Lovely to be back on @ucldh.bsky.social soil, to give the annual Susan Hockey lecture - and fab to see so many old friends in that there London Town. 🥰

Someone is out scanning the streets of London… the driver didn’t look too pleased when he saw me photographing him, but.

Back in the heady heydays of Twitter, there would have been sufficient noise made on that platform for there to be national knowledge. The communities we used to have are broken in many different ways.

This is doing numbers, huh. Am particularly enjoying the reply guys telling me this horse head doesn’t matter, only the Elgin marbles matter - when it is literally one of the most famous of the Parthenon sculptures… ahhh, social media, never change!

I do appreciate that the @britishmuseum.bsky.social is now using the words “colonial loot” in its newer displays. A first step…

Popped into the British Museum to see my boo: I’ve been visiting the horse head of Selene (inspiration for chess pieces everywhere!) for over 40 years, but the older I get the more sure I am that she should be in Greece…

View from a hotel room, #London #academicglamour

I am on the Big Train southwards to London, where tomorrow evening I’m going to give this public lecture at UCL. All welcome, but do please register. Maybe see some London peeps there…

There aren't a lot of West African manuscripts older than 400 years because they quickly disintegrate once they're taken out of storage This 350-year-old manuscript was nearly intact when it was collected in the 1960s, but only fragments of it remain today

Yes. Using a computer now feels like this at all times.

This was by far my favourite thing at the @edinburghnapier.bsky.social degree show, by Sofiia Omelchenko 😻🪦🥀

View from a hotel room, #Riga Latvia. Here for funsies but #academicglamour

look. is everything more expensive now? yes. but you have to look on the bright side too. now every time you open a computer, it doesn't work

Fab visit to the People’s Museum of Tallinn, which had a super interesting exhibition on the relevance of Garages to Estonian culture and community, from the 1920s onward (cooperatives! Workshops! Hangouts! DIY!). This sign made me smile: out of context, what a phrase to learn…

I hope we'll see you at the Susan Hockey lecture at UCL on Tuesday 2 June (6-8pm). Professor @melissaterras.bsky.social will be sharing her state of the field address. Drinks and nibbles to follow. Free, but signup required: www.ucl.ac.uk/digital-huma...

View from a hotel room, #tallinn. Here for funsies but still #academicglamour

South #Edinburgh heatwave #meadows 😻

Caturday….

Preach.

This is not wrong, is it. What a world.

AI translation hasn't quite got the hang of surnames yet, bless it.

Struggling today. Everything seems so broken. Everyone is over capacity, miserable. It was confirmed today that our contracted research time at @edinburghuni.bsky.social is being cut because we can get a sabbatical. But we are not guaranteed sabbaticals. So they squeeze staff even more. Well done. 😿

Its really ironic to me that someone from the "ethical" and "social justice" charity @juliesbicycle.bsky.social keeps sending AI to meetings instead of themselves, and recording people without their consent. Sigh.

Went with my Mum & Dad to a very-much-offline house clearance auction in an old mushroom farm in Deepest Darkest Fife. Did these 1970s orange stools/tables come home with me? Well, at £14 it would be rude not to… #vintage

A fab Master's student at @edincollegeofart.bsky.social is doing her dissertation on the difference between 2D & 3D digital/virtual museum visits. If you had 10 mins, we'd really appreciate hearing about your experience of the British Museum galleries 🙏 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/edinburgh/...

Is AI leaving non-Latin scripts behind?  Alíz Horváth joins us as Keynote speaker at #TUC2026 to discuss the gap in non-Latin script support and the future of inclusive text recognition! 👉 Take a look at the full programme: tuc.transkribus.org/programme

Tried a more advanced bowl shaping technique at pottery class today… We only fire our best two. Pleased with these!

New paper! By Naomi Korn, @smitakheria.bsky.social & me: "Orphan Works, Mass-Digitisation of Cultural Heritage, and Licensing Barriers: Lessons from the United Kingdom’s Experience" - how Brexit led to the deletion of @britishlibrary.bsky.social's Spare Rib resource or.niscpr.res.in/index.php/JI...

Edinburgh evening walks be like… 😻

“You don’t get to build digital projects on landscapes whose histories are being sanitized and pretend that’s someone else’s problem.”

How not to digitize, and then how not to use automated text recognition: an awful race to the low…

Let me introduce you to a fun game I play at my corner shop! When we NEED something, you have to guess when was the earliest it would have been possible to buy it at a UK shop. So today was bananas (1633), matches (1827) & pasteurised milk (1920s?). The earliest you get wins!

When will I ever learn that "everyone should be themselves at work!" actually means "please be a good drone worker" not actually be yourself at work... 🤦‍♀️

oh is Starmer banging on about steel again

Walking home after having lunch with a pal and… you know you live in #Scotland when there is a free rock ceilidh on in the park with a massive castle behind 😻 #Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

On the one hand, our very-decent-chap-indeed MSP was re-elected, and on the other, my house is full of the sound of teenagers having an epic Magic The Gathering game, after finishing their Nat 5 Maths exams today. What is this strange feeling for the future, is it hope...?

Looking forward to seeing everyone in the Transkribus family in Passau in September!

Democratic duty done… (some of these are way more attractive than others, tho!!!) #pollingday #Scotland

“what happens at the BL is, mostly, the wrong kind of research. It’s about the dull old humanities, not the cutting-edge sciences. It mostly looks backwards, not forwards. So it’s regarded, not least by our political leaders, as a backwater.”

At the end of all these cuts, will Linguistics actually be taught outside of a few 'elite' Universities? (and even at those institutions, the field will be much smaller than it once was) If you aren't seeing this as a Widening Participation issue, then you really don't get what's going on.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m... #HistoryEducation the first searches may have a personal motivation. The next step: historians ask questions. Living in a time where a political party in the UK is suggesting detention camps, we too should care about what this data reveals.

Fun with web archives…

For years I obsessively played Terminus: The Prison Planet (1986), not to win but just to wander round and mentally map out the (I know now is 512 screens) maze. Very soothing, and £2.99 on a ZX Spectrum tape was pocket money well spent. 😂

Come and hear @melissaterras.bsky.social at @ucldh.bsky.social on 2 June! "The More Things Change..." www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-more-t...

I don't think people fully understand yet just how fragile university-hosted digital resources are after external funding ends (especially if the lead academic retires or moves or is made redundant).

Hurrah! Clocks as shared culture… it will be good to see this back in place www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Evening Walk #nofilter #Edinburgh #parklife

If it's any consolation to anyone, I spoke to a fancy rug cleaner when he stopped by the lace museum store for a crochet hook, and as he tells it, the billionaires are all unhappy and lonely and isolated. It is us, in community, with our hands full of crafts, who are the happy ones. #DHmakes

Side eye to an internal email advertising a gnarly administrative job I did for 5 years with only 10% of my Workload Allocation assigned to it, which is now being advertised for 60% WAM, for the 4th time, and still no takers. Don't do it, kids! Its really not worth the sleepless nights...