Recommend this really moving piece by @bcgl.bsky.social on the challenging questions raised when representing the past with technologies like AI.

I think this miiight be the best feed for machine-learning news on Bluesky. It strikes a good balance between new/popular and whitelist/regex factors in the algorithm.

The Ohio State University is now requiring students to become "fluent" in AI. It's a perverse metaphor, and as always, the wisdom of Star Trek proves useful in understanding its perversity. sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

I've used Clio for some great teaching exercises - highly recommend for those interested in mapping the past or cool forms of public history.

Read the last "Teaching the Early Republic" #JERPano post! Molly Nebiolo explains how student mapping projects boost classroom engagement in "Connecting Across Time and Space: Using Maps and Memory to Teach the Eighteenth Century." Available on The Panorama: thepanorama.shear.org/2025/09/16/u...

Our tool Riveter💪 used for a creative and interesting study of fan fiction! Riveter helps you work with “connotation frames” (verb lexica) to measure biases in your dataset. @julianeugarten.bsky.social’s overview and explanations are really clear, highly recommend! github.com/maartensap/r...

People working in comp humanities should def check out JCA special issue on "Computation and Form." It's actually very historical! Editors' intro explores the history of DH; @jeddobson.bsky.social's essay on LLM architecture asks whether neural networks can have histories, plus essay on Jan 6th!

The Association of Ancient Historians meeting will be in Iowa City from April 16-18, 2026. For those new to the AAH, we have preset panel themes; you pick 1 to apply to. The theme overall is Ancient Exchanges in a Global Antiquity. See CFP: abstracts are due by December 1. aah.conference.uiowa.edu

LLMs introduce a huge range of new capabilities for research, but also make it possible for researchers to "hack" their results in new ways by how they chose to use models for annotation This is a useful pass at quantifying some of the risk, and some mitigation strategies arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress. Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

Completing a rural #HouseHistory with tall tales of escaped German POWs hiding in the barn, complete with plane crash & complicit farmer. The truth is less Boys' Own Adventure but no less interesting. Such stories are v much part of the house's history! POW camps: www.theguardian.com/news/datablo...

An October 1942 FBI leaflet asking the residents of Buffalo to report any "possible violation[s] of our national security statutes" or anything suspicious to the Buffalo Field Office. It concluded, however, with the paragraph below. Seemed relevant today somehow.

First World War Studies is very happy to finally have arrived on Bluesky! please follow for news on our publications and activities

As we're starting the academic year, I thought I'd once again circulate my "Critical Introduction to AI Images" course - a blend of critical AI, art history, and media theory taught to university students - which includes video lectures, transcripts, and reading lists, all free.

So excited to see this cemetery I am helping to preserve on the Black Cemetery Network! blackcemeterynetwork.org/bcnsites/han...

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

A couple months ago I made an unusual request to my editors at @wired.com: I asked if I could go work at a tech company for a few days to learn how to vibe code. Then, for some reason, the $10 billion dollar startup Notion agreed to let me embed with them. 🧵

Here is the truth about museums: Museums are among the most trusted institutions in American society. Especially history museums. Museums support over 700,000 jobs in the US. Museums generate $50 billion in economic activity in the US every year. Just the facts. That’s what we do. #museum

Whether or not AIs “truly” understand is less important than how they reshape jobs, politics, and culture. My new post: why the “Human of the Gaps” fallacy distracts us from governing real-world AI impacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-retrea...

I just pulled out my copy of Newton's Principia, a book that was originally written in Latin, and noticed that the translation I am using was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has basically been destroyed Science depends on the humanities 🧪

Looking forward to exploring this new volume on Computational Humanities - looks like a great collection of very timely approaches. dhdebates.manifoldapp.org/projects/com...

There's a left-wing narrative on AI there for the taking: it's a bizarre, miraculous creation, math somehow replicating things we thought were intrinsically human, more pure science than applied science. Meanwhile capital is desperately trying to hammer it into profitable robot butlers and failing

We’re launching early access 🔥today🔥! Hidden Door is where roleplaying meets fanfic. Rise from the beyond to wreak vengeance in The Crow, go rivals-to-lovers in Pride & Prejudice, lean into after-dark vibes with Courtship & Crimson, and so many more!

And the new JSH has 50+ book reviews of new scholarship in the history of the South - many thanks to all our reviewers and contributors 📚📚📚 Journal of Southern History: Volume 91, Number 3, August 2025 muse.jhu.edu/issue/55303

There are a lot of horrifying photographs of the damage and human toll at Hiroshima. But it's still this one that sticks in my mind the most. Noboricho Elementary School, about 1 km from ground zero. School children were an important source of data about the bomb's mortality. 98% fatalities.

so I am one of the 12 people (including the “god-fathers of AI”) that will be at the Vatican this September for a two full-day working group on the Future of AI here is my Vatican approved short provocation on 'AI and Fraternity' for the working group

New FRUS volume just dropped on SDI and the Reagan administration's strategic modernization program, compiled by @jamesgrahamwilson.bsky.social. history.state.gov/historicaldo...

CFP - AI for DH: Research Problems and Critical Approaches. DHQ seeks 500-word abstracts for a special issue on AI (research problems, critical approaches, responsible applications, case studies, etc.). Deadline: Sept 15, 2025. More details: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

Many VLM-based OCR models have been released recently. Are they useful for libraries and archives? I made a quick Space to compare VLM OCR with "traditional" OCR using 11k Scottish exam papers from @natlibscot.bsky.social huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/ocr-time-capsule

Historian friends: tell me about your favorite research & writing tools. As a bonus, would love to know where you learned how to use them & if you'd be interested in sharing your knowledge w/ others.

One like, one Thucydides opinion.

The @transkribus.bsky.social "Egerton: English Secretary Hand" model is now public! app.transkribus.org/models/publi.... We have a website with sample transcriptions for different hands, information about our training conventions, and more: sites.northwestern.edu/egerton/

Here's a write-up of my keynote from #DH2025, since academic publishing is slow and this was written for right now. roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...

(•_•) <) )╯Publique fundinge / \ \(•_•) ( (> of the artes and humanityes / \ (•_•) <) )> doth benefit everyone! / \

“The so-called southern Confederacy is fighting for the establishment of a Government, which will have for its corner-stone … the degradation of the many for the purpose of elevating the few; but never shall they succeed so long as I can raise my arm against them.” www.hnn.us/article/elev...

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test — there are many more important takes one could do for this, but for DOOMSDAY MACHINES I put together a small compilation of attempts to capture its spectacle in film: doomsdaymachines.net/p/trinity-go...

New blog post alert! 🚨"What is the Hugging Face Community Building?", with @yjernite.bsky.social and Irene Soliaman The AI narrative focuses on big players, but the real story is happening in the open source AI ecosystem across 1.8M models, 450K datasets, and 560K apps, on @hf.co.

Got it working with HuggingFace and Qwen 2.5 VL now. Simply use your free HF token. Pro users can transcribe around 300 pages a day for free.

Working on something fun =) This lets you create regions (bounding boxes) on any IIIF image and run that through VLMs for transcription, alt-text, etc. This is real time.

Check out this advice from undergrads who are on the other side of their first conference. This would be great for a methods or research seminar syllabus and a handy tool for PAT advisors. 🗃️ clioandthecontemporary.com/2025/07/12/f...

This post tries to explain why I find language models exciting. But it doesn't try to persuade skeptics that they should agree. It's aimed more at people already working with AI, and its goal is to sharpen our collective sense of what the upside potential might be. #MLSky 🤖 🧪

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961 Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

IU's Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian programs were among the best in the world, a gem of American academia that nurtured numerous giants, including Stephen Cohen. Now almost all of them are abolished, including PhD programs. What an unmitigated disaster.

Really looking forward to being part of this free digital history workshop with faculty and practitioners hosted by DePaul’s Experiential Humanities Collaborative in a few weeks! More information here: las.depaul.edu/about/initia...

My one and only author/editor copy of #dolessharm has arrived! 368 pages of goodness put together by me and @cethompson.bsky.social and 27 other fantastic authors. Thank you @hopkinspress.bsky.social ! Buy yours here: www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

How did British citizens experience sickness & disability policy under New Labour? This article uses blogs, message boards & the Internet Archive to explore how workers, managers & families navigated welfare reform—and how they remembered the welfare state. journalofdigitalhist...