Our full-gut reno is coming up next week and we’ve been selling/storing everything - so now I have a house full of chairs. Maybe we will have our family dinners on moving boxes!

Just waited two hours to get into the line for passport controls at CDG. Some poor kid next to me peed his pants after waiting for two hours, and I gotta admit, the sheer “I don’t care” affect of the passport control security folks to his poor mom was remarkable.

what is the datafied web? how to study it? and reimagine it? we chat in @internethistories.bsky.social ✨ jonathangray.org/2026/05/18/d... with @nannathylstrup.bsky.social @carolingerlitz.bsky.social @sebgiessmann.bsky.social @silvertje.bsky.social @ianmilligan1.bsky.social @valeriesch.bsky.social

This July I'm starting as inaugural Director of the new School of Social, Political, and Historical Research at Waterloo. Seven former departments – Anthropology, Classical Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology & Legal Studies – coming together.

I do not envy people trying to find a middle path on AI inside humanities depts. It’s not only that the scene is polarized, but that the “middle paths” are hard. Becoming Colonial Williamsburg is coherent; doing cultural AI is coherent; teaching students to do close reading with AI seems tricky. +

Must be getting older: I can do the North America -> Europe jet lag perfectly fine (the power of sleeping on planes!), but East Coast -> West Coast and I'm inevitably waking at 4:30am. The only wisdom I've learned is to embrace it and enjoy a few quiet hours.

Had such a wonderful time at Aix-Marseille University today, an honour to be invited to speak on my work around web archiving and the impact of the September 11th attacks. Back tomorrow, and in the meantime, unwinding…

A key post by Mark Humphries. After a decade of crypto BS & internet enshittification, tech skepticism is healthy. AI isn’t conforming to this model, even if Altman feels similar to Elon. We’re moving fast to a world where AI transforms our economy & universities. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Bummed I can't make #cha2026 when all my great Canadian history friends and colleagues seem to be able to go – had hoped to, but unfortunately, a combination of my daugher's dance recital and a home renovation move made that week just completely fall apart. I'll be sad from afar!

If it turns out the thing LLMs are best at is generating computer code from something like "natural language" then, in a sense, they are just a continuation of the abstraction of computer code than began with assembly language and continued with high level languages and their compilers.

Some folks on main campus were describing the satellite campus admin building I'm in as "the place with the smelly bathrooms," and it hit me like a wave. Have they put us in the campus equivalent of Slough House?

Doing research for an article and just found that UsenetArchives.com now requires Age Verification to access. IMO, this points to a secondary consequence of the current moral panic and associated age verification legislation: Restricting access to born-digital history for those under 18.

A great whirlwind trip to Vancouver - great to catch up with colleagues and deliver a talk at UBC's History Department. (My family may be less jazzed that I am spending the Good Friday holiday on a plane...)

Digital history didn’t fail; it stopped short. It built archives, not cumulative research programs. Now AI is asking the questions DH left unresolved. Computational history is what comes next. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/the-lost-p...

Tenure-track position in Canadian history at Lakehead!

Here we go again! Go Jays!

Release day!! 🎉 I've been working on this book since 2020, so it's exciting that it is finally out in the world!! I really just wanted to write a cool story, and so I hope people enjoy it! 🙏

I know AI is debatable, but I gotta be honest, it's going through and placing library holds for me (after I've signed into my browser), and this is automating the worst, most boring parts of my workflow.

On an early morning GO Train for a provincial government AI Summit in Toronto. Not naturally a morning bird, but taking the train across the countryside as the sun rises is beautiful.

Small #universities matter now more than ever. They provide a model for teaching & learning that resists the convenience of #AI & they are also cost effective. In #Ontario, however, systematic underfunding puts these universities at risk. lfpress.com/opinion/colu... #onpoli #cdnpoli #cdnpse

Good thing governments spent the last decade telling young people they all had to learn how to code and universities that they were useless unless they were churning out IT grads.

The @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social version of "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean" is out today! It includes an audiobook, which I recorded last December at a sound studio here in Washington, DC. Now you can read or listen to the book, even if you live outside of the US and Canada. #History 1/2

Tried to get my AI agents to enage in a Nathan Fielder-esque "Rehearsal" of an upcoming conversation. Claude is down to play. Co-Pilot is like that co-worker who refuses to engage in any chicanery or tomfoolery. Come on!

Kinda sad that the main Olympics are over. This was the first one in a while that I really got into - probably because I have a sports-crazed son - and I genuinely thought the CBC Gem app was great.

Writing a commissioned/invited book chapter this morning. Been recounting therein debates about print/digital fixity and preservation, from Eisenstein and Johns, through @kfitz.info, up to @ianmilligan1.bsky.social. Now, though, Robyn is demanding a cuddle. Who am I to say no?

I feel like we could forgo giving the stuffed animals to the hockey players… (My son is insisting we watch the medal ceremony. Sigh.)

Fuck

My research trip was cancelled last night due to the winter storm - a 1:45am call from Air Canada - but the bright side is that I get to watch the gold medal game with my kids. The downside… it’s going to overtime and my heart is pounding…!

I can’t believe I have a 3pm meeting, during the third period of the US/Canada gold medal women’s hockey game. Let’s go Canada!!

Wayback Machine director Mark Graham pushes back on unfounded claims from media organizations that the Wayback Machine is a backdoor for AI scraping.⁠ ⁠ Read more via @techdirt.com 🔗 www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/p...

Searching "longest national anthems" because wouldn't that be a fun Olympics awards ceremony... (too bad they don't play all 158 stanzas of the Greek national anthem, "Hymn to Liberty")

Unbelievable. OCUFA didn't even mention the deeply regressive raid on student financial aid in their announcement response (it did, however, critique the tiny tuition fee increase, which should have been much larger).

No, you pay a small fraction of the true costs because tuition has been kept artificially low, at what has become a real cost to the quality of education. Cost of living dwarfs tuition as an obstacle to access post-sec ed. www.ctvnews.ca/london/artic...

I've been asked to chair (and time-keep) two sessions at the @cndhistassoc.bsky.social conference in June. I'm now wondering where I can rent a bear costume in Charlottetown...

Here's my full take on Thursday's funding annoucnement in Ontario. It's a big deal. The money to institutions is good, the way the money being raised is more regressive than it needed to be.

Transit nerd alert, checking out the new Line 5 in Toronto. (I am not a good photographer, as I always forget to take photos)

I have a "full" MS Co-Pilot license. I hate to admit that the chat function, for scheduling meetings, is amazing. Presented with a list of meeting times, I say "find me a time there immediately following another MS Teams meeting I am in," and it cooks it up.

Took the Friday off to take my son up to a ski race - now that my feet have defrosted, glad we did! (Also, it was at a private hill, kept thinking they’d kick us out once they realized we were from Kitchener..)

New on H-Sci-Med-Tech: Check out @ianmilligan1.bsky.social (@uwaterloo.ca)’s review of @lucipangrazio.bsky.social & @neilselwyn.bsky.social’s book _Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data & Everyday Life_, pub 2023 @mitpress.bsky.social #hstm Review available @hnetreviews.bsky.social

Heck of a day, worth trying out a new bottle of gin. Empress 1908 - makes me want to head to Victoria!

I presume it's all this new AI stuff - I am the "proud" owner of a new M365 Co-Pilot license which has filled my apps with cruft – that makes MS Office desktop apps feel incresingly sluggish on my 2021 MacBook Pro?

Hey, this makes me seem pretty, pretty cool - hanging out with the "British Academic Historians."

We’ve (foolishly?) decided to renovate our house. Like a good nerd I am now trying to figure out what that means.

Personally, I would not do this.

One of those dream days that rarely comes along as a full-time administrator. An 8-hour "retreat" (i.e. long meeting) was cancelled with one days notice, and you better believe I almost got carpel tunnel syndrome with how quickly I replaced that with my own 8-hour retreat in my office.

Our dryer broke. So now I can get a new drier with AI!

My son just did his first ski race ever! Super proud of him. (And a bit proud of myself for standing in extreme cold for hours as his cheering squad)

An email and a phone call from the city, telling us to run a tap continuously (could be months!) because of our water line being at risk of freezing. Given our house dates to 1916, makes me wonder how it’s lasted this long..!