"AI research assistant" researching data that is incomplete biased skewed missing excluded obscured extracted from collections that were already a partial, skewed view of the past (unless one really interrogates the sources of the data). What could go wrong...

The University of Virginia Archival AI Protocol governs "how artificial intelligence systems may access + use arch collections." Core rules: - item-level provenance + attribution - institutional control - donor + community responsibilities #ai #archives libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...

Archives are neither dusty nor old stuff neither dead nor boring. Archives are what we make of them. Each generation, each of us sees diferent things in an item. Each of us adds something new every time we engage. Each item in the archives is the sum of all these interactions.

Also worth noting for the ‘everything is online’ crowd that the numbers of archives being destroyed means that an increasing proportion cannot ever be online.

Awesome work, result of *collaboration* btwn historians & comp scientists! Nice shoutout to underlying work of generations of archivists and librarians who "over more than a century, transcribed, collated, gathered and published biographical records for over 20,000 individuals." #archives #labor

⬇️ This. Many collections everywhere, but particularly beyond Europe or N. America, are undercatalogued or not catalogued at all. When they burn, no trace survives.

For the "everything is online" crowd in the back: Important to consider that "everything" cultural heritage related that is accessible online represents only 1% (one percent) of archives, libraries, and museum collections worldwide.

IN THE SAME SEA's team and Dr. Joy Lewis have guest-edited the special issue “Small Islands, Proximity and Connection in the Eastern Caribbean” of the Journal of Caribbean History. See: www.uwipress.com/journals/the... Thanks to all contributors and the journal’s main editor Kathleen Monteith.

Missed this 3 days ago, but we're thrilled this is out. @ruthahnert.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social & I wrote this after 6 years of collaboration + discussions about - what "data" and "digitization" mean [in History] - what we need to do to ensure data is findable & accessible

"Cultural institutions face a perfect storm of risk factors. Operating budgets prioritise immediate public service – acquisitions, exhibitions, programmes, access – over invisible infrastructure investments." informationsecuritybuzz.com/the-cyberatt...

On ransomware and under-funded GLAMs: 'At no point was the British Library particularly negligent or unprepared. Instead, it was hindered by vulnerabilities shared by the majority of cultural institutions. ...the attack [is] a warning to the whole sector.' informationsecuritybuzz.com/the-cyberatt...

Important article that emphasizes proliferation + fragmentation of hist datasets & the need to - rethink our responsibility+commitment as scholars to FAIR principles - reeducate in dig skills for locating/navigating/using hist datasets - build communities around data to naturalize reuse/engagement

1/ Important new article by Dr. Tara Inniss that discusses the "chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure, and climatic threats" of Caribbean archives, compounded by vulnerabilities and policy gaps. Thread w recent examples of destruction of collections by fire: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Community archives "have been chronically underfunded by government agencies and private foundations..., passed over in favor of wealthier institutions that...promise longer term stability and prestige, but they also propagate dominant narratives." medium.com/community-ar...

📣 The public deserves more than basic training on how to use AI. That’s why we’re launching a new AI Civics initiative, treating AI not as a tool to be mastered, but as a domain of civic life where people have rights, responsibilities, & avenues for collective action. datasociety.net/points/build...

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

Everyone should be following the digitization and posting of the Adam Jacobs Collection. A 10,000 live concert chronicle of rocknroll-live-in-Chicago between the mid-1980s and today. archive.org/details/aada...

The Weekly Read is "Indigenous Archives" by Floridalma Boj Lopez, which analyzes the modes through which young Mayas in Los Angeles and Guatemala make sense of and respond to transnational structures of settler colonialism. Read the entire book for free now thanks to TOME! buff.ly/BTvGoKo

Digitization in countries beyond Europe and North America is often a fine balance between standards and realities on the ground. Several institutions provide digitization guidelines (and grants) that have been developed for projects in such locations. Here I point to some:

now available — the house archives built & other thoughts on black archival possibilities by @dorothyjberry.bsky.social (3rd printing) www.weherepress.org

Next week Wednesday 11 February we are delighted to have @pbhellawell.bsky.social & @libertypaterson.bsky.social present their paper titled 'The Ship Bedford: Atlantic and Archival Crossings in the Long Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade'. Join us either in person at the IHR or online from 17:30

Beautiful public outreach! Academic research on archival material "transformed into a series of stunning musical arrangements on stage."

We’re thrilled to launch the BlueSky page for CONTACT 🧪We are using radiocarbon, isotopes, DNA & historical analysis to map the timeline of Norse expansion into North America. Follow along! A 5-year ERC-funded project @rug.nl #Norse #Archaeology #NorthAtlantic #Research

My therapist: Don’t worry, Merovingian cursive is not real, it can’t hurt you Merovingian cursive:

"Newer inks on the palimpsest’s top layers contained more iron, whereas those used to transcribe Hipparchus’s catalog a few hundreds of years earlier left a calcium-rich residue that researchers zeroed in on with the x-ray imagery." www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost...

I can finally share the happy news 🚀 liiive.now — my tool for real-time collaborative annotation of #IIIF images — is going open source! First code is available here: github.com/rsimon/liiive Self-hosted setup coming by end of February. #OpenSource #DigitalHumanities

"all the books in the world" *laughs in archivist arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/a...

The Atlas of Digital Damages "is a staging area for collecting visual examples of digital preservation challenges, failed renderings, encoding damage, corrupt data, and visual evidence documenting #FAILs of any stripe." www.flickr.com/groups/21217...

The internet's memory isn’t a cloud—it’s heat, power, and hard drives 🔥💾 Inside the Internet Archive’s trillion-page fight against digital forgetting, from PetaBox servers to legal battles over memory itself ⚙️📚 ➡️ hackernoon.com/the-long-now... #InternetArchive #DigitalPreservation #WebHistory

Haven't checked out the #Sinners syllabus yet? Well, w/ a record of 16 Oscar nominations, it's high time to do so! bsky.app/profile/disc...

How do you transform a fragile book into carefully maintained digital images & provide free, round-the-clock access for anyone, anywhere in the world? On January 28 at 11am (CT), join us for “The Extraordinary, Ordinary Work of Building a Digital Library,” a free, virtual program: hmml.org/events

Our latest report— Implementing Mission Barbados: A roadmap for state transformation—co-authored with Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley shows how Barbados is working to align finance with national goals around six missions. Read the report ➡️ buff.ly/3Xk7nHB

brilliant article about dispersed, displaced, lost and destroyed collections and the strange combination of emotional, affective, technical and administrative language used to describe them

What is supervised learning? Why should it matter to digital humanities practice? And, most importantly, why should historians get involved in the process? Brief answers are offered at the link below: #digitalhumanities #AI #research #socialhistory #history #academia

Beautiful thread.

'Beyond the book: recycling print in early modern England' is out in splendid & lovely English Literary Renaissance. 50 free downloads, warm & ready to go, at www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/Q2MMD... (pcis: Bodleian coffret lined w. Horace & Virgil; damasked pages in Worcester College deed box)

🔥 "to address what is missing from the cultural record, we should not replace the real with the fabricated. We must elevate the accountability, specificity, and reflection that has long accompanied archival work" arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190

Among all the details of this great watercolour showing the interior of a British museum around the 1780s, is a #Greenland Kayak (in the upper right corner). This collection of Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) echoes the #earlymodern Wunderkammer and adds a colonial interest of the world. #skystorians

Level up: “Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research,” arXiv:2502.19190, preprint, arXiv, January 12, 2026, doi.org/10.48550/arX.... Written by some of the best minds I've had the honor of collaborating with or admire up close over the years. Absolutely solid read.

University archives are home to many under-described hazards. Especially if they have or had medical or dental programs.

Leonardo da Vinci's legacy won't be found in his DNA: defector.com/leonardo-da-...

Please join @dlocaribbean.bsky.social for a series of workshops focused on Copyright and Ethical Reuse facilitated by copyright expert @perrycollins.bsky.social. Register here, dloc.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/workshops/, to receive the Zoom links.

Love this: MTV video archive as retro media experience, including adverts! “This site streams 27,000 music videos, 24/7, across 7 decades... You get dropped in and see what comes on next, just like we all used to…You don’t curate it. You don’t optimize it... just let it play." wantmymtv.vercel.app

Two superb threads for whoever thinks that archives are "dusty" aka boring. Despite their shortcomings, biases, silences, they contain wonders.

Everything inexplicable becomes explicable if one applies Trouillot's silencing framework.

Archives can't digitize everything because understaffed underfunded undervalued overworked volumes of materials pre-/post-processing costs copyright ethical concerns digital preservation issues environmental impact [...] Most importantly: information is not in the content but in the context! +

Wait until you hear that LLMs can only train on digitized/datafied info. Most of the FACTS scholars use are in archives/libraries. Less than 1% of archival colletions worldwide have been digitized. Also: lots of facts are not even in archives, but in the attics.