Welcome to the personal website of Daniel Hutchinson. I’m an Associate Professor in the History Department at Belmont Abbey College and direct the Digital Humanities program. My academic work focuses on topics as varied as war and society, digital humanities, religious history, and historical applications of artificial intelligence. I also offer consulting services in the areas of AI and large language model ops, historical research, and professional writing. Visit other parts of the site to learn more about my teaching, scholarship, consulting, and digital projects.
My current book project is The Barbed Wire Oasis: German Prisoners of War in Alabama during World War II. This monograph explores the captivity experience of 16,000 Axis POWs and their contribution to Alabama’s social, political, and economic transformation in the postwar period.
Outside of academia, I enjoy life and leisure with my family in Clover, South Carolina. When not herding children and pets, I dabble with AI art, obsess over prestige TV, and win primarily moral victories at pub trivia. Don’t hesitate to contact me should you wish to collaborate or communicate.
Nicolay is a digital history experiment that uses large language models to explore the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. The app is named after John George Nicolay, a German-born American author and diplomat who served as the private secretary to US President Abraham Lincoln. This app is a part of Honest Abe’s Information Emporium, a digital history project developed as part of the inaugural Digital Literacy Accelerator program offered by the U.S. Department of Education (2021-2022) and supported by a team of faculty at the University of Texas-San Antonio.
This digital history experiment examines the following question: what do AIs know about history? AIs don’t ‘know’ anything really. But recent advances in machine learning have resulted in new computational models capable of remarkable imitation of human analytical capabilities. Among the most studied of these models is GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3). In this digital history experiment, users can pose historical questions to GPT-3 and observe its responses. This project enables historians and the public to directly probe the historical capacities of advanced AIs, and gauge for themselves the possibilities and perils of this technology. With such knowledge, we can better assess AI’s potential impact on understanding of the past, and consider the broader implications of this technology for the future.
This oral history project records the history of the House of Mercy, a residential care facility for those living with HIV-AIDS. Established in 1991 and sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy (Belmont, NC), the House of Mercy celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with a retrospective oral history project. Interviewees describe the history of the ministry and the impact of the AIDS epidemic in North Carolina. They also consider this history in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred during the filming of the interviews.
BAC_HistoryBot is an automated Twitter account that randomly posts images taken from the BAC Digital Archive (see below). The project’s chief goal is to share and promote the history of Belmont Abbey College, both within the college community and beyond it.
This account posted images every four hours for two years. The bot was retired in November 2021 after two years of faithful automated service.
The BAC Digital Archive collects historic images of Belmont Abbey College, providing snapshots of the college’s nearly 150-year history as a liberal arts college in the Catholic and Benedictine traditions.
In fall 2019, students and volunteers collected images from digitized copies of The Spire, Belmont Abbey’s college yearbook series. These editions were digitized by organizations such as DigitalNC and placed on the Internet Archive. These images were then organized into an Omeka collection for public access. The BAC Digital Archive is also the source for images used by the BAC_HistoryBot (see above).
Consulting
I offer consulting services in the areas of generative AI, large language model programming, image synthesis, historical research, and professional writing. My Prompt Portfolio offers more details on this work. Below are examples of my work available to the public:
The Brainstorming Tool is a generative AI application designed for Teaching Tools, an edtech startup. This resource allows instructors to create rich educational content based on just a brief description of their course and class topic. This demo video explains how the Brainstorming Tool works.
Nicolay is a digital history experiment that uses large language models to explore the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. The app is named after John George Nicolay, a German-born American author and diplomat who served as the private secretary to US President Abraham Lincoln. This app is a part of Honest Abe’s Information Emporium, a digital history project developed as part of the inaugural Digital Literacy Accelerator program offered by the U.S. Department of Education (2021-2022) and supported by a team of faculty at the University of Texas-San Antonio.
At the request of the USS Thresher Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Project, I composed an independent study supporting the establishment of a memorial for the 129 souls lost aboard the USS Thresher nuclear submarine in 1963. This study was submitted to the Secretary of the Army as part of an application package mandated by Congressional legislation. The memorial was laid in Arlington National Cemetery in 2019.
Generative AI
I’ve been an eager explorer of generative AI technologies like large language models, image synthesis techniques, and other technologies at the intersection of machine learning and human culture. My research also explores how education might be enriched by the use of these technologies. To learn more about my work, visit my Prompt Portfolio page.
