There seems to be some sort of logical fallacy at work here. I'm going to call it "transcriptionism"... it's as if some people think all the knowledge is already out there in some sort of grand transcript and all that's needed is better indexing and reading tools to look it all up.

New volume of Traditio Vol. 80 (2025) muse.jhu.edu/issue/56113 @projectmuse.bsky.social @xuthal.bsky.social @jmharland.bsky.social @daveaddison.bsky.social

Imagine not wanting to write bios for foster kittens. Imagine giving up something that reaffirms why life matters.

I've been thinking about this post... as a writer and a journal editor, i think this situation emerges from many places (pub/perish, bibliometrics, REF/ERA, job mkt contracting etc), but one issue is technological: we can read/access so much more now than in the past 1/2

another example of AI as tracer dye, exposing an already existing problem (and, of course, significantly worsening it)

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Finally, if you can get through the paywall this piece from earlier in the week illuminates how the experience above is just a tiny part of an industrial-scale, global, and sector-wide catastrophe of AI and citations to nonexistent papers in academic publishing bsky.app/profile/mile...

Possibly an unpopular opinion but all the ghost and wizard crap has utterly ruined York.

The original craniometric assessment was done before more recent reliable aDNA techniques were widely available. Everyone involved in that original study was acting in good faith. Science is iterative and this is a transparent example of self-correction.

No doubt there will be crowing from conspiracy-minded detractors of 'woke archaeology', but this result doesn't materially change our understanding of Roman Britain, and the whole thrust of their argument is that this kind of update could never be allowed to happen - it undermines their worldview.

Perhaps also a cautionary tale that craniometric methods not only risk perpetuating racial thinking, but are also unreliable in terms of inferring ancestry. I think also there is point about resisting hanging potent narratives of the past on single individuals where there is ample uncertainty....

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

BCDSS Professors Julia Hillner and Pia Wiegmink, together with former BCDSS Guest Researcher Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln), have been granted funding by the VolkswagenStiftung for their collaborative project "The Nameless in History". @unibonn.bsky.social @dfg.de @volkswagenstiftung.de

some news 👇 we're going to find out how to overcome the numerous practical and ethical problems we face when researching the nameless.

ACCOMODATION OFFER: Dear TAG-ies, a TAG delegate has non-refundable accommodation in York available that they are looking to pass on. Get in touch with us and we’ll connect you!! Note: This is not coordinated by the TAG organization team, we are strictly communication facilitators in this instance.

@tag2025york.bsky.social starts next Monday @york.ac.uk! We'll be there, so make sure to say hello, get your hands on some coveted #Archaeoswag and learn how you can publish your #archaeology research in Antiquity! 🏺

That the reporting about new US ESTA requirements is focusing on social media history rather than requiring that you supply a sample of your DNA is very much burying the lede, tbqh.

I have published a letter from the 17th-century classicist Johann Georg Graevius to his French colleague Adrien de Valois, about the latter's Ammianus edition, on the blog of the Last Historians of Rome project. lasthistorians.shca.ed.ac.uk/blog/2025/12...

"Whatever you want to do with me, may you have the power of doing..." So reads a Merovingian contract for selling oneself into slavery. But where might this concept of slave ownership have come from? Find out more from our new blog post: www.dosseproject.com/from-francia...

One day someone might be able to explain why it always seems to be an excellent idea to put deadlines in December.

I indeed would have more sympathy for the AI industry writ large around public perception if there hadn’t been years now of genuinely constant attempts at the highest level to make everyone who isn’t an upper-level manager terrified that AI will destroy their livelihoods

I continue to have no sympathy left for whinging about how the public are rude about AI and feel threatened by it when the biggest players in the AI space have spent years very vocally and constantly *threatening the public*

Absolutely stunning to see Australia's teen social media ban rushed through while every single government, educational institution and probably a huge number of parents are frantically force-injecting chatbot slop into the mind of every single child in the country without a second's hesitation

We've had a few enquiries come in after chatbots told researchers that we hold documents we don't actually look after so this is particularly relevant. If you're ever unsure, contact us directly or use our catalogue, linked below.

The entire project of advanced education is about believing it's worthwhile to do the hard work of learning to understand difficult things and express your understanding in your own words. Bringing GenAI into the process is wholly destructive.

i mean, we have learned (Gödel, Church, Turing, et al) that we cannot—hard *cannot*—automate the process of proving *mathematical* truths. general knowledge? forget it

the idea that we will ever devise a technology that can automatically sort true statements from false ones and factual ones from “hallucinations” is a lead-to-gold fantasy

Nice to see LITTLE KINGDOMS ascending the best-seller ranking on @penandswordbooks.bsky.social's website once again - it makes the perfect Christmas present, especially for those familiar with the British Isles and their varied backstories and landscapes! www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Little-Kingd...

Gosh. www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-an...

Interlibrary loan is also being inundated everywhere it sounds like. Requests for scans of items that don't exist. Someone has to search for them and respond.

Happy everything in academia is due at the same time season for those who celebrate!

Imagine, realising for the first time that you can just buy a thing and use it forever, no monthly subscription, no vendor-bricking, who on earth in this day and age would want such a thing? 🤷‍♀️😱

I wish a notice like this wasn't necessary. www.icrc.org/en/article/i...

"We are aware that some AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references. These systems do not conduct research, verify sources, or cross-check information."

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to hate Wes Streeting, who has always been nothing more than a PR campaign in a suit.

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

How is it that Farage can brazen it out despite everyone knowing he’s a racist bully? Here’s a timeline of key milestones in recent UK and international history that helps us understand (1/6): www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Much of PhD/first monograph entailed asking “how many layers of citation must we dig through before this argument or cultural system being argued actually becomes based on empirical evidence, and if so how reliable is it?” That was a difficult (if rewarding) task well before LLMs burst on the scene.

I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from. Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.

Here's the reality this example illustrates: It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).

www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Little-Kingd... My third book, LITTLE KINGDOMS: AN A-Z OF EARLY MEDIEVAL BRITAIN, is now out I couldn’t find a better way of explaining it than the old thread I made - so here it is preserved in amber! Happy reading! 🧵

I'm very happy to see that my new article on the martyrs of Zaragoza is out in this year's Traditio. Many thanks to the Traditio team, who were wonderful to work with! doi.org/10.1017/tdo....

The process of transcribing documents and doing that sort of deep work is essential to the process of scholarship. (I get that when you’re working with big datasets some sort of AI is helpful ofc). But a hill I’ll die on is that transcribing, checking and sorting is essential to understanding.

NEW info on shipwreck attack. It gets worse. The 2 survivors climbed atop wreckage and waved to overhead. "Some of the people viewing the video thought ... could have been an attempt to surrender" Others "said the most logical explanation was ... signaling for a rescue." 1/

A disrespect for me as an educator means that a basic piece of sociality and trust has been broken and so I don’t owe anyone generous feedback. But I don’t need to be punitive either. That’s what those who are selling these products want. They want to exhaust us into resignation.

Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.

My new article has now been published in the 2025 volume of Traditio. I use a little examined episode on the lower Rhine in the late 350s with the aid of agricultural archaeology to reveal fiscal dependency relations between the Empire & Barbaricum, & the consequences of their rupture. #medievalsky

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too. "We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...