It's a good night to read this excellent piece, on the Orban regime's network of financial support for the nationalist right in Britain. For many on the radical right, the tills are about to stop ringing. democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

i hope the white house sends vance to campaign for Reform in britain

one immediate dramatic consequence of the Hungarian result: Magyar has promised to repair relations with the EU and unblock a €90bn EU loan for Ukraine

Massively important result.

For almost a century generations of scholars and thinkers have tried to understand why the Germans sleepwalked into disaster. Future generations will focus on a different case.

"We do not know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky."

I keep checking the news to see "how the war is going". Then I remember: since there's no plan, no "progress" can be made. Silly me.

New working paper out: "Open Maps: New Research Directions and Workflows for Digitized Historical Cartographic Material" led by Vincent Baptist & Jules Schoonman (TU Delft) #dh #maps openmapsmeeting.nl/publications...

Sadly I won't be able to attend this, but it looks very interesting.

Possibly the most interesting (and chastening) piece I've seen so far on the impact of tools like Claude Code on digital history: "the fig leaf of methodological difficulty won’t cover a lack of interpretative results much longer" lincolnmullen.com/blog/behind-...

The use of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers has contributed to the distortion of scientific publishing practices and research practices, noted France's CNRS as it walked away from Web of Science, using $$$ saved to promote #OpenScience & #OpenData. www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...

Having read the original Skinner article as an undergraduate a long time ago, this looks a very interesting book and not only for the digital method chapters (two).

Catching up on some very interesting digital history seminar recordings: first, this one on HTR and NER in early modern Irish manuscripts: a project at Trinity College Dublin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QC0...

There's information about the kind of (small) projects I can help with, with examples, at websterresearchconsulting.com/services/

Nominations for the 2026 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History are now open ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2021/12/the-... (closing date 31 May). You can submit your own work or recommend a book or article by someone else that you’ve loved reading.

It's been a long time in the making, but here's the new Library Data Lab at Southampton, giving dataset and API access to digitised collections. Currently in beta: all comments welcome. Intro from my colleague Matt: southampton.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page... Service datalab.library.soton.ac.uk

What is a Digital Humanities PhD? Seminar with DH colleagues from Cambridge, Edinburgh, London and Manchester, open to all students or others considering a DH PhD at some point. Monday 9th March 2026, 16:30 GMT. Online only. Register at: www.sas.ac.uk/digital-huma...

Look what arrived in the post, featuring an essay by yours truly.

Really, this has always been the real skill, long before the current situation arose.

As I have more time now for interesting things, I got this out and dusted it off a bit. websterresearchconsulting.com

This morning I find myself, for the first time in 22 years, committed neither to any publications nor any speaking engagements (on my research, that is). Not sure what to make of this.

If you're free on Monday, I'll be giving an online talk: "The edited collection as community: explorations in the history of a discipline" 6pm CET, hosted on Zoom by colleagues in Germany. QR code in the image, and/or Meeting ID.

The deadline for submitting a proposal for the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association annual conference is 30 Jan digitalhumanities-uk-ie.org/2026-annual-.... The conference is 15-16 June and this year’s theme is Sustainability (broadly defined).

A nice write-up of a very neat idea from my Southampton colleague James Macdonell: a Cabinet of Curiosities made up of 'objets trouvés' turned up during a recent project to review the whole book stock of the library. This pleased me a great deal this year. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...

New #DigitalScholarship blog post out by @peterwebster.bsky.social on a project I'm involved in, digitising the writings of James Parkes 📖✨ library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...

#dhist Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 9 Dec (midday GMT on Zoom) for Aleksandra Kaye and colleagues on 'Science Across Borders: Text-Mining and Network Analysis Insights into the Polish Diasporic Periodical Press, 1830-1930' ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...

It's a particular pleasure to talk about this project: to digitise some of the writings of James Parkes, twentieth century Anglican specialist in the history and theology of Christian-Jewish relations. His library came to Southampton sixty years ago this year. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...

Some films I was involved in making about religion and peacebuilding: on the #Corrymeela Community and the St Philip's Centre, #Leicester www.open.edu/openlearn/hi... Thanks to Riaz Ravat and Alex Wimberly for their interviews. #peacebuilding @openuniversity.bsky.social

If you missed yesterday's wonderful Deswarte Prize seminar - ' (Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI' - it is now on the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History Seminar youtube channel youtu.be/iwT7PRy-eQs?...

Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 4 November (12:00 GMT on Zoom) to celebrate the winning entry for the 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History and to learn about gender and lottery rhymes in the medieval/early-modern low countries ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...

Come and work with us! We have a two-year, half-time postdoctoral research associate position working on the @storymachine-ht.bsky.social project www.jobs.london.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai.... If you’re interested in #DigitalHumanities and/or folklore, we’d love to hear from you. Closing date 27 October.

OMG Peter @nickiclarkson.bsky.social you are genius

For the avoidance of doubt: not named after me.

Introducing the Southampton Digital Scholarship team mascot: Just who is Peter the Penguin? library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...

Once again, it was my privilege to chair the judging panel for this, in memory of a much-missed colleague and friend. Those who knew Richard will be able to imagine how delighted he would have been to see the vitality of digital history.

Nice write-up of what our two placement students got up to over the summer, looked after by my colleague James Macdonell. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...

Preparing for a lecture in January on what networks of authors in edited collections can reveal about the global history of evangelicalism in the 20th century. I take some of the approaches discussed here: peterwebster.me/2024/11/15/r... And apply them to this: peterwebster.me/2019/07/03/e...

The proofs of this just landed. Open Access postprint in the quoted post, but DM me if you'd like the proofs instead.

Excited to announce that the paperback edition of Age of the Spirt, a #history of #charismatic #Christianity, is out on 26 September (on my birthday no less!). Pre-order here or at your preferred retailer! Thanks to OUP for making this happen. www.waterstones.com/book/age-of-...

New post, and a new venture into Irish fiction (the series hitherto having featured British writers.)

Some details on my little fictional priests project.

New post, and a new venture into Irish fiction (the series hitherto having featured British writers.)

New post on the blog, and another fictional priest, from an author I've only recently discovered and have been enjoying enormously: Brian Moore. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) peterwebster.me/2025/09/01/j...

A little blog post introducing some of the themes of this chapter: peterwebster.me/2025/07/30/c...

An excellent summary. And, worse still, as a sector we expect senior scholars to somehow just acquire the skills to manage this kind of complexity and contradiction.

I'm not saying we live in the country, but the opposition in my game of cricket on Thursday were two players short because they were busy with the harvest. #SoVillage #ABitAgricultural

The new book has arrived! Very pleased to add this to the 'Iris Murdoch Today' collection from @springernature.com, all eight of which were published in the past three years. Full details here: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Walking barefoot with Aidan, Bede and Cuthbert to Lindisfarne lukemckernan.com/2025/07/31/w...

Fired up with new energy for this little project, with lots of new characters to write about. It's a way of re-energising my writing. Right now, I don't have the time for big projects, but I can (for the time being) work by a series of vignettes; it's a kind of collage.