and the activities within the two research schools I belonged to (the National Graduate School in History and Learning in Multicultural Contexts ) prepared me quite well for what came afterward — and for what you can do in advance to increase your room for manoeuvre. If I were to give advice to a PhD student, it would be to teach as much as possible and to learn as much as possible from more senior teachers. This is because you often have to teach at least part-time to make a living after your thesis defence, and previous experience counts for quite a lot. A more informal piece of advice I would give is to think carefully about a) what you want to publish after your defence, and b) where and why you want to publish. After I finished my thesis, I knew that I wanted to continue doing research, which I was...

Artificial intelligence is still the talk of the town. As a scholar, I am very interested in AI, especially in focusing on what it can do, rather than what it can’t . In academia, many discussions about AI in education and research tend to be rather critical claiming that AI can never be “trustworthy” or used for complex tasks where the end result is important. I totally agree with that but in many cases where AI has rendered itself useless, it is often due to a) poor prompting, b) attempts to use it for tasks it was not developed for, and c) unrealistic expectations. The text you are reading right now is not generated by AI, but like much else on this blog, it has been edited by ChatGPT 4.0. The reasons for this are quite obvious: I am not a native speaker of English and I would prefer not to sound like an idiot in text. For this purpose, ChatGPT actually works quite well, but I also need to be careful about what I prompt into it and what I expect from it. I usually make a prompt sta...

For the past few months I have not made any entries into this blog. This is due to private circumstances: my mother passed away after a very short period of illness in January, and during the spring I mostly focused on teaching. The little energy I had left for writing was directed elsewhere. After that, I have been occupied with writing up three projects that are currently in various stages of peer review, and hence I have not had much time or energy to write here. But perhaps this entry might be a new start. This morning I was struck by one of the paradoxes of academic life: the level of education versus how it has shaped my career. I truly enjoy being part of academia, and I love teaching and writing. At the same time, permanent positions are limited, and many talented people are striving for them. This often leads to discussions about the challenges of the academic job market—something I both relate to and find thought-provoking. Starting with the obvious: despite the challenges, a...