“Blogs are one of the great literary inventions of our time. Coming somewhere between an essay and a diary entry, they are a form of personal journalism that is intimate and immediate... but they also have… a rough-edged informality that breaks down barriers. They are engaging.”

We are so proud of this work. Not only is it the first effort to publish & analyze **open-access data** derived from the entire text contents of digitized @britishlibrary.bsky.social newspapers, it presents a metadata-driven approach to understanding bias in big historical data. #dh #skystorians

!Stop Press! Article on bias in digitised newspaper collections: ’Whose News’, in the new journal of @comphumresearch.bsky.social by Kaspar Beelen, @jonhistorian61.bsky.social, @kmcdono.bsky.social and me. See blog for summary & 🧵 1/7 Article doi.org/10.1017/chr.... Blog is.gd/2IFc30 #dh #c19 🗃️

lol

When my grandpa died last year at nearly 104, he left me this mantel clock. He kept it wound, and in meticulous shape. The thing is stone—extremely heavy. He got it from a friend in the '60s, who got it from some television personality a few decades earlier. Apparently it's 19th century French.

Great news! This is out: Opening the black box of EEBO academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina

How do we navigate gaps and challenges in quantifying and understanding innovation and R&D in the creative sector? Excellent roundup from @suzannerblack.bsky.social on how difficult it is to count and map innovation, and "return on funder investment", in the creative industries.

This week I received four items through interlibrary loan and document delivery, and I gotta say, that service suite continues to be a shining example of society functioning as it should. Eduroam is another. Thank your librarians working on ILL in the background. They do saintly work.

The first (1955) Danish edition of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. Later editions did not convert the title, so this is the only SI-compatible edition! 🎢

Haven't seen any linguistics research on character limits, but perhaps someone who follows me might know of some!

A permanent post in my department. Closing date Dec 14th 2025, interviews in March. Please spread #histsci

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that. So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more. Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort! bit.ly/ach-anthology

If you can do so, now is a great time to donate cash to food banks in your region.

Every time discover a new piece on the dangers of LLMs, particularly for research and teaching, I add it to a Zotero library. I figure that I might as well share it, so here's my library of Cautionary AI Tales: www.zotero.org/groups/62758...

Online! Free!

If you can do so, now is a great time to donate cash to food banks in your region.

'Cost-Effective Machine Learning for Automatically Processing Bibliographic Metadata' is a very readable account of using DistilBERT for specific DH tasks www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.... #AI4LAM

(I've occasionally heard the argument that even rejections add "value" to the general "market." For example, research applications help scholars gather thoughts, and can be reused for articles. Which is true, but may not outweigh the sunk costs & resource rebalancing from poor to rich institutions.)

Weirdly, this means in some cases that adding a (competitive, onerous, and popular) grant program where one didn't exist can actually cost a community more than if it didn't exist at all. So, that's cursed knowledge for you!

PSA: Grant programs with sufficiently low acceptance rates and payouts can cost more for applicants than they distribute to awardees. Say it costs $5k in salaried hours to complete a proposal. 1k people apply. $1m is distributed overall. For every $1 spent, 20¢ of funding goes out. This happens.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments. #medievalsky www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

PSA: Grant programs with sufficiently low acceptance rates and payouts can cost more for applicants than they distribute to awardees. Say it costs $5k in salaried hours to complete a proposal. 1k people apply. $1m is distributed overall. For every $1 spent, 20¢ of funding goes out. This happens.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

listen, yinz spend so much time focusing on the Voynich Manuscript that you keep forgetting the Codex Seraphinianus

We're reopening our survey to gather more responses. If you didn't get a chance before, we'd love to hear about your DH experiences in the United States. The survey will remain open until 12/15.

In an obscure corner of Kazakhstan, the remains of an ocean millions of years old have created probably the most surreal landscape on earth -- as captured by photographer Daniel Kordan mymodernmet.com/daniel-korda...

'History and Archives in Practice, 2026': call for participation bit.ly/4pITZrs HAP26 takes place in Sheffield on the theme of 'Shaping Societies, Improving Lives: The Impact of Archives & Historical Research'. With @ihr.bsky.social & @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy Closing date 31 October.

OCR is one of AI's oldest challenges (first systems: early 1900s!) Modern vision-language models have transformed what's possible: handwriting, 100+ languages, math formulas, tables, signature extraction... New @hf.co guide on OCR huggingface.co/blog/ocr-ope...

The most important thing universities should do in a world with AI is to greatly increase the number of professors, so that classes can be smaller and more class time can be spent directly interacting with students as people.

“We are all, how you say, trying to find zee guy who did zis.”

Ryan Heuser's new piece on AI-generated poetry is fascinating and worth a read. He offers new insights into AI models' obsession with rhyme—I mean just look at that figure!—as well as how to read and interpret generative texts that lack human authors and intentionality.

My employer (the Library of Virginia) is hiring a director of government and external relations. The posting closes on 11/10, and the salary range begins at $90k.

There's some delightful metaphor to be found in the fact that the solution came from archival research rather than math, if only someone could decipher it.

There's some delightful metaphor to be found in the fact that the solution came from archival research rather than math, if only someone could decipher it.

I just received the sickest burn of my life. My Afghan meal tonight arrived with two sauces, herb-based and yogurt-based. "What exactly are these?" I ask. The waiter looks me straight in the eye, speaking slowly to be sure I understand. "That's green sauce," he points, "and that's white sauce."

A few weeks into my new job, let me take a moment to say: thank you, sincerely. The situation at NEH was a devastating combination of losing a dream job, seeing my colleagues experience the same, and seeing my field deal with the loss of their grants and the infrastructure to support them. +

Hyped to read the special issue that goes with this introduction by @vhalsmayer.bsky.social and Eric Hounshell. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

My life improved last year when I started pronouncing AI as the name Al (AL) in my head whenever I saw it. In case you need that.

This opportunity is related to the Doing AI Differently white paper, where I'm also honored to have been one of the co-authors.

Pre-announcement of a funding opportunity for "artificial intelligence humanities sandpits," supported by AHRC, EPSRC, and SSHRC. Expressions of interest by 31 Oct; up to four grants will be funded.

CFP: Historical Network Research conference 2026 in Turin, Italy! (deadline Dec. 1 2025) historicalnetworkresearch.org/cfp-hnr2026-... HNR looks forward to meeting colleagues from Italy and beyond who are involved in the analysis of historical networks.

Registration is free, and low-cost university housing available. I'm excited by the theme, encouraging philosophical reflection. Organizers ask not just how sources influence network thinking, but how network thinking influences how we see sources. It'll be a fun conversation.

The next Historical Network Research conference will be held in Turin, Italy in July 2026, and submissions are now open. Proposals due December 1. Bursaries available for early career scholars. This year's theme is "Networks and their Sources." See you there! hnr2026.sciencesconf.org

The next Historical Network Research conference will be held in Turin, Italy in July 2026, and submissions are now open. Proposals due December 1. Bursaries available for early career scholars. This year's theme is "Networks and their Sources." See you there! hnr2026.sciencesconf.org

Introducing Sidra Co-Founder Hannah Alpert-Abrams! Hannah has over 15 years of experience in arts, culture, and the humanities as a practitioner and funder. Hannah can help establish new grant programs, manage funding processes, and understand the impact of your work. sidracollaborative.com/team/