About This Book

What this is: Workshop materials introducing Claude Code and Claude Desktop to historians and social scientists at DISSINET — mostly non-programmers or light coders, working with document-heavy historical sources. The core pitch: Claude Code is not just for programmers, and it is a better research assistant than Claude Desktop for the kind of work this audience actually does. See C.start-here for the five ideas that make everything else make sense, or README for the full document map.

Who made it

Tomas Hampejs — tomas.hampejs@mail.muni.cz — directed and curated this project: the audience framing, the phase structure (A/B/C/D/E), what to include, and every editorial judgement about what counted as good enough.

Claude (Anthropic) drafted most of the actual prose, from briefs, commissions, and topic identifications — including running background research agents to find real-world examples (Tom Pepinsky, David Berry, and others cited throughout the A11–A13 documents) and synthesising what they found.

Neither half of that sentence is the whole story on its own — see below.

How this book was made

This project is unusually explicit about its own production, because it is a project about working with Claude — an inaccurate account of its own authorship would undercut everything else in it. The honest version:

These workshop materials were developed in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). The project structure, editorial decisions, and approximately one-third of the documents were produced by the author independently. The remaining documents were drafted by Claude from the author's briefs and commissions, and accepted following editorial review. All research findings (external sources, policy documents) were obtained via AI-assisted web research agents working from author-defined briefs.

That is the project's own disclosure statement, unedited. Two documents go further than this page does:

Funding

The material was developed as part of the "Dissident Networks Project" (DISSINET, dissinet.cz), which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101000442).

License

This book is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International).

You are free to share and adapt this material — copy it, redistribute it, translate it, build new workshop materials from it — for any non-commercial purpose, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Commercial use requires separate permission; contact Tomas Hampejs.

If you reuse or adapt this material and want to credit the AI-collaboration split accurately rather than crediting authorship as if it were entirely human-written, see "How this book was made" above and _ownership.md.

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