My New Year resolution is to visit one museum, church, castle, cathedral or archaeological site every week, until I run out of ideas/forget/lose the will to live. May as well do something I might actually enjoy, rather than do something I have to endure

I’d travelled to Lund, Sweden specifically to visit the Historical Museum but it was shut for refurbishment. I nearly cried then bumped into a man outside, turned out he was the curator & he gave me a full behind the scenes tour, then loaded me up with free books to take away. So incredibly kind

Finally got to visit Norwich Castle & the incredible Gallery of Medieval Life. I absolutely loved the use of a lighting sculpture installation as a visual reconstruction of the missing Romanesque arches. Art + archaeological visualisation & no danger of obsolete in-gallery tech (unless a bulb blows)

"The processors in data centers run hot and need to be cooled, so big tech companies are pulling from municipal water supplies to make that happen—and aren’t always disclosing how much water they’re using. Local wells are running dry or seem unsafe to drink from."

Still in bed, in anticipation of the return to work, with c.13 hours of teaching timetabled at present (subject to change). Malaise is upon me

Holiday present book haul 10/10. I am a very lucky, spoilt woman

Basically, the outtakes of Mark Steel's In Town, from Bungay 👇 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

I could tell so many stories about my 4 years as volunteer curator of Bungay Museum. Most of these fall under the category of ‘things we found damp in 1980s carrier bags placed there by the previous curator’

I’ve had 30 whole hours of un-Zoplicloned sleep in the past 3 days, more than I’ve had since my dad got ill in the spring. I feel incredible, like a new woman, reborn in fact. Is this what normality feels like?

this made me so happy

Plea to stop using prehistoric monuments & peoples as a sub for present-day national identities. Past peoples are not ‘ancestors’, they had no idea of the concept of a nation-state & this archipelago has seen a lot of traffic since the last ice age

Yesterday I took my annual trip to see the seals 🦭 I parked at Waxham & walked the 5 miles to Horsey Gap & back. A whopping 3659 pups have been born this season! I'm lucky to have this natural event close by. All taken with a long lens and from a very respectful distance. 🧵1/2 #Seals #NorthNorfolk

Time to get settled with a cup of tea & watch this

It's midwinter's eve tonight. If you're quick about it, you can start your timed THE DARK IS RISING read-along before midnight. (tonight's portion is Chapter 1, 'Midwinter's Eve'. Tomorrow is 'Midwinter Day' and 'The Sign-Seeker'.)

We have also recently updated our Social Media Research Toolkit, a curated collection of over 50 academic research tools compiled by researchers at our lab. Whatever platforms you are interested in studying, we probably have a tool to help. socialmedialab.ca/apps/social-...

Parents! Carers! Anyone taking care of children over the Christmas holidays! My regular reminder of this thread of TOYS you can make from scrap materials, all of which work due to some sort of interesting scientific principle

I’m increasingly uneasy about the flood of AI images on social media. They are mostly absurd and frustrating. They may sometimes be creative experiments, but the fact that so many users take them at face value says a lot about our collective loss of visual literacy. www.facebook.com/groups/ancie...

There’s no point handwringing about the Arts Council’s problems if we don’t fix the Tories’ austerity-fixated destruction of the pipeline. If arts education is not rapidly restored in UK schools & universities THERE WILL BE NO ARTS to sponsor or give grants to. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The #WinterSolstice livestream link is now available Join us on 21 Dec @ 8:40 am to witness the solstice sunrise live from inside the #Newgrange chamber, weather permitting. Save the link now and be part of this extraordinary moment. 🔗www.gov.ie/solstice#WinterSolstice#Newgrange#ShareTheSolstice

Rather than a demonstration of the incredible developments in scientific understanding of the past, the right wing press & social media actors will use this to further erode public trust in expert knowledge & the importance of telling stories about possibilities www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

7.5 hours and one chunk of moderation until I’m on leave for 18 whole, delicious days

I'm reposting this not for doomerism purposes but because she talks about some ways that you can identify AI images, which people who follow me may or may not already know about

Please sign and share this petition to stop Banbury museum's closure. Cherwell council are proposing to cut ALL the museum's core funding. c.org/jWp54xYh9r

❌ Are platforms really curbing disinfo? New SIMODS research has found that TikTok has the highest exposure to mis/disinfo, and repeat misinformers enjoy a “misinformation premium” in engagement. Watch @disinfo.eu's webinar replay for the full findings ⬇️ buff.ly/4g2g1yu

Not heading to TAG York because I don't want to risk my immunosuppressed mum's health if I catch anything, but will be appearing in our session tomorrow as the Big Head on The Zoom Screen

Just saw people arguing that the shooting in Sydney wasn’t antisemitic because Chabad is a Zionist movement, and killing Zionists is fine. Fucking ghouls. Get fucked.

We mourn the victims of the mass shooting on Bondi Beach at a celebration on the first night of Chanukah, bringing darkness into a festival of lights. Our hearts go out to those attacked and their families and friends, as well as the entire Australian Jewish community.

Just so we're clear, one incident of alleged anti-semitism by a musician = a major national scandal that should be roundly condemned. Multiple incidents of alleged anti-semitism from the man leading the race to run the country = a load of nothing that should be completely ignored

Mental health & the looming shadow of redundancies never gets a mention in any of the discourse about ‘right sizing’. Sign posting scared anxious people to a phone line barely counts. These emails have and will push people to the edge

Sam McLean @sammcleanntcc.bsky.social on Essex Pathways, the University's experts on foundation year provision. "[O]nce that department is gone, it's gone. It would take decades to rebuild the hundreds of years of combined experience that run it."

Solidarity with our Essex colleagues down the road. Just before Xmas as well, like Concrete Towers last time round. Devastating news for the region too

Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk

Do archaeologists use Lidar scanners on digs? Curious what tools are used for digitizing findings, - are they scanned on-site or taken to lab and digitized from photographs? Drones? What is the 3D software & file format that is used as standard in the discipline? Would appreciate input on this.

Last teaching day of 2025. This year has been 10 years long, and I’m ready for a nap

Gendered language for ✨human ✨activity in the past? In 2025? In the Guardian?

Vivid memories remain of our National Trust report, an audit of existing research on country houses' colonial histories. Here is a recent open access article about The National Trust and future possibilities for exploring colonial history by Jessica Moody. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

This is, for me at least, the first academic teaching semester where AI-as-resource has become normalised in a student's thought/research/hone/refine process. Even in a class on critical approaches to AI and digital media, I'm starting to feel it's a chronic, long term condition with no cure

First of many such incidents, I expect. Another ‘win’ for those ‘useful’ Gen AI tools. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A statement from Woodcraft Folk re: the ban on trans girls from Girl Guiding. Trans girls deserve to belong everywhere. But when bigots win the day (not for long I hope), at least there remain places where trans girls and everyone else can belong. woodcraft.org.uk/woodcraft-fo...

Grim news and vacuous messaging from Essex: 200 academic posts (in unspecified subjects) to go this year & 200 professional staff posts in the next 2 years. Closure of Southend campus will be a blow regionally as well. The vision and ambition that saw Essex et al established is sorely needed now.

How much did this cost to run? And at what cost to membership numbers? HEC need to do some urgent work on listening to members, rather than alienating people living with the very real threat of redundancy

Unfortunately the HE 2025 ballot failed at 39% turnout. I have written about why and about what desperately needs to change in UCU's national structures off the back of this result. Some HEC members need to chi up and understand their role in all this, and how disconnected they are from members.

Visiting Norwich Science Festival in February? Interested in the connections between AI, history, film & technological change? Come hear our talk "Do Humans Dream of Electric Gods?" with a spot of terrifying robot futures on screen for good measure! Suitable for adults & kids 12+, tickets free:

Trying to summarise my successes & room for improvement for my appraisal, with a year that started with the announcement of redundancies, strike action, Dad suddenly hospitalised, a summer of caring for him then his death, returning to work far too soon & to new teaching responsibilities

Nothing surprises me more than the contents of the NSPCC book sale at my local Lidl

Close to 1 full goddamn gigawatt of gas (open-cycle, so the most inefficient kind) for the "Project Jupiter" site in New Mexico. This whole article is a stunning illustration of how data centres are incentivising new fossil infrastructure: eastdaley.com/daley-note/p...

Keeping the British end up, in my contribution to this multinational melodrama overview: www.bfi.org.uk/features/aro...

This weeks class is ‘AI, digital media & the environment’ so I’ll be introducing my students to the materiality of these technologies & the object history of their mobile phones. Everyone can learn something from an archaeological approach to tech

"As Mumbai sees increased energy demand from new datacentres, particularly from Amazon, the filthiest neighbourhood in one of India’s largest cities must keep its major coal plants" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Another year, another round of redundancies then?