🧒 Our website detailing information about our upcoming conference “Space, Place, Belonging and Identity in Intergenerational Histories of Childhood and Youth” is now LIVE!

When I'm tired and grumpy at work: this trip home from work helps. #museumlife

I'm not completely sure I have read all of Orwell's fiction, but my favourite is his journalism & memoir stuff. His essay Some thoughts on the Common Toad is beautiful.

I got curious about this quote, so I looked it up. It's a paraphrase. Here's the original: "When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on." —George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.

ja fragt euch mal

They’re at it again. None of this is valuable historical research. It’s about exploiting historical artifacts and historians to develop computer vision further and to make a soft cultural argument for surveillance tech. This nonsense has been going on since c2010.

what’s something you still enjoy doing in your academic job? ill start: -reading new things -collaborative teaching -using dr but having to clarify “haha not that kind of doctor”

Podcasts generated from the empty PDF file revealed the underlying template NotebookLM uses to generate its podcasts. The deep voice starts the podcast: "All right, so topic redacted, awaiting remaining source material." There was nothing in the source material. dataverse.no/file.xhtml?p...

New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...

In the archives #museumlife

Luca Ambrogioni is an assistant professor of machine learning. Their field is Gen AI. The AI expert thinks getting rid of hallucinations and fake data is too high a bar to clear.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

17 May is 🇳🇴 Norway’s Constitution Day. Today we celebrate our independence and the freedom, democracy and human rights enshrined in our 1814 Constitution. None of it should ever be taken for granted. Happy Constitution Day Norway!

absolutely wild to see people out here saying that it is responsibility of peer reviewers to check for hallucinated references. it is hard enough to persuade people to read articles and provide reviews. expecting them to spend hours cross reffing literature is unreal.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

zeitgeist post

When is paganism not paganism? Today's post on 'All Old Strange Things' grapples with the complexity of religious identities in the Caucasus and Volga-Ural region - and what we might learn from them drfrancisyoung.substack.com/p/schrodinge...

I just had to jump on this trend! These are my "horror movies" as an academic doing a Marie Curie. And what are yours?

We also keep running into problems with ai crawlers that slow down our databases. And accessing other institutions’ resources also takes time, and is occasionally restricted, as a constant reminder of where we are now. Smaller institutions with limited capacities must be extra vulnerable.

Friday I spent two hours of my workday dealing with the fact that our digital archive platform was down *because of ai crawlers*, and another hour removing LLM slop from a wiki. Today I am taking the boat to work for my stupid mental health. #museumlife

This!

Thank you. Most of the defenses of AI in academic work that I read seem to involve two false beliefs: that efficiency is an academic virtue and that writing is a chore.

I'm increasingly receiving papers to review that are just not ready. The authors haven't read the major theories related to their hypotheses. This could either be due to AI writing them or the authors themselves just rushing to get things out. Either way it's a waste of time for everyone.

AI seems to me like another tragedy of the commons in academia: it may be useful on an individual level for some limited use cases. But for academia as a collective it's a disaster bsky.app/profile/olav...

So I've tried for the second time to write an academic paper using AI (Claude) almost from scratch. Qualitative, based on interview data. 30 percent useful stuff and 70 percent rubbish. The only reason I am able to identify the rubbish part is that I know how to write papers without AI

It's been a long while since we had news of a project change because of elf-dwellings and it's high time, I say. Article heading: Hot-water pipeline rerouted to avoid offending elves.

When having to work on the weekend, the trick is to make it pleasant. #museumlife

One of my PhD students gifted me a sweater w the WEB CHILD logo at my inaugural lecture. ❤️

Respect the rules

Today at @norskfolkemuseum.bsky.social : opening of our new exhibition on Norwegian enamel art. It's beautiful, come see it! #museumlife

Kate listened to AI-generated podcasts about knitting so yiu dint have to, and explains why it actually harms us that this slop exists.The COSY and affect without any substance seems a feature of AI. katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/k...

View from my office window - the bloom is almost fluorescent 🌸 #museumlife

I think I have noticed a writing practice on here of writing _thing_ and I do not think I have read anything about what that use of underscore means in online communication. Anyone know anything good written on this online writing practice?

Very important to rinse thoroughly and seek medical attention if irritation persists. #fairyliquid

Others have pointed this out, but if you are publishing a book in the near future, be prepared for AI-generated scam emails purporting to be from book clubs, festivals, and even radio stations.

The last time I taught my class on the history of Belfast in 2022, @tomhulme.bsky.social Zoomed in to talk about his research; When I teach it again this Fall, I am forbidden from including this material.

Kinda tired of the "historians will say they're close friends" meme. Babe, we've been screaming about how gay everyone is for *decades*. Funding for history keeps getting cut as a result. There are entire moral panics about it. You just haven't read any history since highschool.

My condolences to anyone who has to use OneDrive. It’s so spectacularly bad at the one job it has it almost feels like the disembodied soul of a tech bro out for revenge.

If you love food and folklore then do I have the book for you! It would really help if people could pre-order A Feast of Folklore. Plus it will teach you things to do with your nuts you never dreamed of. #FolkloreThursday amzn.eu/d/01YUPupr

My new years resolution was to give myself some time & space to breathe, and so far this year I have turned down 5 review requests, 2 book review requests, & 3 requests to be external examiner... I did agree to some lectures, but still 💪 #academicsky #museumlife

The way things are going it won’t be long before each academic has their own personal regulator.

"If only I knew why the devil's semen is always described as 'cold' in the witches' confessions. I have ordered the Malleus maleficarum, and now that I have put the final touch on the infant paralyses, I shall study it diligently." -Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (1897) 2/3 #WyrdWednesday

Vi minner om DH-lunsjen i morgen kl. 11.30! Kom og hør om VL-modeller med Arne Solli.

Working from the shadowy side of Bogstad gård on a sunny day. #museumlife

I really like conferences that have hybrid/online presenting possibilities. In this era of accelerating climate change, we SHOULD do more conferences/symposia online.

Hey folklorists! I need texts on ghost stories as folklore genre. Any advice or recommendations? #academicsky #folkloristics

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

Looking so much forwards to this (even if it means I may have to go by plane). I'll be speaking about letters to Santa, with the great @cerihoulbrook.bsky.social ! 🥳 #folklore #museumlife