I'm very excited about this collaboration between @ropensci.org's R-Universe and @bioconductor.bsky.social to build common infrastructure: modernizing build systems for #RStats while expanding and testing new models for governance and development. ropensci.org/blog/2026/04...

Just saw the announcement for two exciting PhD positions in Arthur Kocher's ERC project EpidemioCene (https://www.eva.mpg.de/press/news/article/reconstructing-the-long-term-dynamics-of-human-infectious-diseases/): One on ancient pathogen genomics at the MPI EVA in Leipzig ( […]

Yesterday, a colleague sent me a paper. Topic: Gap filling methods. Application: Daily precipitation time series in Oman. A fusion model promised an extreme quality boost compared to any single model. Since gap filling and time series extension of meteorological data is more or less the core of […]

Sigh. The #aibots are running amok again. I need to update my network protections on https://opencontext.org If there was any genuine "I" in "AI", the bots would skip the slow and costly random crawl of our website. If they really wanted gobs of #archaeology data describing random broken bits […]

Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 21 new and 50 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 9 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize a full week's worth of such work, but meantime here's a #SneakPeek at one […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

The minutes for the last meeting of the @caa_ssla are out. Congrats to @mattomasini on becoming the new convener and a huge thank you to outgoing convener Martin Hinz! Keep an eye out for the planned catch-up at #caa2026. https://sslarch.github.io/minutes/2026-03-06/

After many months of work I'm happy to announce the release of [Poseidon v3.0.0](https://github.com/poseidon-framework/poseidon-schema/blob/master/poseidon_package_specification.pdf). This is a new schema release that comes with a number of changes in the Poseidon package data structure. Among […]

Working on a new string encoding technique for {zap} - a package for fast/compact serialization of #RStats objects Char vectors are converted on-the-fly to a dictionary+index (equivalent to converting to a factor). Integer indexes are then compactly bit-packed […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

🆕 blog! “How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?” When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK […]

Excited to share our new preprint on time-lagged F2-statistics, which informs about migration rates from ancient DNA data. Find a preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.12.710875v1 The work was driven by Giulio Isacchini and Oskar Hallatschek. Proud to be part of it! […]

🚨 Job alert in my group: Want to do a PhD in Computational Linguistics working on figurative language (metaphor), on social media data, and in an interdisciplinary digital humanities environment, at one of the largest universities in Germany? Apply by March 30, 2026! Contact me with any […]

📢 We’re hiring at WorldPop! We're recruiting Research Fellows / Senior Research Fellow to join our team, producing high-resolution population data supporting governments, NGOs and UN partners globally. This role focuses on geospatial data, statistical/AI methods, and international […]

'Introduction to Maritime Archaeology' Summer School (BA/MA, 7.5. ECTS) at the University of Copenhagen and Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde: https://kurser.ku.dk/course/harks2026u/2025-2026 Open to Danish or international students; register before 9 April. #archaeology #maritimearchaeology […]

RE: https://lgbtqia.space/@dianea/116083673458174334

PSA: If you block the `claude` user on GitHub, you'll get a warning every time you view a repo with that user in its commit history. This allows you to, the moment you look at a repo, immediately adjust your expectations. You may do so here: https://github.com/settings/blocked_users

I wrote a small game simulating the transition to a solar-powered economy. You can build solar panels, batteries, hydrogen storage and sell your generated electricity at market prices. Electricity demand, pricing, and weather conditions are based on realistic […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

When I said that your discord clone doesn’t need e2ee, I got a lot of comments along the lines of “ then how would I use it to organize the revolution!” The answer is: you don’t. If you have more users than can comfortably share a Signal chat and hence want to use discord or something like it […]

I went to a fantastic seminar today at the University of Canterbury by Carl Bergstrom (@ct_bergstrom), titled “Information Foraging in a Social Media World.” Carl has been applying his knowledge of how information flows through ecological and evolutionary systems to better understand our digital […]

#typst PSA: Typst is actually three languages in a trench coat: * The default, a markdown-like language. * A programming language, where you can do... well, programming stuff: define variables and functions, compute things, ... * A language just for describing math expressions to be typeset […]

‘AltMetric’-style services, which track citations to academic papers outside of academic literature—so in the news, social media, etc.—have been quick to incorporate #bluesky posts, but I’ve yet to see one that includes the #fediverse I can see that (real) decentralisation makes it harder to […]

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@pandoc/116011707001692685 This is amazing! Such a neat interface for a common task, so easily accessible. I wonder how this was implemented and if I could use something like this for my own haskell projects.

“pandoc for the people”, the pandoc wasm web-app, is now available at https://pandoc.org/app/ It allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the browser. The documents never leave the computer, thus ensuring *full privacy*. Conversions to pdf are done via Typst […]

Ironically a few weeks after reading this excellent piece from Dariusz Jemielniak, I've 'retired' from #wikipedia, which I've been editing for more than half of my life: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00075-0 Academics absolutely should take Wikipedia seriously as the single most […]

Bereits Mitte Januar kamen die erfreuliche Nachricht für Freundinnen und Freunde #historischer #geodaten #hgis aus #bayern: Die topografischen Karten in den Maßstäben 1:25.000 bis 1:100.000 stehen nun unter einer freien CC-BY 4.0 Lizenz zur Nutzung bereit 🎉 👇 […]

And as a friendly reminder, we hold monthly meetings where we host amazing speakers, organize collectively-maintained projects, and discuss all things relating to scripting languages in archaeology! (we also sometimes spill out into other #digitalarchaeology and #ComputationalArchaeology topics […]

Have you ever tried to contribute to an EU opensource project hosted at https://code.europa.eu? I did and failed. Why? #digitalautonomy #digitalsovereignty #opensource #eu #tech

Elections to the 3D Analysis SIG committee will be held at #caa2026. Details below if you're interested in joining, and more info about the SIG can be found here: https://caa-international.org/special-interest-groups/3d-analysis/

I'm #colorblind and I use https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/ frequently. Randall 'xkcd' Monroe did a survey of over 100,000 readers where he showed them random rgb colors and said "what would you call this?" and afterwards he did his best to sort the results into the most popular color names and the […]

Gibt es eine umfassende Übersicht über Mastodon-Instanzen (nicht Konten) aus Deutschland, die aus Wissenschaft, Hochschulen, Forschung und Bildung heraus betrieben werden? Hintergrund: Der idw steht regelmäßig im Austausch mit den Instanzbetreibern u. a […] [Original post on idw-online.social]

🗺️ fastfocal: fast moving-window and point extraction for rasters in R, optimized for large windows and common focal stats via FFT. Built on terra. https://cran.r-project.org/package=fastfocal #rstats #giscience #rspatial

Coprolites aren't my favorite fossil but they're a solid number two. #dadjokes #paleontology

Asking the #OpenScience Hivemind: been spending the last couple of weeks discovering that a lot of tools that I use, that download databases stored on #zenodo, are failing with 403. But downloading the file manually via a `wget` command works... It happens regardless of which network I'm on […]

Teaching introductory archaeology is so fun. You get to flit back and forth between theory and practice and introduce students to many different skills. And get out in the fresh air! My preparation for next semester's first year course includes organising two excursions, coordinating with a […]

This is so niche and yet so relevant to my interests: "Kip is an experimental programming language that combines Turkish grammar rules with a type system. Case endings, vowel harmony, and other Turkish morphological features are an integral part of Kip's type-checking process." […]

I've spent a long time asking myself why open source matters so much to me, why I keep coming back to it. I once joined a company purely because they promised I could do open source full-time (it didn't turn out well). Before that, I was doing open source inside and outside of regular jobs. And […]

✅ Testing your code involves including additional logic to test whether your code is operating as you expect it to. Aside from supporting users with different computational environments, they’re a great way to slow down and think about the code you’re writing and whether it supports your goals […]

RE: https://archaeo.social/@zackbatist/115894441545778394 ✨ Advertisement block for open-archaeo.info ✨ It's your first resource if you are looking for a software tool to solve your #digitalarchaeology or #ComputationalArchaeology problem. And if you know a good one: Have a look whether it is […]

Unfortunately mostly what I've been doing so far in #digiarchmaintainathon week is maintaining my sanity in the face of university bureaucracy. But with what's left I will try to get my #rstats package wrapping the #intchron chronological data API ship-shape and ready for CRAN […]

📈 We’ve showcased many great projects throughout the week, many of which are developed by junior researchers and volunteer labour. If any of these are especially interesting to you, consider reaching out to offer support! This can take the form of contributions to the code base, helping promote […]

🤖 Continuous integration (CI) automates tasks that always need to be done after you update your codebase e.g. building a software, testing, generating documentation, or producing accessible outputs. This is great, as it ensures robust software development. Want to learn more? Check out our short […]

🌐 Do you publish your code properly? While commercial platforms like GitHub and GitLab may provide very useful collaboration features, they should not be trusted as long-term stewards of software or data. Professional archives are better suited for this. There are some options. Check out our […]

ActivityPub standardization is back! The #W3C just announced a new Working Group to evolve #ActivityPub and #ActivityStream and related standards! This is extremely good news. It's not like all the world's federated social media protocol problems were already solved! lists.w3.org/Archive...

📚 Plenty of research has been done to encourage better software engineering practices, among archaeological and non-archaeological researchers alike. We compiled a brief list of papers addressing challenges in this space, and we encourage you to take a gander […]

RE: https://archaeo.social/@CAA_SSLA/115893524040726408 Yesterday I updated the roadmap for open-archaeo, which is a list of open source archaeological software and resources (https://open-archaeo.info). while it's fairly comprehensive, it could really benefit from a focused attempt by people […]

🐾 A roadmap is a documented plan of action that structures future work. Having a checklist of things to do (and already done!) can help garner momentum while also making your plans more transparent for prospective users. Roadmaps should document what features are planned over short- and […]

For the #digiarchmaintainathon I just updated the open-archaeo roadmap: https://github.com/zackbatist/open-archaeo/blob/master/ToDo.md This involved checking off some completed items on our to do list, adding a few new ones, and restructuring the document for greater clarity. I also added […]

📜 Check: Is your code properly licensed? ⁉️ If not, go and give one of your repositories a license now! It is such a quick and easy way to improve the re-usability of your contribution. Have a look at our small introduction, if you need guidance 👉 […]

RE: https://archaeo.social/@scschmidt/115888509446346811 Following this excellent tip from @scschmidt I learned about cffr (https://docs.ropensci.org/cffr/), a package that automates generation of CITATION.cff for R packages using existing package metadata and keeps it up to date with a GitHub […]

✨ The Journal of Open Source Software @joss is a great venue for writing a software review. They tend to focus on technical aspects, but if you prefer to focus on application-oriented feedback, Archäologische Informationen (https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/arch-inf) is happy to […]