Onwards! Happy celebrations and best wishes for a more joyful new year of solidarity.

EXTRAORDINARY. OHLeuven qualifies among the top 12 European women's soccer teams. On a shoestring budget.

First steps for pilot work on the automated transcription, translation, and entity/event extraction of Qing archival dossiers and their linking across other datasets and other archival and historical sources. Impressive results even on cursive script.

🔊The Call for Proposals for the 2026 #IIIF Annual Conference is now open! Read the full CfP and find a link to submit: iiif.io/event/2026/n...

Working with a small museum/archive/project with digitized images but little metadata? I'm looking for testers for a VLM pipeline for auto-enrichment (transcription, captions, tags, IIIF). If you share a few sample images, I'll run them through + share results. Would love to hear your feedback!

In defence of higher education & research: Sign the petition and join the protest in Brussels on Dec 11, 12pm For The allocation of basic funding for higher education; No increase of current registration fees; No cuts in scholarships hogeronderwijsinopstand.be hogeronderwijsinopstand.be/english/

🎉 IMMARKUS 1.0.5 is out! The latest release of our open-source image annotation tool for humanities, heritage & museum professionals is now available – with bug fixes, productivity enhancements, and improved #IIIF annotation import. Try it here: immarkus.xmarkus.org Docs: github.com/rsimon/immar...

Cold and rainy but good fun at the annual Science Day in Leuven where we demonstrated how anyone can easily collect and work creatively with high-quality images streamed from cultural organizations globally. #dvdw2025 #IMMARKUS

Somewhat of a surprise to me when this came up on a newsfeed: we're used to hearing that the Netherlands tops the list of the global EF English Proficiency Index, but it appears Flanders tops the Netherlands, and most Flemish provinces significantly outperform most Dutch provinces...

WIth colleagues collaborating on the Lives and Afterlives of Material Infrastructures we worked on methods & theoretical perspectives first; first results: 1. Our digital humanities quarterly article on semantic annotation of text and image is out and live! dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/19/4/000...

Kom langs op 23 november. Wij zijn te vinden in de Universiteitsbibliotheek vanaf 11u met een korte sessie over het verzamelen, annoteren en vertalen met AI van beeldmateriaal wereldwijd. Ga op digitale schattenjacht; word een wereldverzamelaar! www.dagvandewetenschap.be/activiteiten... #dvdw2025

CFP: 14th Annual ESPRit conference: “Periodicals and the World” 9-11 September 2026, Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), Brussels events.vub.be/periodicals-...

Sorry to miss Beijing Forum on AI next week, but glad to be in Paris tomorrow afternoon for a retrospective on 4 years of DISTAM, a French network on Digital Research for African and Asian Area Studies, led by Prof. Marie Bizais-Lillig For those in and around Paris: distam.hypotheses.org/21048

Had the chance to join a workshop on image annotation in IMMARKUS led by @hildedw.bsky.social, Rainer Simon, Sunkyu Lee, and Dawn Zhuang today. This was great fun and definitely a tool I will use when working with visual media and texts in the future! #digitalhumanities

It has a cover... uhpress.hawaii.edu/bookseries/p...

CFP for a workshop to be held in Leuven in September 2026 on Histories of Scholarly Evaluation in the Sciences and Humanities 1700–2000 - deadline: Jan 2026 hshh.ugent.be/en/news/cfp-...

November 23 is open science day. Come check out what research is going on at universities across Flanders. As part of the offerings in Leuven we're conducting 2 30-minute workshops on working with high-quality digital images in the arts. Register here www.dagvandewetenschap.be/activiteiten... #DVDW

Oct 23 1-3pm we're conducting a workshop on semantic image annotation at the LECTIO institute for intellectual history from Antiquity through early modern times. The workshop is open to all. Participants can join in person or online but need to register from this site www.kuleuven.be/lectio/event...

Wetenschap is overal en we tellen af naar de 15de Dag van de Wetenschap op zondag 23 november 2025. Vrijdag 10/10 om 10u10 komen honderden activiteiten online www.dagvandewetenschap.be. Dompel je onder en stippel jouw ideale #dvdw2025 uit met jouw eigen profiel.

Tenure track prof in Contemporary Middle East Studies KU Leuven Unlike many European universities, Leuven has a tenure track system; university & faculty management are elected. There is a startup fund of 110,000€. Leuven has a sabbatical policy. www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

New in #IMMARKUS: when you import a #IIIF manifest, IMMARKUS now imports existing annotations (embedded or referenced) into your workspace. We'd love to test with real-world examples. If you know of IIIF collections with annotations, let us know. Annotated manifests still seem rare in the wild...

informatief interview met historicus Beatrice de Graaf waarin ze het besluit van de meerderheid in de Tweede Kamer om Antifa als terroristische organisatie te kenmerken scherp veroordeelt. www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/antifa/

"This is what it looks like when a society’s elite rolls over in the face of authoritarianism. It never ends well.'

RIP Robert Redford, who famously and beautifully brought Norman Maclean’s *A River Runs Through It* to the big screen:

If you are interested in the history of book, check out this phenomenal exhibit curated by the wonderful Martin Heijdra at Princeton. It is a model exhibit in so many ways, covering different parts of the world, so many languages, and, images are in IIIF dpul.princeton.edu/global-book-...

"drastic plans to halve the intake of humanities students at one of China’s most prestigious institutions, Fudan University, divided opinions among scholars." Has anyone seen more on this?

From the supposed advocates of freedom of speech and the supposed critics of "cancel culture": target lists continued.

Very pleased to see The Young Academy's important report on First Generation Academics published as a book. Hoping that this coming academic year will be better for all, including first generation academics! To read online www.linkedin.com/posts/de-jon... and www.dejongeakademie.nl/nieuws/30313...

We just released IMMARKUS 1.0 - our first full release! An open-source tool for semantic image annotation: multi-image workbench, AI-powered selection tools, ontology builder, knowledge graph, #IIIF support. Runs fully local–no login, no-signups, no data sent to the cloud! 👉 immarkus.xmarkus.org

On international enrollment in NL: "The decline is particularly noticeable in the Language and Culture sectors (-28.5 per cent), Law (-25.0 per cent), Science (-12.5 per cent), Behaviour & Society (-16 per cent), and Economics (-4.0 per cent)." 😮

REGISTRATION OPEN! Now more than ever, research is reshaping our view of women’s roles in the early modern book trade. Join us in Antwerp (5–7 Nov 2025) for our conference Women & the Household in the #earlymodern Book Trade. Register here: tinyurl.com/womenbooktrade #rarebooks #bookhistory 💙📚📜

“Stimmt es, dass Tausch die erste Währung war?” (“Was barter the first form of currency?”) is now online in the ARTE Mediathek – and also on YouTube. I had great fun contributing a small part on the first production of paper #money (esp. 12.45-15.15 minutes) youtu.be/W9f51gaShNI?...

Coming up in Leuven next week: Workshop​: Structures of Descent: Neo4j-Enabled Readings of Intergenerational Mobility and Marriage in Premodern Korea ​ Date: Monday, 1 September 2025​ Time: 15:00–17:00​ More info:​ www.infrastructurelives.eu/events/1-9-2...

"Daarnaast heeft het aan elke vorm van toezicht op het functioneren van Hofman ontbroken. Alleen het resultaat telde." Geldt dat niet voor alle decanen en instituutsmanagers die zich in de laatste decennia schuldig hebben gemaakt aan allerlei wangedrag @unileiden.bsky.social? Goed nieuws voor hen.

I regularly get the question: "Which is the best model?" I usually answer: "You have to test." IMMARKUS (immarkus.xmarkus.org) makes testing across various open and commercial models easy for automatic transcription and translation. You can compare, collate, edit, and save all notes for later use.

Urban historians working on any part of Asia are warmly invited to submit proposals for the session "Good Governance and Urban Conflict in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cities in Europe and Beyond (13th-17th centuries)" at the 2026 European Association for Urban History Conference in Barcelona.

It's hard for this fairly text-oriented historian to beat that imposter feeling, but I'm looking fwd to discussing ongoing work on the longue-durée social and regional history of infrastructures at a Society for East Asian Archeology 10th Conference keynote. Programme: seaa-web.org/conferences/...

This looks wonderful!

Quick update: Plugging your own transcription service into #IMMARKUS via Hugging Face Spaces is now available for testing on our dev server! It’s a bit DIY/hacky... But if you’re building your own HF Spaces, you’re probably ready for that 🙂 Ping me if you’d like to try it out!

Soon on immarkus.xmarkus.org : select your favorite models from Huggingface, the Github of AI models; or add your own. Turns out freely available Chinese models like QWEN perform well on early printed Latin texts -better than others. Get in touch if interested in testing or further collaboration.

And as we assemble a fantastic vol 13.1 a reminder that we are always looking for exciting essays and special issues in any area of medieval studies tmj.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk - do get in touch! #medievalsky

Oxford Studies in Medieval History is now Oxford Studies in the New Medieval History. Glad to be part of the opening up of this great series to global approaches. We are looking forward to receiving book manuscripts in global #medieval history. More info in the flyer: fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

The amazing Dan Pett has been at it again. Using @aboutgeo.bsky.social liiive.now Dan explains how to DIY your own IIIF: add image to cms, create manifest, put manifest into Rainer's magic, download annotations, paste text into cms, manifest recreates. Try it yourself! museologi.st/blog/iiif-di...

Worth a read: "It seems likely that China will remain a self-denying empire... In this respect, 21st-century China displays an uncanny resemblance to 20th-century America, which clung to its mythic self-conception as empire’s enemy even as it assumed an unprecedented orbit of power."

"guidelines on the responsible use of AI in research are clear that we should refrain from using GenAI tools in peer reviews and evaluations. But that’s not to say that researchers aren’t experimenting. Thelwall’s team has shown weak success in using Chat GPT to replicate human peer review scores.."

Our #history department at KU Leuven is again looking for a new Postdoc colleague, this time to join the ERC project “Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History” led by @hildedw.bsky.social. For more info check: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... #sinology #imperialchina #chineseinfrastructure

Oh no, what a tragic loss for all and Tangut Studies in particular.

@hilariodesousa.bsky.social deserves a medal and our gratitude for this and his other apt visualizations of Benelux rail networks. Amsterdam Brussels Paris London rail options PDF: hilario.bambooradical.com/benelux/imag...

With eight different submission types for #AAS2026, there's sure to be one that matches your preferred participation format! Check them all out at our website and get your proposal for Vancouver ready—the deadline is coming up on August 6! buff.ly/GLqsRJv

let us think about this #IMC2025