Introducing
The Smartacus Method
Artificial intelligence is transforming not only how we write, but how we research, organize knowledge, collaborate, publish, and share stories.
This certificate program introduces the Smartacus Method—a complete publishing workflow that combines human creativity, editorial judgment, and artificial intelligence to accelerate the creation of content in all formats. Those on which we’ll focus in this course: magazine features, self-guided audio tours, and books.
We’ll show you how to write all of these at the same time from the same Knowledge Refinery we create in NotebookLM. Over the last three years, we’ve developed a repeatable technology that generates high-quality content every time by “mining” the knowledge of experts and other sources.
You’ll still be the writer. You’ll just be newly empowered by new forms of intelligence we could not have imagined just three years ago.
In Six Zoom Classes Between September 30 and November 4,
We’ll Show You How to Augment and Accelerate Your Writing with this Process
Part 1: Story Acceleration
September 30, October 7 and October 14
In the first three sessions, we'll introduce Story Acceleration—a practical method for transforming 90-minute conversations into magazine-quality feature stories like those we publish in collaboration with the Saratoga Torch Club on Civic Conversations.
You'll learn how to use the same basic workflow to generate with ease meeting minutes, reports, newsletters, presentations, and professional correspondence.
The key is to bring NotebookLM and ChatGPT into collaboration: NotebookLM serves as your Knowledge Refinery, organizing and synthesizing only the trusted sources you provide, while ChatGPT transforms that verified knowledge into polished, engaging writing. Because your work begins with carefully curated source material, you gain both the speed of AI and confidence in the accuracy of the results.
Part 2: Spatial Storytelling
October 14, October 21, and November 4
In the last three sessions, we’ll focus on the tools that enable us to generate self-guided audio tours in STQRY with extraordinary speed, efficiency, and accuracy. We’ll demonstrate, step by step, the process we used to produce Voices of Lake Luzerne with the Hadley-Lake Luzerne Historical Society and are now using to develop tours of the Lake George Battlefield and Thomas Durant’s Adirondack Railroad.
You’ll learn how to plan a tour, organize and refine historical source material, write compelling location-based narratives in ChatGPT, generate distinctive character voices in ElevenLabs, and assemble the finished experience in STQRY with GPS-triggered stops.
Our larger purpose is to rapidly expand our capacity to produce historically rigorous and engaging audio tours throughout the region. We are therefore offering this program not simply as an introduction to a new technology, but as an opportunity to enlarge the community of writers, historians, educators, designers, and producers skilled in spatial storytelling. If you complete the program, you’ll be prepared to assist in developing tours we produce, develop your own projects, and help establish spatial storytelling as a powerful new form of public history and travel writing.
Learn More
Please let us know if you’d like us to keep you posted on details of this course as they develop.