SFF book blogger (on hiatus) and archivist. She/her. Blog: https://paladinjanereviews.wordpress.com/
Paladin Jane
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You do not "fill the gap" in archives.
You ask *why* the gap is there in the first place.
That is where the real information resides.
Also:
LLMs train on digitized materials.
Do you have any idea how little has been digitized?
LLMs train on a *sliver* of the human past and human knowledge.
A historical fantasy set in 1100s England had the farmers growing potatoes. No, there was no alternate history explanation for this.
Baltimore peeps, this looks really cool and tickets are on sale now! I got mine already.
One paper I tracked down from the mid-1800s was incorrectly cited in every instance of citation I found thanks to lazy researchers copying one man's mistakes. I, not an expert in that field but merely a person willing to check citations, caught that within minutes of looking.
So my job on that part of the project quickly became 1) research, rewrite, and give due credit so it's not plagiarized and 2) track down all the correct citations, many in languages I'm not fluent in and in a field that's not my own.
Plus I also work in an academic library and we absolutely have a group chat to talk about the books we've been reading. I'm no influencer on here, but I do hand sell people on books all the time IRL! If people post about good books on here, that word of mouth does reach outside the platform.
I'm fortunate enough to have disposable income and I want to spend it on books! I'm an easy sell on a good book! I can only do that if I know to look for it because there are so many authors whose work I love that it's easy to overlook someone if no one is talking about their new book.
I buy over 100 books a year. I've got 79 books preordered right this moment. Bluesky is the main place I get my info on new releases, from authors, publishers, and reviewers talking about great books.
That careless scholarship boggled my mind because even as an undergrad I couldn't have gotten away with that and yet here were these successful researchers publicly demonstrating they hadn't done the reading in their own area of study.
As a grad student I once worked for a scholar on a community archives project that included a timeline of the history of his field. I quickly discovered that his text was almost entirely plagiarized AND that his source (pre-AI!) got a lot of things wrong, including many citations.
Amalia S. Levi, PhD
Paladin Jane
Rebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.
