Truly phenomenal work. #Coptic #Hebrew #Greek in #Braille plus #Cuneiform transliteration Braille guide

Fascinating article on Tommy Flowers, the little known engineer who actually invented the compute at Bletchley Park. I had never heard of him… www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Great reading for LIS folks - covers development of LIS related disciplines through to contemporary concerns for information professionals and LIS students.

Delighted our (Vikki Jones, @ingepanneels.bsky.social, Frauke Zeller, @melissaterras.bsky.social & I) new paper "Creative Informatics: the role of ‘the university’ in Edinburgh and South East Scotland's creative cluster" is out now in City, Culture & Society! Read it here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cc...

ICYMI: 11 changes historians and archivists need to make in response to generative AI. Now with a new and improved reading list. #dh #digitalhumanities #history #archives #ai #highered #pedagogy foundhistory.org/2025/07/gene...

This is a potential blueprint for how to build digital cultural heritage platforms to be interoperable and agile. So glad to see IIIF used throughout, with minimal compute principles. One to watch…!

Ever wondered where all the Cheers title photos are from? I did. And I've gathered everything I can find into this post. That was fun. joelmorris.substack.com/p/where-nobo...

Universities planning cuts to jobs and courses are not cash strapped Jo Grady highlights hypocrisy of the University of Edinburgh as it plans to make £140 million in cuts when then have £2.7 billion in net assets Enough is enough #WeAreTheUniversity

Job! Postdoc in Digital Cultural Heritage: Data Ethics & Software Ecosystems, on new EU funded grant. 3.5 years, @designinf.bsky.social, Edinburgh. Design ethical processes, & evaluate open source tools for Digital Cultural Heritage Objects, with me! elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Short BBC podcast about the history of Tippex, invented by Bette Graham 😍 - will be of interest to history of the book, and history of tech folks... www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

View from a b&b, #York. Last trip of this run before a whole four weeks at home…! #academicglamour

At the Guildhall, York today for our XRNetwork event - celebrating the projects we’ve funded but also Emma Brown now talking about the hard work we’ve put into EDI to make sure we’re reaching, supporting, and funding a wide range of people across the UK, via wonderful @xrstories.bsky.social team

York! 😍

Today I got told off by a new computational system at work as I tried to book a meeting room more than 23 days in advance and that is AGAINST POLICY even tho I have meetings in my diary booked years ahead, thus creating more work for me at a time we are all having to do “more with less”. K Thanks 👍

Museum cyberattacks “are no longer a question of if, but when.”Amy Adams and George Wilson on the National Museum of the Royal Navy attack www.museumnext.com/article/less...

Rogue urban sunflowers. Love it. #edinburgh

Interesting... can't wait to read the first edition!

Digital Cultural Heritage is big business… not that we fund our public institutions enough. This is an alarming, aggressive attack on a public institution that has found a way and a business model to offer a digital service.

Add to this worrying list “Library Washing” - persuading very prestigious university institutions to contribute their digital library collections to OpenAI’s model, to lend legitimacy, in exchange for a handful of (reduced cost!) magic AI beans.

Wikimedia Foundation joins the fight for library digital rights! 🎉 @wikimediafoundation.org has signed onto the 4 Digital Rights of Memory Institutions, affirming memory institutions' rights to Collect, Preserve, Lend & Cooperate in the digital age. ➡️ www.internetarchive.eu/2025/09/26/w...

On the big train home. Having just done Oxford-London-now en route to Edinburgh, I can report that EVERYONE is coughing badly. Absolutely everyone. Take care out there folks...

Had time to pop into the fab @bodleian.ox.ac.uk Treasure exhibition. The “problematic” case was eye opening. I hadn’t heard of this truly awful bible - the parallels today re what power is doing in the name of Christianity shows exactly why we need libraries, historians, & humanities scholars now.

Thankyou to @discoxford.bsky.social for the final @theturing.bsky.social humanities and data science group. Our voices stand together championing the importance of the humanities in digital futures. Thank you @melissaterras.bsky.social you are a star digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/networ...

Tuning in to the final event of the discontinued @theturing.bsky.social Humanities & Data Science Interest Group and @melissaterras.bsky.social is absolutely smashing it. Power & politics cannot be purged from this conversation digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/networ...

Great new tool from Flickr foundation - the Data Lifeboat, to package up Flickr image collections and get them out of dodge quickly, with metadata and readmes. Speaking to urgency of portability of digital cultural heritage given current times. They need some testers to play and give feedback 👇

A minute to admire the tropical palms of… #oxford

View from a college room, #Oxford. Love it. #academicglamour

Am becoming quite obsessed with this little ruined house right on the cliffs just outside Berwick, which you can briefly glimpse from the East Coast Mainline. 😍

Well the Pillow Queens at the Usher Hall were awesomesauce. Finally got to see them live. 10/10 no notes. They finished with Liffey 🥰 which is where to start with them if you don’t know them…

So today my piano tuner told me about a rare book about pianos he's been trying to find for aaaages - only two copies in libraries he can't access in the US - and I found him another copy online in 5 mins. Digital Librarianship skills can look like magic. Feeling like a triumphant book warrior 🏆📕

#Edinburgh folks: free hackathon for 15-18 year olds on Sat 27th Sept. Build a project in a day. Free, beginner-friendly, and open to secondary students. Food, drinks, snacks, and swag are provided. At @codebasetech.bsky.social, Castle Terrace. Sign up at: lochdin-edinburgh.netlify.app Please share!

At gate, about to leave China. An eye-opening 10-day trip, on tech ambition, infrastructure, pursuit of engineering… but essential place of criticality, and the humanities. I read this phenomenal Dan Wang book while here - really recommend it. View from Shanghai tower yesterday. Mind-blowing.

View from a hotel room, #Shanghai #academicglamour - home again, home again, early doors tomorrow… had a fab trip, but!

A brave and timely interview with John Unsworth, who has done so much for Digital Humanities, on his retirement. Considering the place of libraries to combat the rise of fascism…

Just chatting to other hotel guests about how much we love the official Chinese “Beware of Communication Network Scams” poster on the back of our room doors… the illustrations have their own peculiar aesthetic…!

Nanjing Flea/Vintage/Antique Market… fascinating range of things… I came home with 1960s(?) Deer Lady!

Having a marvellous time in #Nanjing, a guest of the fantastic Nanjing Uni, and a visit today to Nanjing Normal Uni. Today is Teacher’s Day in China - a national, celebrated festival: the atmosphere so, so different to how it feels working in UK Higher Ed just now.

again, i think there absolutely ARE ways to thoughtfully roll out new LLM and AI tools in a way that won't cause massive disruption to labor markets, and it is very telling that people with power largely aren't doing any of those things right now, or really even bothering to pretend that they are

Today I learned that the French term for hacker is "pirate informatique," which is just fantastic news

View from a hotel, #NanjingUniversity, China. Here to keynote at an AI conference later in the week. #academicglamour

AI things I love: the Merlin bird call identification app from @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social, Cornell. Screenshot of the sounds of Oxford before I wend my way home. More of this kind of AI processing, please. And we should be asking why there isn’t more of this, and where resources are to build more.

i wonder if there's anything about Turing's life that might benefit from a humanities perspective oh well we'll never know

So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!

View from a College Room, #Oxford #academicglamour. Is this #darkacademia enough for the hipsters 😍

“Oliver’s detractors, pro- and anti-lyric alike, show all the classic symptoms of this sort of shame: a discomfort with her work’s digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people—and a fear about what the popularity of such work might say about them.”

My favourite necklace broke, welp. Not unreasonable response from German jeweller: "We extimate that you live- unfortunately -  in Great Britain. To replace the chain is not a problem. The problem we have is the FUCKING CUSTOMS. ... we have no time and knowledge for to do it and no money." No lies 🥲

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.