The Purpose of the Presses: Teaching the Fine Press Movement with a Tactile Timeline of Primary Sources

By Miah Clark / The phrases “fine press” and “book arts” don’t always give students something to hold on to, but luckily as primary source educators, we can! When teaching with fine press material, I’ve found success in highlighting not subject material, but the physical material: the highs and lows of book quality throughout history that gave purpose to the presses of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Teaching the Limitations of AI in Primary Source Research

By Alessandro Meregaglia / This post will discuss the current limitations of using AI to search digitized and born digital primary sources––like newspaper databases, the Wayback Machine, and archival digital collections. I will show examples of how AI fails to identify information in these primary sources, even though they are available online and navigable by humans. My goal is to equip other primary source instructors with a general overview so they, in turn, can inform their students, who might be tempted to think AI is an exhaustive tool for primary source .