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.

It's the run-up to Christmas and as every year I'm reposting my own Xmas miracle story - of the Apollo 8 mission that set off on 21 Dec 1968, their iconic reading from Genesis on Christmas Eve, & how we found the name of the woman who had this genius idea. writinghelena.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/t...

If you work somewhere w/a free public space+printer for work purposes, you can make a mini zine distro! Even just 5 zine titles you periodically replenish stacks of. Search "zine"+topic, or Zine Bakery's catalog has this large subset of free zines: airtable.com/appY7WyBFjSz...

"the material histories of a paper-using humankind...are relevant and crucial to understanding global history...across different book cultures, belief systems, and political constellations...highlighting parallel developments, entanglements, and integrations between the world’s paper-using cultures"

Clay letters from ancient Mesopotamia are alive with idiom, sayings, and everyday language that I love. Here are just a few random ones so you can enjoy them too.

I love how the @bucksarchives.bsky.social does outreach! This post starts with the (seemingly) "dusty" archival boxes, gives a sneak peek of the reluctant, stern county archivist (brilliant!), and offers a riveting human story, which is what archives are all about!

🎉 Today I defended my dissertation and passed with summa cum laude. The title is "Dependent Lives In and Beyond Archives: Enslaved People in Sephardic Jewish Households in Early Modern Bridgetown, Barbados (1654-1800)." The abstract is below, and I hope to publish it soon.

Found the coolest website that takes random found cassette tapes people submit and digitizes them. I’m listening to an NYC hip hop station from 1994: intertapes.net

LLMs can only understand the first line. Humans can understand the infinite context below.

"[...] people can suffer from historical overdose, complaisant hostages of the pasts they create." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past [1997] 2015, xxii

Ok sure just a tiny little note: YOU CANNOT TALK TO HER THAT'S NOT HER. This is the technology version of talking to a really good Elvis impersonator. It's not Elvis.

Somebody make a movie out of this thread!

Looking for some photos in the LoC collection, I noted that John Collier really liked photographing bulletin boards for the Farm Security Administration in the early '40s :) Here: Childersburg, Alabama; Questa, New Mexico; Fort Hunter, New York

"...scientists need to start thinking more seriously about historical records as research resources. Not just as background or context, but as sources of actual data. The barrier between historical research and contemporary science is becoming more permeable..."

🧵 of good free #zines on ethical+safe digital preservation of protest & advocacy: * always RTing @invisiblehistories.bsky.social's "How to Archive a Protest: A Field Guide for Southern Memory Workers" drive.google.com/file/d/1QtFT... +

More than ever it's crucial to be able to understand the provenance/trajectory of information to determine authenticity + reliability. Generative AI tools "cannot indicate that no information exists; instead, they will invent details that appear plausible but have no basis in the archival record."

The second of our yearly lists--this one features thirty-five articles and chapters authored by contingent historians in 2025.

Hear me out. Holiday gift idea.

I bet that people who think AI can compensate for "archival silences" have never set foot in an archives, let alone worked with archival collections. And this is the hill I'll die on.

don’t miss the 2025 @contingent-mag.bsky.social book list! inclusive & welcoming as ever, Contingent curates a list where the hard part is not getting on it, but rather, the hard part is researching & writing a book while contingent contingentmagazine.org/2025/12/02/2...

Join us on a day full of new data of the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) Database, presentations from researchers that are related to ESTA or the field of Indian Ocean slavery, and the introduction of TIDES. iisg.amsterdam/en/events/la...

📢 NEW 'Project Progress Update' Blog Post! 📢 We've recently reached a very significant project milestone, and thought this would be the perfect moment to provide a research update: sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult... Featuring @zooniverse.bsky.social news, and a sneak peek at our database! 📜✍️💻

"You find yourself in an archive. You are there because you are seeking something... You expect order, you need order. Instead, you find instability, difficulty, and danger. Your plans fall apart and time unravels. You have been lured in; it is a labyrinth." Edmund de Waal, an Archive

On the occasion of Fantastic Futures 2025 #FF2025, we share the progress made by the Working Group on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage to better support data providers in describing their data. Learn more and check out their Datasheet template - Version 2! bit.ly/3Kgd84n

CFP: 'Difficult Collections' Special issue of 'Paper Trails' @uclpress.bsky.social. Focus on challenges of working with troubling heritage collections (colonialism, eugenics, representation, etc). Proposals: 31/01/26; Submissions: 31/05/26. Details: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/special-coll... #GLAM ##HistorySky

Some great books and articles on archives and libraries that came out in 2025. In no specific order. 🧵

Or a library

Some great books and articles on archives and libraries that came out in 2025. In no specific order. 🧵

We've got some HUGE news! We've DOUBLED in size overnight! Not only have we added "some" more Cairo Genizah fragments, but "ALL" of them @theul.bsky.social !!! This now brings the total number of items in Cambridge Digital Library to OVER 160,000! cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/...

Here's a poster version of the DIY Web Archiving zine's front cover, with some added text if you want to print copies for some space where people can take them—you can hang this poster above or nearby:

"We are living through precedented times." - Historians

Coming March 2026 from @yalepress.bsky.social - Sumana Roy's beautiful translations of Jagadish Chandra Bose's work on plants, whose voices he recorded through stunning technologies + vocabularies. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

We’re delighted to announce that the newly remodeled Getty Provenance Index has won Digital Innovation of the Year in this year’s Apollo Awards. [🧵10/10] Learn more: www.getty.edu/tracingart/

There aren't enough words in the world to express my gratitude for all the @archive.org does!!! I had "lost" 5 blogposts, but found them archived in @waybackmachine.bsky.social Also: humanity's digital memory hangs from literal threads & we're so foolish to believe that digital stuff are "forever."

I'm so grateful our project, "Voices in Slavery's Archive: Law, Place and Testimony in British Guiana," was funded! @dianapaton.bsky.social, Linsey McMillan, @juanitacox.bsky.social, @pbhellawell.bsky.social, Estherine Adams, and Jamie McLaughlin www.ed.ac.uk/news/project...

"Ongoing digitization and cataloging work not only serves the interests of scholars and manuscript communities—it also creates crucial, publicly-accessible provenance records that provide an increasingly robust bulwark against manuscript theft and trafficking." hmml.org/stories/reve...

"This is the first study that uses proteomics to analyze Renaissance recipes, and the very first to use in-depth archival research to contextualize proteomics results."

I very much appreciate research at scale on the representativeness of and biases in digitized archival collections. Some examples below. 🧵

A total of 150 million document images have already been processed in Transkribus! Stacked on top of each other, they would form an impressive 15-kilometre-high tower—almost double the height of Mount Everest. 🏔️

!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 🗃️

Great write-up of the emotional context surrounding written documents that we usually encounter flattened out in folders in the research room. Beautiful art that draws the gaze to the act of the creation of letters as a distillations of emotions.

😂 😂😂

😍😍😍 OMG! *How* beautiful is this user interface. So many wonderful ways to search and navigate archival material! The ability to compile life stories clustering personal "life archives"--simply stunning. Congrats @timhitchcock.bsky.social and all involved.

What do pirates in Madagascar, a red knitted jumper, the sunken warship Vasa, captivity and colonialism, and the Prize Papers have in common? They're all part of our new online lecture series "Ships & Seafaring 1500–1800". Join us weekly on Mondays, 1pm CET, on Zoom #earlymodern #maritimehistory 🗃️

"...while recent models show competence in recursive knowledge tasks, they still rely on inconsistent reasoning strategies, suggesting superficial pattern matching rather than robust epistemic understanding." www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Transkribus is the handwritten text recognition tool that we used to transcribe 25,000 wills from 1540-1790 for our Leverhulme project. Beginners' guide here 👇 #DigitalHumanities 🗃️ #EarlyModern

oooooooo! Foundling tokens are being nominated for Unesco's International Memory of the World Register! With archives in Portugal, Italy, Argentina, and Belgium nominating. also VERY handy overview of collections with foundling tokens in that nomination form: ebesluit.antwerpen.be/zittingen/25...