Same boat, go get 'em for me!

Anders Zorn - that man could paint water. "What seemed to particularly attract me was the play of light and reflections," he said. This is Summer Holiday (1886, Private collection) in the excellent Zorn retrospective at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-sw...

AI translation and Latin, a 🧵. I want to explain to English speakers a bit about how LLMs are fundamentally unsuited for Latin translation work. This also applies to Ancient Greek, and a lot of other languages, but Latin is what I know so we're going to talk about Latin translation.

There’s no such thing as the history of science (and this is a blog post about it) (inspired by a great 2017 article by Lorraine Daston) williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/t... 🗃️

Great read! Was particularly struck by the bit on using the first person: "Any history work could lift the veil and do this, but few do. In fact, shortly before I wrote the book, I submitted an article to Renaissance Quarterly in which, when commenting on an element of the historians’ practice,

We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Help, before I teach, where does the stress go in "Origen"? 😂 I've never had to say it out loud before...

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

see? here's the thing. A lot of people are like, the earth is fucked, it's beyond salvation, it's hit the tipping point, but time and time again we see that if we just fucking fixed the problem, it rebounds so incredibly fast. Imagine what could be done if people actually cared

A really wholesome discussion on the whole, and love seeing the palaeographical implications (indirectly) acknowledged! Shame on those who say "why bother"—given that writing by hand has known benefits, why not teach kids to do so more efficiently?

Absolutely fascinated to see this caveat on the description of the Steam Medieval Sale—as if more justification for our course on history-themed video games was needed! 😉

Joke's on them, unis have already been cast as convenient enemies so now what ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Brings to mind how my French bank issued the checkbook to "M ou Mme Nelson Goering" 🙃 (this was only 10 years ago!)

Delighted by the facial expressions in this Schwabenspiegel illustration. Jesus looks so happy! The king looks so grumpy! The hellmouth looks... oddly cat-like?

This is an appreciation notice to librarians, who help you find cool digitized manuscripts within minutes after an unproductive hour spent searching the catalogue yourself 🥰

I spend *way* too much time trying to pick primary sources to use in class, but how can I not when there are soooo many good sources to use? Argh 😂

Fun little bit of translation I'm considering today: a house "si comme elle se comporte". It's an apparently common phrasing when talking about medieval property, and the DMF lists most of them under the heading "Comprendre en soi, s'étendre (de telle ou telle façon)", but I'm having trouble finding

Every so often you stumble across a medieval hand that just makes you catch your breath it's so pretty 😍

Looks like a fantastic lineup of speakers here!

#FRHistory 🗃️

Any recs for female literacy and manuscript culture in medieval England? (For a student, I'm not up on my English context!)

New article in French History! ‘By the king’s suspension, the constitution is violated’: provincial opposition to the revolution of 10 August 1792' by William S. Cormack 🇫🇷🧐💾👨‍🎤🤴 Open Access here: doi.org/10.1093/fh/c... @frenchhistory.bsky.social

...so, uh, I guess we've been fighting this trend at universities for a little while now? 😅

Okay, I have pulled out of the text all the complaints about Barton grifting at the abbey so LET'S GOOOO

ok #medievalsky what's the funnest medieval source? like the one that students really respond to, or just the one that you absolutely delight in talking about? for me it's Marie de France's LAIS

4 hours left, and some *glorious* dice (and non-dice) art for an even more glorious cause!

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

Whatever we calculate, the future in Iran now looks like Iraq or Libya, Bibi’s dream. It’s so hard to imagine Iran, a modern built up country w huge dense cities, amazing architecture, great bookshops, trendy cafes & vibrant people, reduced to a Hollywood-movie “rubbles & ruins” war-torn country.

Palaeojackalope.

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

It's raining, which means it's officially the advent of slipping season here in Oslo—the wonderful few weeks where trying to get to work involves heavy-duty shoe spikes and every hill* means taking your life into your hands 🥳 *we have a lot of hills

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

Fun game for the history nerds! Note that you’ll need to specify CE or BCE sometimes. I got within twenty years for nine out of ten but was out by a century for the other which I’m feeling slightly sheepish about. when-was-this-war.web.app

This was an entertaining read from the perspective of both a historian doing quantitative work on people and a person who has lived in multiple countries!

It’s so common to come across the assertion that books were luxury objects exclusively for the elite in the Middle Ages that I want to guest curate a massive exhibition called “Meh-nuscripts: Books for the Many,” which features just workaday or unremarkable objects.

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

Is it possible to write meaningful multiple-choice questions for university-level history? And if so, can anyone point me towards some good examples?

In terms of material objects, my petty research interests would very much like to have the seal of Duchess Jeanne of Brittany on her act of 29 November 1352 (because I think it was the first time she used a new design but I can't prove it!)

If you could get back any one historical source that didn't make it (but which we know existed), what would it be? I'm plumping for the second half of Book I of Froissart's Rome manuscript (here's the last folio of the first half), though there are several competitors on my wishlist

Some people complain about their endless TBR pile, I'm more worried about my endless TBW pile, aka the growing list of pieces it would be super-fun to write except I have no time 😅

Your reminder that "prompts" are what you're giving a chatbot, not "instructions", because you're just pointing it in a certain direction and have no way at all of knowing what it's doing in its black box. (This is why they cannot be used in research because they have no verifiable methodology.)

Appel à contributions : French History, numéro spécial Les Valois (1328–1589) : Gouverner la France entre Moyen Âge et modernité Date limite des propositions : 30 avril 2026 academic.oup.com/fh/pages/cal...

Good morning! Have you seen our *brand new* issue? Featuring… Michel de Waele on Henri III and the Catholic League doi.org/10.1093/fh/c... 🗃️(1/7)

So lemme tell you about @adapalmer.bsky.social's Inventing the Renaissance, which came out last year and absolutely blew me away. I'd replace half the 1st-year curriculum with this book. Reading it made me a better historian, and also the kind of person who underlines books. Plus, it's hilarious.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was trained on pirated books. This finally came to light in a lawsuit three months ago, but it has gone essentially unreported. 🧵 1/5

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.