{"id":27189,"date":"2025-09-24T14:31:55","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/?p=27189"},"modified":"2025-09-24T14:31:55","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:31:55","slug":"new-book-by-shawn-graham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/2025\/new-book-by-shawn-graham\/","title":{"rendered":"New Book by Shawn Graham"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n New Book by Shawn Graham\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

History Professor Shawn Graham<\/a>‘s new book, Practical Necromancy for Beginners: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students<\/a><\/em>, has just been published. The press release is below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New Book on AI in Archaeology and History Encourages Students to Push, Prod, and Break Large Language Model AIs.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In the last few years, there are few concepts that generate as much hype, and anxiety, as AI. Higher education, and the humanities in particular, has shown particular interest in the impact of AI on teaching, learning, reading, and writing. Shawn Graham\u2019s Practical Necromancy: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students<\/em> offers a focused guide for historians and archaeologists who want to learn how to use AI in their research and their classrooms. Graham is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada. His book invokes the haunting figure of the necromancer, an ancient priest who could talk to ghosts. He advocates a kind of digital necromancy in our approach to Large Language Model (LLM) AIs and encourages us to \u201cbreak them, push them, prod them, make them give up the ghosts in their data.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first part of the book is a survey of development of AI. Graham engages the reader with his conversational style and draws them through the complexities of how LLM AIs, such as ChatGPT, Google\u2019s Gemini, or Athropic\u2019s Claude work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graham explains that he wanted to offer a text that is \u201cshort, sharp, accessible, and something that at least would point the way into a deeper literature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second part of the book offers a series of step-by-step, classroom-ready exercises that help the students get hands-on experience deploying AI to advance their own research and analysis. Graham emphasizes that process matters more than the final product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final part of the book speaks to administrators and skeptics who might see the potential and the pitfalls of LLM AIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graham\u2019s summarizes his book as follows: \u201cI set out to explore what language models offered my history and archaeology students, but it turned out that the question was far too simple. This is a mistake I see a lot of us (administrators, especially) rushing to make: na\u00efve implementation and use, taking their creators at their word and swallowing the myths of intelligence. The truth is much more complex, there\u2019s a lot of nuance, and there\u2019s a lot of material to unpack before we ever get to that stage of \u2018how to use\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is Graham\u2019s second book with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. His first, Failing Gloriously and Other Essays<\/em><\/a> has enjoyed nearly 5000 downloads since its publication in 2019 and was named the \u201cBest Exploration of DH Failure\u201d at the international, public-nominated Digital Humanities Awards in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all works from The Digital Press, the book is available as a free download and as a low-cost paperback here: https:\/\/thedigitalpress.org\/practical-necromancy-for-beginners\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Professor Shawn Graham‘s new book, Practical Necromancy for Beginners: A Short Incomplete Opinionated Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Archaeology and History Students, has just been published. The press release is below. New Book on AI in Archaeology and History Encourages Students to Push, Prod, and Break Large Language Model AIs. In the last few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":20902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27190,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27189\/revisions\/27190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}