If you watch the Obama Library, the World Cup, and the Knicks parade this afternoon -- and nothing else -- you can actually see the America we're supposed to be at age 250

🎭 Faire une pièce de théâtre avec l'IA ne veut pas dire se passer d'expertise humaine, bien au contraire ! 👉 Costumes, décors, peintures : découvrez les métiers et savoir-faire ancestraux qui ont donné vie à la pièce "L'Astrologue ou les Faux présages" : swll.to/0ckcnF

IT'S TIME! The #CFP for #BSECS2027 has been released! This year's theme is 'Artifice and Authenticity'. The deadline for submissions is the 15 September 2026. The conference will by the 6-8 January 2027 @pembrokeoxford.bsky.social #18thC #skystorians 🗃️ www.bsecs.org.uk/conferences/...

Probably shouldn't have let a handful of weird business perverts unwind the cultural miracle of American research universities

☀️ Today's the day! We're welcoming about 60 participants on-site and 50 joining online for #CCLS2026, while Potsdam is showing off its full summer charm, with a sunny sky and just the right breeze for #CLS discussions. ... and did we mention the view from the #rooftop terrace? See you in a bit!

Issue 3 of Digital Enlightenment Studies out today! digitalenlightenmentstudies.org/issue/6/info/

”Computational hermeneutics: why study canonical figures like David Hume in the age of AI?”, published in Digital Enlightenment Studies: digitalenlightenmentstudies.org/article/id/64/

Whether people like it or not, use of AI in historical research is coming, and will have a big impact. The transcription process described here produces something quite new, and is scaleable. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Extrait | « Humanités numériques » (Hermann) « Sans peur de détruire les humanités philologiques, mais sans espoir démesuré de les sauver par le recours à un numérique qui peut être considéré, à tort, comme leur dépassement. » Plaidoyer pour une philologie hybride.

If you haven't read Benjamin Breen's thoughts on Talkie, you should! I agree that this is an exciting moment, exactly because we don't quite know yet what these things (historical language models) can or can't legitimately do. There are going to be temptations and false steps. Breen mentions +

Just published with @universitypress.cambridge.org ‘Digital Scholarly Editing in Practice: Making Oxford University Voltaire’ - free to read and download for the next few weeks! cup.org/3Qw6YQp @voltaire.ox.ac.uk

Cagnotte terminée pour le volume en hommage à @benoitmelancon.bsky.social. Objectif atteint et même dépassé. Merci @glennroe.bsky.social @mariedmartel.bsky.social @marcandea.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy @msonnet.bsky.social et les autres ! #lumières #québec

New on the blog! @zenothankyou.bsky.social on Enlightenment in Upper Hungary: Notes from the library of the Sárospataki Református Kollégium voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2026/03/05/e...

Interested in applying for a Gale Digital Humanities fellowship for 2026/27 @bodleian.ox.ac.uk - join our online informational session on Wednesday! www.digitalscholarship.ox.ac.uk/event/gale-f...

Very much looking forward to @kategibson.bsky.social speaking about 'Fostering in 18th Century Britain' to @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social on Wednesday. All welcome either online or in person, but please register www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Interdisciplinary research ftw…!

"Given that the UK needs more graduates with languages qualifications, the task of universities is not to accelerate the decline of language learning but to find ways to bolster their student intakes."

So pleased to have officially joined the Fellowship of @jesusoxford.bsky.social today - a vibrant academic community at the @ox.ac.uk since 1571.

Ce livre est une merveille Pour les masteurant-es, doctorant-es mais aussi pour les chercheureuses, même blanchi.es sous le harnais Une réflexion passionnante sur les nouvelles pratiques et écritures historiennes Merci @ccarolinemuller.bsky.social

📢 Call for Proposals: DH2026 📍 Daejeon, South Korea 🇰🇷 📅 July 27-31, 2026 🎯 Theme: "Engagement" Submissions: Oct 8 - Dec 8, 2025 Hybrid conference w/ AI translation support More info: dh2026.adho.org/cfp/ #DH2026 #ADHO #KADH

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...

Great paper showing how far text embedding models have to go in capturing the semantics of phrases arxiv.org/abs/2506.08354

Hey, the dataset is out now. A million books: huggingface.co/datasets/ins... H/t @naitian.org for the link

Fancy Edinburgh Uni as a visiting fellow? Global Majority Fellowships in NLP 2025-2026, for early careers researchers. For this 1st year, we welcome applications on “Responsible NLP and Digital Cultural Heritage”, working with me! 2-3 months in duration, Visa fees, stipend &travel. Please share!

#CCLS2025 #conference is only a few weeks away, and registration will close soon! 😱 🔜 Register by Thursday, June 12, at 11:59 p.m. GMT+1 to join on site in #Krakow or #online. 💻 You can register directly here: www.konferencje-uj.pl?lang=en&go2r... #JCLS #CLS #LiteraryComputing #CulturalAnalytics

I had the honour of delivering this year’s Voltaire Foundation Digital Enlightenment Studies Lecture in Oxford. The talk is now available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Nf...

Victor Hugo's artwork was amazing. Icymi, I wrote up a blog post about an exhibition in London at the Royal Academy with a ton of pics. ghostweather.com/blog/posts/2... #museums

You can still register for onlince access to Prof Leah Price's 2025 Lyell Lectures @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social, 'Victorian Books and their Servants', though we are fully booked in person ... visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/lyell-lectur...

📆 Save the date! 📆 Mikko Tolonen @tolonen.bsky.social (@helsinki.fi) is going to give our Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies! 9 May 2025, Blackwell Hall, Weston Library, 17:00–19:00. More information: tinyurl.com/3cjmx4zj

CFP: LLMs and DH, Paris, July 3-4 2025 www.fabula.org/actualites/1...

CFP conference+journal track of the Journal of Computational Literary Studies (JCLS). The 4rd annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies CCLS2025 will take place from July 3-4, 2025, in Krakow, Poland. Deadline Jan 30! jcls.io/site/cfp/

New on the blog! We are delighted to introduce ‘L’Écriture est la peinture de la voix: essays in honour of Nicholas Cronk‘, the latest special collection from Modern Languages Open which is available to read Open Access. #18C #DH voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2024/12/12/i...

Just in time for the holidays, a new volume of #digitalenlightenmentstudies - text reuse ; revolutionary digital corpora ; Voltaire’s manuscripts, and more! digitalenlightenmentstudies.org/issue/5/info/ #digitizingenlightenment #lumieres #digital18c

A pair of interesting and helpful new accounts of studying C18 French text reuse from @glennroe.bsky.social and Dario Maria Nicolosi digitalenlightenmentstudies.org/article/id/22/ digitalenlightenmentstudies.org/article/id/23/

BookNLP-fr, the French Versant of BookNLP. A Tailored Pipeline for 19th and 20th Century French Literature doi.org/10.48694/jcl... #CHR2024

Further articles in 'L’Écriture est la peinture de la voix' include work by Robert Morrissey and @glennroe.bsky.social, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The Questions sur l’Encyclopédie in the Nineteenth Century’. Read it #OA on MLO: bit.ly/MLO-Roe-Morrissey. @voltaire.ox.ac.uk @tomofwynnland.bsky.social

Many thanks to Lea Ypi for a fascinating paper on Kant’s approach to colonialism and to the large, interdisciplinary audience at this term’s Enlightenment Workshop! Next session: Colin Jones on Robespierre, 29 Jan, 5pm. www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/home/researc...

I'm sure I. A. Richards would interpret this as evidence that we need more and better teaching of poetry. That interpretation remains open!

Releasing two trillion tokens in the open. huggingface.co/blog/Pclangl...

Hi new followers. 👋🏼 It's probably my sacred duty to highlight that I published this firey volume recently with @dukepress.bsky.social. I just presented it in Martinique this AM. Big hit. Folks are ready for this more radical Césaire.

The best of all possible worlds: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German polymath, mathematician, scientist & philosopher, inspired Voltaire's Dr Pangloss; died #OTD 1716. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum

Schmidt Sciences is outlining the timeline for a new program to support research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities. Open call for proposals to come Dec 15. www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

The part of this narrative I knew least about is Fei-Fei Li’s creation of the crucial ImageNet dataset. See beginning and end of this nice story for laypersons on the history of neural-network deep learning: arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/h...

New year, new class. Teaching “Digital Texts in the Humanities” for the first time at Lancaster with lots of inspiration from @zoeleblanc.bsky.social @ryancordell.bsky.social @miriamkp.bsky.social @pfyfe.bsky.social @glennroe.bsky.social + Programming Historian & more! Will share the syllabus soon.

New year, new lecture series! We are excited to invite you to our brand new Voltaire Foundation Lecture Series in Digital Scholarship 2024 - Digital Enlightenment Studies: Methods and Approaches! The full programme can be found on our website: www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/vo...

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Forget Sam Altman. America's greatest AI visionary is... an English professor in Illinois https://www.businessinsider.com/ted-underwood-ai-optimist-humanities-language-literature-research-bill-gates-2023-12 (came across this article article about @tedunderwood.me !) #AI #humanities

A new piece of mine, in TIME, to coincide with the release of the Napoleon biopic: time.com/6337581/napo...

Deuxième étape de l'atelier d'édition critique, après Wikisource, une belle page Wikipédia sur Le Prince philosophe d'Olympe de Gouges: fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Prin... Bravo aux étudiantes ! @wikipediafr.bsky.social