Gonna spam some of my own writing here again because AI industry people are bringing out that “black box” canard again www.techpolicy.press/the-black-bo...

When I experienced sight loss, my perspective on the experience of blindness changed. This post discusses blindness and cataract surgery in the Middle Ages. wellcomecollection.org/stories/reve...

Awesome work from one of our PhD students Vera! Check out this mega isotope dataset! 🧪 ⚛️ 🦷🦴

Everything Is Mechanical Turk

A very interesting viking (?) find from south of Cambridge: www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Assistant Professor, Medieval History in Chile networks.h-net.org/jobs/69752/p...

Very much looking forward to this #charterrific event tomorrow! If you want a copy of the Teams link, just let me know. (Formal sign-up is now passed, but I have permission to circulate the link.)

New discovery: A wooden structure, identified as river bank protection of the #Roman harbour, has been unearthed in Cologne. www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-... #RomanArchaeology #archaeology 🏺

Anyway, good news! Open-ended lectureship in early medieval history at KCL. www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/136727-...

I've not seen it pointed out yet, but AI cannot think human thoughts, which are formed by the connections of neurons. AI developers cannot simulate this process, because we do not know how neurons connect to make thought. AI is a simulacrum that they force on us.

If you have graduate students working with medieval manuscripts this free online training might be useful 👇 www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

If you feel like they’re trying to force LLMs (“AI”) down our throats even if we don’t want it, it’s because they are. Fascinating essay on the SV-authoritarian alliance, LLMs, and the complete alienation of labor

For #FindsFriday two very small gold bars from the #viking age found in Denmark (🇩🇰 East Jutland) last month www.tv2ostjylland.dk/randers/muse...

Dutch pals! Er zijn nog enkele laatste tickets vrijgegeven voor de (gratis) 'Vikingverhalen'-avond @rmoudheden.bsky.social deze donderdag. Lezingen van Eleanor Barraclough, Nelleke IJssennagger-vd Pluijm, Annemarieke Willemsen, en ikzelf.

Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. Yitzhak Hen explores some of the mechanism that allowed the dealing with such texts. see mgh.de/en/blog/post...

New book just out by Thomas Cirotteau, Lucie Malbos & Éric Pincas - Vikings : enquête sur les femmes des terres gelées cescm.hypotheses.org/35266

University of Arizona Libraries is hiring for a RARE BOOK LIBRARIAN! 1st review of applications February 9, 2026. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... We have great collections and great people here. Not on the committee, happy to chat.

Many congratulations to Dr Alex Langlands & team from Swansea for this stunning new discovery from Margam Park in south Wales 😮🥳. The coastal belt in south Wales is very heavily ploughed, but it sounds like this villa complex has been preserved below old parkland 👌 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Read #TheBoneChests by @catjarman.bsky.social

The PIMS Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. Toronto-Rome Programme in Manuscript Studies offers a full curriculum which leads to a formal diploma. Apply for this summer's Palaeography and Codicology courses by February 1. pims.ca/article/diploma-programme-in-manuscript-studies/

There is time to apply until 30 January for this opportunity sponsored by Early Medieval Europe to spend one month at the British School in Rome

A 16h30 sur @franceculture.fr l'Entretien archéologique parle de l'aménagement du littoral près de Dunkerque au Moyen Âge. A quoi ressemblent ces polders du nord de la France et quelles découvertes matérielles ont été réalisées nous renvoyant aux peuples nordiques? www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

As the year draws to a close, I’m signing off 2025 with a magical find! An ancient amber bear. Carved some 10,000 years ago, it washed up on a beach at Fanø, Denmark, from a submerged Mesolithic settlement in the North Sea. ✨ Happy New Year all! ✨ National Museum of Denmark 📷 by me #Archaeology

Medieval ship discovered off Copenhagen may be the world’s largest cog www.medievalists.net/2025/12/medi... #medieval #Denmark #archaeology

Y’all might not appreciate it, but it took him 87 moves and 14 hours to get here

As everyone has noted, the humanities are worthless, AND ALSO if the LLM companies have to pay market value for writers’ work they’ll all go bankrupt.

Medieval Silver Hoard Discovered in Sweden www.medievalists.net/2025/10/medi... #medievalworld

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

Publication – « L’objet mérovingien. De sa fabrication à sa (re-)découverte », éd. Gaëlle Dumont rmblf.be/2025/12/19/p...

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending. UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

Researchers in Germany find that fMRI scans may have been read wrong for 40 years, potentially destroying AI analyses based on them. www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Fr. James Farge's handmade Christmas cards are on display at University of St. Michael's College John M. Kelly Library. stmikes.utoronto.ca/news/christm...

The algorithms are making it a lot harder to spread the word about these online talks. Although numbers are still reasonable, it would be a great help if folk were able to give the 30 December event a quick share 🙂 Booking available here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/buildings-...

I want to add to Daniel's excellent points here bc I've been arguing against these uses of "AI" by historians for years. What's important is this, as ever: the tech isn't the central issue; the surrounding political & economic project of its deployment is. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A 'Raven Banner Coin' minted in AD 941-44 for the Dublin-Jórvik Viking king Amlaíb Cuarán, a.k.a. ANLAF CVNVNC-kunung-ᚴᚢᚾᚢᚾᚴ Óláfr kváran Sigtryggsson Amlaíb mac Sitric 🐦‍⬛✝️ Does the banner / shipvane include a raven or a cross? My 📷 Historiska museet (3004628)

It strips away the context that would otherwise allow historians to read these records as records, because what we do *as historians* when we read them is adduce *more* context. Or, as I say, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

PIMS, Toronto: The Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. Toronto-Rome Diploma Programme in Manuscript Studies

That Samsung AI ad where the guy goes to a museum and his phone tells him about all the art is such a good idea. I hate when you go to museums and they never tell you what any of the stuff is

This week on Wonkhe: Jim Dickinson reflects on the end of scarcity, the rise of AI, and the challenge to a system of higher education built on pretence, performance and proxies

I think this gets some important things about what is happening wrong. 1. This quote, central to the argument is a typical misunderstanding of what these products do. They don’t democratize previously scarce or paywalled specialist knowledge. Instead they give very mediocre and sometimes flat wrong

Double-posting b/c this is so true but also so important to say out loud: "You have to stand up and fight. And that’s not what administrators are selected for." Thank you @miriamposner.com!

We are told that, under stress, the humanities must be sacrificed. But amidst a war of aggression scholars in Ukraine have undertaken one of the most ambitious knowledge projects of our time. It's a privilege to be involved with Ukrainian History Global Initiative snyder.substack.com/p/ukrainian-...