TV show pitch: ‘Tome Team’, where a group of rare books librarians and book historians are sent to investigate an uncatalogued library for interesting incunabula, marginalia and provenances - and they have just three days to do it.

Hello! It's two years since Thomas, my gorgeous son, died. Next month, Alison and I, along with around 30 friends and family, will be doing a memory walk in support of Children's Hospice South West. If you could spare a few quid in sponsorship, that would be 😍 www.justgiving.com/page/thomas-...

I wrote a piece for the CDBU blog with some low or no cost things our employers could do right now if they care about precarious staff as much as they say they do.

I hate to tap the sign but again: this is all made to make in-person education and access to knowledge transfer a preserve of the elite. Human education for the few, bots for the many.

This is horrific. Docking all pay for refusing to reschedule teaching due to strike action (for which pay has already been docked).

This map is a thing of beauty and explains so much about why norther rail is a thorny issue.

The German Research Foundation, possibly the most important funding body for academic research in Germany, is now not only allowing the use of AI to write applications, they‘ll also allow it to evaluate said applications. Only prerequisite is that one makes this transparent. It‘s a farce.

🎓Latin Job Alert!🎓 UGent's Department of Literary Studies is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Latin Literature, with a focus on a late period (medieval and/or early modern), starting 1 September 2026. Applications are due by 28 January 2026 at midnight (Brussels time). See link below⬇️

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

Just love how the same university that shamelessly promotes gen AI gives me a sanctimonious instruction upon requesting a hard copy of a thesis for examination to 'Please consider the environmental impact, and whether a printed copy of the thesis is necessary, before doing so.'

Excellent exposé of a 20th-century Chortlemuffin (talk by Holly Ordway, 7 Sept 2024): www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSC6...

I’ve got used to having to wade through “AI” slop when doing online research – in the way that you can get used to a terminal diagnosis, that is – but this was a new low: clicking through to a few search results in quick succession, only to be temporarily banned as a potential scraper bot 😠

Bookings are open for Textual Criticism and the Transmission of Texts. Learn how to build a critical edition and a stemma codicum, step by step, with Dr Anna Somfai. Thursdays 2-4pm, 16 April-7 May 2026. Book: warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/... #TextualCriticism #MedievalStudies

I posted this👇 to a claim that genAI is better than Ctl+F to search historical docs. @tristanpalmgren.bsky.social replied with a genAI summary of my document and @bookllyfr.bsky.social asked if it was accurate. It turns out that it did exactly what genAI does: made stuff up & got stuff wrong.🧵

Publication – Lucien Reynhout, « Les colophons » rmblf.be/2025/12/17/p...

Right, that’s it. We need bounty hunters to track down the fake academics who are publishing LLM-generated bullshit and “retire” them, by which I mean mercilessly expose them until they’re ostracized by their genuine academic colleagues and ultimately kicked out of the jobs they don’t deserve. 🕵️‍♂️

New volume of Methodos Vol. 25 (2025) journals.openedition.org/methodos/10599 @openedition.bsky.social Les mathématiques médiévales dans le monde latin @medphiljournals.bsky.social

British medievalists! With perfect Christmas timing, Bennett & Kerr are selling 30-odd second-hand OMTs (from the library of John Maddicott, nisi fallor). Their website has been practically dead for ages and doesn’t include the books listed here, but you can order them by email. www.benkerrbooks.com

Abstracts are due 15th Dec for the next European Symposium on Medieval Logic & Semantics, to be held in the Netherlands on 23–25 June 2026. The topic is LOGIC & THE SCIENCES, and ‘medieval’ is taken to cover 200–1700 in the broadly Western philosophical tradition. i2erc.wordpress.com/call-for-abs...

Is there a Humanities-specific interest group pushing back against AI at University level? I think it’s important that this organisation exists to call out the permissible culture around AI and how in a generation that might absolutely destroy the soul of learning. Seriously. Or I’m gonna start it.

Literally anything else more effective than AI for learning www.cambridge.org/news-and-ins...

Abstracts are due 15th Dec for the next European Symposium on Medieval Logic & Semantics, to be held in the Netherlands on 23–25 June 2026. The topic is LOGIC & THE SCIENCES, and ‘medieval’ is taken to cover 200–1700 in the broadly Western philosophical tradition. i2erc.wordpress.com/call-for-abs...

'I am less inclined to call on the Government for a solution to the British Library’s ongoing issues since, despite repeated calls for action, the UK Government has largely ignored the similar crisis within UK Higher Education.' 1/3

When asked just what do I do, I often utter darkly, “I rescue manuscripts before they become someone’s découpage project.” I never truly believed that anyone selling a fragment would encourage such a practice — then I saw this on eBay. Perfect entry for “10 Word Horror Story” contest. #fragmentology

“their bewildering outputs should serve as productive reminders that underneath the carefully engineered workarounds of the chatbot interface, LLMs are unremittingly indifferent to knowledge and truth claims.” Indeed. Not cited here is “ChatGPT is Bullshit” (2024): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Don't call it a "bubble." OpenAI, Microsoft, & Alphabet are just fine with that term because they get to tell you that all the dot-com bubble or the railroad bubble or the whatever bubble was, was a shaking out the greats after an intense period of mania. This isn't a bubble. This is a time bomb.

'More universities use AI tools to teach students, generate course materials & give personalised feedback. A Dept of Education policy paper hailed this development, saying generative AI “has the power to transform education.”' Into an accreditational dystopia. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

🚨Job Klaxon: The ERC project COALA (Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics) is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Latin Linguistics. 📍 King’s College London, UK ⌛ Duration: 3 years ⏰ Deadline: 2 December 2025 ➡️ To apply: tinyurl.com/rme6rczh

Next to Jesus Maria Johannes, another triad: amen amen amen. Unusually, the reason for invoking it thrice is explained: it is in honour of the Trinity as the superscript letters show (p[ater], f[ilius], s[spiritus sanctus]). @magdalenoxford.bsky.social MS. lat. 71.

Exciting news from Cambridge, where a donation has funded a permanent lectureship (sorry, “Assistant Professorship”) in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400. The only explicit restriction is “not medicine”, but it is in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/53305/

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...

It’s rare to see a piece of journalism about the use of “AI” in universities that doesn’t salivate over the prospect of students outsourcing their reading and thinking to a mindless generator of (on a good day) superficially plausible text. Here’s a good one from Belgium: apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

ATTACKS from bots are a major problem for libraries scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/10/07/g... "Can we differentiate the behavior in our systems from the motives of the operating individual or organization, and should we be in the business of judging “good” and “bad” site visitors and uses?"

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

A great thread applicable to scholars outside the US. Much of the work that historians do is not strictly what they’re paid for. Being able to do it depends on historians being stably employed, with access to resources, and with flexibility built in their schedules. All of those things are at risk.

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Crest fallen.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Note that although the upgraded high-res digitization can be viewed at BAV, the Biblissima interface allows a much higher-resolution download.

Reminder @theguardian.com has a partnership with OpenAI; which explains this thinly sourced excuse of an article that relies on ONE Masters student and OpenAI's International Education Lead countered by measly words of "caution" from ONE university admin.

We need more "unfunded" research, not less. Or rather, we need more "core" funding and much less project based funding. Then universities can *invest* in core research infrastructure (including people), reduce precarity, and focus on growing and retaining talent.

Join us next week to assess ⚖️📏 the role quantity played in diverse premodern cultural domains and practices. It is possible to attend on Zoom (if you send me an email).

New Wyclif polemic discovered! Only 250 words long, but not obviously detached from a larger work. It isn’t ascribed to him in the manuscript (no titulus or colophon) but the style is recognizably his. I’m posting it here because the content is eerily topical. #medievalLatin #medievalSky #genAI

Provenance to die for: the works of Tacitus (Antwerp, 1581), edited by Justus Lipsius, and scribbled on by both Isaac Casaubon & Richard Bentley (Master of @trincolllibcam.bsky.social). @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Adv.d.3.14.

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

BREAKING: THE discovers a new grammatical category of questions to which the answer is “No”! Also, “Isabel spent over 20 years working in technology innovation and digital transformation at American Express and Visa… before transitioning into academia full-time in 2015. Her teaching reflects this” 💯

OMG PEOPLE! I have the BL hack of all BL hacks. Why didn't this occur to me before? It turns out the Wayback Machine has snapshots of MS metadata from the old Digitised Manuscripts site. I tried it for the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, in honor of his day, and lo! web.archive.org/web/20140305...

“The Daily Mail claims the number of people who click its links from Google search results has fallen by around 50% on both desktop and mobile traffic since Google introduced its AI Overview feature.” Every cloud… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...