Nominate your favourite #DigitalHumanities resources for #DH Awards.

I think that the EU improving the mechanisms of third country associations for Horizon Europe research funding so that the UK and various other countries, and now Japan, could become associates is one of the few Brexit benefits I can identify. sciencebusiness.net/news/horizon...

Clearly, we need to give more money to the national trust so it can do more of its good work in city centres.

Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out. This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue. 💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 Analogy: imagine a person who teaches people techniques for shoplifting being outraged that someone has stolen their syllabus. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

And even more of them, wrongly believe that immigration is a bad thing.

You know that thing where Google Scholar alerts you to a new article that cites a publication of yours, and it looks interesting, so you go read it and find the note that cites you randomly attached to a sentence that bears absolutely no relation to anything you've ever written or said. That. 🙄

Adoption of artificial intelligence in academic libraries: A systematic review of current practices, challenges, and research opportunities www.sciencedirect.com/science/articl… #AI #libraries

#ICYMI Our Pre-Christmas blog explored how mining engineer, surveyor and diarist Thomas Sopwith celebrated Christmas with his family as recorded in his meticulous diary entries. Read about how he celebrated here: blogs.ncl.ac.uk/speccoll/202...

I think about this famous passage from Orwell’s 1984 a lot these days: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’

Exhibition now open! Padua to Edinburgh: Cultures of Art and Medicine in European Anatomical Drawings, free to all, Special Collections exhibition space on L2 of the Philip Robinson Library. Find out more before you visit: www.ncl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/exhibitions/padua-to-edinburgh

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Fun!

I asked #Gemini and #ChatGPT about whether the original #YorkPlays Mystery Plays were performed end-on or side-on from the pageant wagon expecting some equivocation but consensus. Instead each provide the opposite conflicting side of the argument. Is this just based on the sources they've consumed?

Excellent thread about a fabulous manuscript culture and tradition. Anyone interested in MSS, from any culture, should read the thread as a useful primer. One of the many manuscript traditions we should all know about.

I asked #Gemini and #ChatGPT about whether the original #YorkPlays Mystery Plays were performed end-on or side-on from the pageant wagon expecting some equivocation but consensus. Instead each provide the opposite conflicting side of the argument. Is this just based on the sources they've consumed?

looking through the books from 1930 that entered the public domain yesterday. Am enjoying this parodic essay that mocks moralists panicking about the promiscuity of the 1930s (from the volume "Whither, Whither, or After Sex, What?"). THE AUTOMOBILE MUST GO!

I'm not a knitter and even I know that you shouldn't use threaded screws to do your knitting. I'm reliably informed there are a 6-fingered handful of obvious mistakes in this AI-generated nonsense. Is 2026 going to be a year filled with misuse of AI news stories? Does laziness mean we won't care?

Well, that'll do.

#DH Awards 2025 nominations open until 2026-02-27. What #DigitalHumanities resources updated in 2025 do you think deserve recognition of some sort? Nomination categories at: dhawards.org/dhawards2025...

Don’t worry gang, no one actually starts their New Year’s resolutions on the 1st. And you’d be silly to begin on a Friday, best save it for Monday. But Monday is the 5th so you’ve kind of missed the boat anyway and can safely put it off for next year.

Nominations are open for DH Awards 2025. Anyone can nominate things that are #DigitalHumanities, available to voters, and updated in 2025. #DH Nominations close 2026-02-26 and the only way something gets on the ballot. You only need to nominate something once. dhawards.org/dhawards2025...

For those looking to celebrate the end of 2025, consider nominating something for @dhawards.bsky.social dhawards.org/dhawards2025...

Learning something every day. Thanks @tracelarkhall.bsky.social

This kind of thing doesn't seem to take context into account. In order to adopt, say, electric fridges you needed the infrastructure of the power network. To adopt the internet you needed power, computers, phone lines, etc. To adopt chatGPT you just open the website/app. And AI started 70 years ago.

Alien archaeologists thousands of years from now will determine that the species died out because they were fundamentally lazy. We are the intellectual equivalent of non-mating pandas. 🐼

Increasingly, people are turning to AI cuz it often appears 'good enough' for their uses. Yes, completely inaccurate for taking actual minutes, but good enough for a vague reminder of what the meeting was generally about. Yes, not good enough for real answers but good enough for 'hive mind' queries.

Is how you and your partner behave during Twixtmas a proxy for how you might behave during retirement?

After a few months, @lucimcummings.bsky.social and Mr Crabbe have finally finished their 'natural sand' jigsaw. They have ones of pure snow, chocolate, candy canes, and more queued up...

Like many of the problems with AI, this one is a human failing.

Getting earlier every year, we're 362 sleeps until Christmas and people *already* have their Christmas lights up. 🙄 😂

Ridiculous but entertaining Wikipedia "did you know?" box this am. "the United States Supreme Court is not the Highest Court in the Land" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hig...

Sadly not, but I do have goth tendencies... (See today's shirt.)

Say what you want about infecting one's house with Google WiFi speakers and similar, but being able to call out to them to set differently named timers when cooking Christmas dinner is exceedingly useful. This may change when they switch them over to Gemini in my area.

Happy holidays everyone!

These visits by ghostes koude have been three emayles.

Santa brings me the nicest gifts! And some idiots want to get rid of the NHS to replace it with the horribly immoral US approach. It is great that the NHS does free early detection #BowelCancerScreening! I might wait until after new year's to send it back though...

I'm just quote posting this in case it gets me banned from going to the USA...

If you're seeing family and friends over Christmas, offer to unsubscribe them from any marketing messages that bother them. It's the kind of thing people never get around to doing, but it makes a difference! Less noise and fewer pings makes room for nicer things

A great read for Twixtmas! (And you'll be helping your local squirrels.)

Some very good principles in this HEA.ie policy framework on #genAI in Higher Ed teaching and learning. Much that we can learn from in our own institutional responses.

Definitely my experience! I remember a colleague dismissively telling me that cuz I was interested in digital things as well as medieval drama I was and always would be "a failed academic". While they were projecting having given up their own academic work, this probably feeds my imposter syndrome.

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Finally removed "jamescummings on former bird site" from my bsky profile, because I never use that place. (Who still does who isn't a dick?) I should now delete the app, which is still the blue bird 🐦 because I stopped updating it as soon as elmo took control.

Today the Sunday Times discusses the decline in students studying A-level and beyond. I believe this is reversible. I believe it is necessary. And I’m glad to have some of my words on the importance of the discipline and the vibrancy of our degrees in English at York in the article.

Yup. They’re also the only way knowledge & insight actually work: in conversation within your generation and across the generations. Citation-as-signalling and now hallucinated titles destroy context for the sake individual grandiosity.

Metadata is hard especially for Medieval Manuscripts ... check out our latest blog post about the @peripheralmss.bsky.social project: peripheralmss.org/metadata-for.... #midwestmss #medievalmss

Unfortunately all the real #ArchiveElves were hiding today but we did find some helpful ilustrations of elves in Fairyland: Pictures from the Elf-World, for today's #ArchiveAdventCalendar theme. The book is part of our Marcus Crouch collection of children's books. Ref. crouch 398.4 DOY

Only just found out about this, on top of all the other horrors. Hard to know what to say when so many awful things are happening.