doing historiography again

i just find this so bizarre. searching through texts and doing the reading for myself is how i actually think through ideas! trying to put together a sentence is how i figure out what i actually want to say!

For me, what makes most of the works of history that I consider great are those that offer a glimpse into the unique mind and obsessions of people who have sifted through and curated a large number of sources, and made compelling and often idiosyncratic choices about what to highlight./9

if you ask it for a thing that looks like an answer, it gives you a thing that looks like an answer if you ask it for a thing that looks like a source, it gives you thing that looks like a source if you tell it that it's wrong and ask it for a thing that looks like an apology, that's what you get

This means as a historian or political commentator, you spend quite a lot of time having to explain “yes, I know, I’m not saying it SHOULD be like this, I’m saying it IS like this,” unless you couch everything you say in fluffy adverbs (“Unfortunately…”), and often it happens even if you do.

To wrap up, some key distinctions I use to do my work: Public vs. audience Journalism vs. the media Truth-seeking vs. refuge-seeking Political vs. politicized Issues vs. troubles Ritual vs. transmission Expect vs. predict Subscription vs. membership "When in doubt, draw a distinction." 25/

"Gen AI is early 1900s spiritualism for digital moderns" prediction stays winning

How Irish booksellers feel about the arrival of Amazon.ie: ‘It’s a very real danger to the industry’. Bookshops offer something that an exclusively online retailer cannot, but they may need support to compete against a corporate giant, writes Tim Groenland www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

Hi! Are you a US researcher who spent time thinking about humans? Then your work is in danger of censorship and loss. I'm here to walk you through basic self-archiving. Maybe you think I am being hyperbolic. You only worked on bacteria! Not your problem. Do me a favor and join me anyway.

New chapter out by me where I argue that people who claim to collaborate with LLMs are mistaken about the role of the bots, and that they're weak ass tools rather than serving the role of an actual collaborator academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

Some really great advice here

The HEA has published Ten Considerations for Generative AI Adoption in Irish Higher Education, which provide a foundation for institutions to shape policies and practices around generative AI. hub.teachingandlearning.ie/ten-consider...

Universities — including the schools that most aggressively shut down student activism — are now fully panicking because the Trump administration is about to shut down all kinds of funding for research and more. Too bad they made it clear that their students shouldn’t speak up and speak out.

I have been soft lobbying for the ALA to change Banned Books Week to Freedom to Read / Readers’ Choice week for like a decade bc of this very impression. Having a banned book is not a positive thing. It’s an attack.

Fascinating!

I was writing about deterrence today and remembered my favourite way of explaining it

Channel your inner Amelia Bedelia

History is never as straightforward as some people want it to be

Studying and teaching history is a form of resistance. 🗃️

Unfortunately, the pedestrian crossing by me is *more* dangerous than cruising in the middle of the street

anyway it's probably fine, it is definitely reasonable to have a machine that lies confidently about things you may not be certain about. a program that's baked into the OS and designed to be turned to for help when you're stuck and uncertain SHOULD randomly make shit up, including references,

From _Clio Wired_ (2011):: "The danger is ... that as the Web goes down the well-worn road of radio, tv, and cable, in which large 'infotainment' conglomerates come to dominate the wires, 'choice' becomes narrowly defined as the competition between two or three very similar 'products.'"

Rest is vital

Academic letters of recommendation: a guide for the perplexed (Bluesky edition).

The first time I have seen track changes in a declassified archival document. From a document created in 2004. From the latest round of Prime Minister's Office files released by the UK National Archives. cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/re...

Going to physical archives helps us realize -the illusion that 'everything' is online -how much of historical record has already been lost -the inadequacy of the written -the selectivity of digitization projects Great @contingent-mag.bsky.social piece, and thanks for shout-out to archivists' labor!

"They are simply ingenious and exciting tools which have solid and encouraging applications but do not, crucially, gesture toward an omniscience that does not exist, and which be undesirable if it did."

Seen a few folks astonished by my lack of support for ChatGPT and similar. Because AI, right? Yeah, no. What we have right now is glorified autocorrect. Glorified autocorrect that takes the energy of an entire city to do what it does, plus half of Lake Erie to cool down while it's doing it.

The number of people in higher ed who don't/won't see this as a problem is enraging

Michel Foucault: Even when the Elf is not on the Shelf, you are never free of it. You carry the Elf within you, monitoring your own conduct for Naughtiness. You hold yourself prisoner within a self-surveilled snow globe of Santa’s making.

A few years ago, at evening childrens’ mass on Christmas Eve, the priest got ‘a call’ from Santa, who said he was in South America, causing a lot of kids present who had just seen NORAD tracking him over Asia enormous geographical confusion.

Great to have our genAI and assessment design work recognised and looking forward to working with @lorettag.bsky.social to do even more! www.teachingandlearning.ie/2024/12/20/h...

I'm sure many have said this before but I'm reading a student-facing document about how students might use AI in the classroom (if allowed) and one of the recs is: use AI to make an outline of your reading! But ISN'T MAKING THE OUTLINE how one actually learns?

I've said this a million times, but I'll say it again: People who use AI don't actually want to *create* something, they want to *have created* something, and those are not the same thing.

This is what's so baffling about so many suggestions for AI in the humanities classroom: they mistake the product for the point. Writing outlines and essays is important not because you need to make outlines and essays but because that's how you learn to think with/through complex ideas.

UCC’s @thelen.bsky.social speaking to the institution’s digital futures programme at the HEA’s Teaching & Learning Conference. @ucc.bsky.social @cirtl.bsky.social

Integrated in formal offerings, ran workshops. Provide resources, readings etc.

Now @thelen.bsky.social on digital transformation @ucc.bsky.social

Also, this issue unites cognitive scientists in a way almost nothing else does. I think only Hinton is all in and he’s more a computer guy than a behavioural researcher 🤔. Is the ‘general intelligence’ claim coming from anywhere other than the salesmen?

This, this, a million times this

"So it's a toy show?" "Toys, books, bikes, singing and dancing, that sort of thing." "Aimed at what age group?" "Say four to twelve-ish." "And it starts at..." "Twenty to ten, runs till after midnight." "Is that... set in stone?" "Absolute deal-breaker, yeah." "Ok... Great." #LateLateToyShow

Time for some reading and exploring

I'd argue there's several more reasons for citation than just two, but very much agree with your larger points: citing chatbots is nonsensical, and the emergence of the practice highlights how little most people think about what citations are for. (copyrightlibrarian.com/discussion/w...)

And chatbots aren't moral agents nor have ownership of the text they output, so they don't need to be credited. The proper thing to do when using a chatbot is to disclose it, for transparency, rather than cite it for attributing credit or signaling credibility. 4/

My web development students don't even know what files they own are. We have to review file structure every assignment that requires JavaScript or CSS. They live out of their downloads folder like it's a van by the river.

For those who don't know this story, which I first shared six years ago today.... This one time I got my days wrong at work and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine. 🧵