Just 6 days left to get your #RSVP2026 proposals in! We hope you'll contemplate "Movements & Migrations" in and through the #19thC periodical press with us this summer @tcddublin.bsky.social. Our CFP deadline is THIS upcoming Friday, 21 November!

I curated some readings for class on "data tensions" and the list felt worth sharing. Come on a tour of datasets, books, the web, and AI with me... We'll start with this piece on the Google Books project: the hopes, dreams, disasters, and aftermath of building a public library on the internet. 1/n

If you were to do write about a close reading to show undergrads how to do *one* thing well, what would you choose?

I travelled to NYC to help launch (last night) Joanna Stalnaker's astonishing new book _The Rest is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death_. The book is a treasure, humane and moving: a vindication both of the #18thc philosophes and of what literary studies scholarship can do with them.

Great news: Johns Hopkins makes tuition free for most undergraduate students. ($200k/year or less is about 85% of American households.) hub.jhu.edu/2025/11/13/j...

One of the largest collections of maps on earth is in Milwaukee. With about 2 million different items, the American Geographical Society Library at UW-Milwaukee is a world-renowned repository.

❗Join us this Friday, Nov 14 for our next map collection showing❗ In this installment of From the Vault, we’ll look at maps that demonstrate historic and contemporary shifts to place names. #bpl #LMEC #maps #bostonmaps #localhistory #bostonhistory #bostonmuseum #thingstodoinboston #bostontourism

In Chap 6 of #ComputationalHumanities, @kmcdono.bsky.social argues in "Maps as Data" that we can go beyond close reading for maps just like we can for text. How can we search over the built and natural environment, and over scales and time? dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...

CFP: Doing Migration History with Digital Methods. 🔥Come and join us in Paris next year for the sommer school at the @dhiparis from June 22-26, 2026. 🖥️Rethink how digital sources reshape migration history, from research questions to methods and narratives, while tackling bias and meeting legal […]

Now that our edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Rant About 'Technology'" is (finally!) printed, bound, packed, & with campus mail, on its way to folks, we’re making approximately 60 of the internal poster available separately If you’d like to claim one see the order form at forms.gle/BKJQWSmcnuq8...

Lovely to be at Alison Bashford’s talk @lancasteruni.bsky.social as a part of the @victorianhand.bsky.social project.

We are so proud of this work. Not only is it the first effort to publish & analyze **open-access data** derived from the entire text contents of digitized @britishlibrary.bsky.social newspapers, it presents a metadata-driven approach to understanding bias in big historical data. #dh #skystorians

For the morning crowd - thread below about our new article on historical bias in digitized British newspaper collections #dh #skystorians @rs4vp.org @vpreditors.bsky.social @thenacbs.bsky.social

Quite a lot of info in this thread - it’s a big and complex piece of work - but the blog aims for a digestible overview: github.com/Living-with-...

TOMORROW (Thursday 13 Nov), 5pm @magdalenoxford.bsky.social. All welcome!

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

2 Bretagnes better than 1? Maybe not. Don't use genAI to make maps.

Want to know how to start a #DH association? Probably not - but lots about building sustainable orgs that support researchers, practitioners & students. Thanks @jfwinters.bsky.social for guiding the process & @jtonra.bsky.social for working on the implementation section w/ me! @ukiedh.bsky.social

Linked Pasts 11 programme (December 1–5 and some 8–12) linkedpasts.hcommons.org/2025/11/09/l...

Highlighting the data from our "Whose News" article: 1. 'NewsWords' unigrams for ALL of British Newspaper Archive (e.g. @findmypast.bsky.social, which includes the titles accessed via Gale too) shared with Living w/Machines in 2021, & lovingly crafted by Kaspar Beelen 1/3

We are so proud of this work. Not only is it the first effort to publish & analyze **open-access data** derived from the entire text contents of digitized @britishlibrary.bsky.social newspapers, it presents a metadata-driven approach to understanding bias in big historical data. #dh #skystorians

If you use digital newspaper collections this new OA paper is for you - it’s full of great insights into how to understand what’s in them and the many hidden perils of digital search (like the systemically poorer OCR for cheaper and more left-leaning newspapers - who knew?). Please share

This is a really important piece of scholarship - not only for people dealing with digitised collections data, but really for anyone who does stuff with data full stop!

This paper was long in the making; many thanks to editors @nolauren.bsky.social, Kristoffer Nielbo and @folgertk.bsky.social as well as @pfyfe.bsky.social @rs4vp.org @ukri.org @theturing.bsky.social and @britishlibrary.bsky.social Blog: is.gd/2IFc30 Article: doi.org/10.1017/chr.... 7/7 end🧵

'Whose News?' shows how new forms of metadata in conjunction with catalogue information can shed light on the complex origins and composition of digital collections, which we argue is an essential prerequisite for meaningful computational research. 6/7

Using enriched metadata e.g., on the price and political affiliation of newspapers, we can determine over-and under-represented voices within the collection; and, for the first time, relate this information to the actual *content* of particular newspaper titles. 5/7

In 'Whose News?' we extend our ‘Environmental Scan’ approach to source criticism at scale using ‘reference metadata’ from the past, which we argue is an approach that could be applied to understanding bias and missingness across other types of documents too. 4/7

We present alongside the paper: 1. ‘NewsWords’ - unigrams from the entire digitised collection, github.com/Living-with-... 2. Newspaper metadata, openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10.... 3. Mitchell's Press Directories, bl.iro.bl.uk/concern/data... 3/7

In ‘Whose News?' we analyse @britishlibrary.bsky.social's 19th c. newspaper collections using 3 OPEN ACCESS DATASETS which we also publish to encourage reproducible research with historical British newspaper collections as data... 2/7

!Stop Press! Article on bias in digitised newspaper collections: ’Whose News’, in the new journal of @comphumresearch.bsky.social by Kaspar Beelen, @jonhistorian61.bsky.social, @kmcdono.bsky.social and me. See blog for summary & 🧵 1/7 Article doi.org/10.1017/chr.... Blog is.gd/2IFc30 #dh #c19 🗃️

Join us online on 2 Dec for ‘Old, New, Precarious Data’, the 1st event of the 2025-6 @dh-researchhub.bsky.social seminar series on incompleteness & loss in digital cultural heritage collections. Speakers include @beatricecannelli.bsky.social, @heatherfro.bsky.social, Leontien Talboom & Amelia Acker

These posts are gold. They directly show how we already have massive documentation from REF impact case studies re: the value of disciplinary expertise in the real world. We can all dig up local examples and publicize them with political leaders & in communities.

'Members of the University and College Union...are unhappy about the threat of compulsory redundancies, as the university seeks to cut 400 full-time posts as part of efforts to save £30m, amid rising costs and a fall in international student numbers.' "are unhappy about" an existential crisis?

That's just the tip of this iceberg. Citizen research, enhanced archival practice, better-informed health care professionals and co-produced museum exhibitions all feature in this Impact Case Study. We lose more than Humanities when we lose university Humanities research. Humanity & policy. 4/4

What's more "The coal industry and its workers, via Friendly Societies, Trade Unions and Mutual Aid societies, were innovative in responding to disability via sickness benefits, provision of medical care and assistive technologies." Food for thought for today's policy-makers? 3/4

If Britain is 'sliding "into economic crisis over £85bn sickness bill', what can UK Arts, Humanities & Social Science research tell us about alternative pathways? Swansea University historians have some excellent answers. 1/4 @torstenbell.bsky.social @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social

At a time when humanities and social science courses are facing severe cutbacks I’ll be mounting a defence of them and their role in shaping a better future at this lecture at De Montfort University on 27 November. All welcome www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shaping-a-...

Lovely videos from @bucksarchives.bsky.social showing value of archival work. ALSO a perfect demonstration of why older traditional NLP approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) fail in historical contexts where people and place are not always mutually exclusive, nor easily distinguishable.

What's lost when we lose staff, departments, programmes and faculties in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and what's that got to do with organ donation? Amid the looming losses faced by Cardiff, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leicester and Nottingham (among many others), here's a worked example. 1/8

There are hundreds and hundreds of similar examples in the REF Impact Case Studies and Environment statements from 2014 and 2021 of contributions such as this--to medicine, science, social policy, mental health & wellbeing, culture & more. They're local, regional, national & international. 7/8

How aware is/are your MP(s) of what your local universities deliver beyond taught programmes? Little in political debate or media suggests that their understanding is high. Perhaps it's time to add tutorials with worked examples to the mix, before it's too late. ICSs offer easy starting points. 8/8

Join us next week on Nov 12, 12pm UK time, online to hear from @ehameeteman.bsky.social on "Reimagining Desalination through Digital Archives" at the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental DH Seminar. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reimaginin... #envhum #dh

📣📣 PRIZE 📣📣 The International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMap) is pleased to invite nominations and self-nominations for its Prize for Projects in Map History. Details: ishmap.com/prize-for-pr... @kparkerhistorian.bsky.social

Historians here: Anyone up for joining a panel on early modern translation practices in science and medicine with me and the wonderful Sare Arıcanlı? It’ll be for the 2026 ESHS–HSS Joint Meeting in Edinburgh. Let me know!

We're hiring in history of science at UW Madison! TT Assistant Professorship with a focus on water. Joint appointment between the History and Integrated Liberal Studies depts, and part of a university-wide hiring cluster on earth/sustainability science. jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/profess... #STS #HSMT

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

If you missed yesterday's wonderful Deswarte Prize seminar - ' (Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI' - it is now on the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History Seminar youtube channel youtu.be/iwT7PRy-eQs?...

'Academic futures are never secure. They're not even futures.' Or something.

Whoa Rebecca Lawrence has resigned as Chief Executive of @britishlibrary.bsky.social. Sorry that this might mean more turmoil at an institution that is a critical part of UK research infrastructure www.bl.uk/about/press/...