Time for our weekly reminder that there is only one ed tech investment that is proven to work, and it's hiring more teachers and paying them better.

Has anyone studied how researchers and academics use library catalogues? I'm struggling to find any literature on researcher (not student) information needs and information seeking behavior. Any leads? My focus is rare books/archives/special collections, but I'm looking broadly right now.

anyway the consultation shuts tomorrow, one minute to midnight UK time: www.gov.uk/government/c... Amnesty have some good guidance here. Go on: media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

Another day another press release for an AI grifter posing as news. Thanks to my friend (redacted here) for texting me this new one.

And never forget that Dame Hilary Cass belittled as "shroud wavers" those of us asking, begging, for a regime that would keep trans children alive.

We have a poster for Fluid Environments & Spatial Humanities! (credit: Giulia Grisot) Join us in Lancaster on Feb 27 - www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fluid-envi... Travel bursaries available for @n8cir.bsky.social students & staff. Details via registration. #dh #envhum #spatialhumanities #histstm

📣 Manchester (& nearby folks)! The brilliant @profkfh.bsky.social will be speaking about how her new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire, came to be in conversation with Dr. Fred Schurink at our next @uomenglish.bsky.social research seminar. Join us next THURSDAY, 12 Feb from 4-5 pm in Sam Alex SG.16.

The UK government is proposing radical and punitive changes to settlement rules. This is settlement, not citizenship. The consultation is open until 12 February; please respond to it and oppose these evil proposals. Amnesty have a good guide: www.amnesty.org.uk/resources/gu...

It feels like it's been impossible to get people outside of higher ed to understand that eliminating staff/programs/majors is primarily an ideological project, whatever claims are made about finances. What's happened at the Post is what's been happening in higher ed for ages.

This looks to be a very promising resource. Researchers in computational humanities at @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social have created CoMMA, a large corpus of more than 32000 manuscripts from ca. 800 to 1600. www.inria.fr/en/comma-med... #medievalsky #earlymodern #dh #digitalhumanities

The process of learning new skills in coding is bashing your head into a wall until the wall gives. If you always skip the bashing part, I'm not sure how the skills develop.

SO SO GLAD to see a PROPER rebuttal against Silvia Federici's very wrong scholarship in the latest Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft! Thank you, Rita Voltmer! muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

jack asked if i would sketch up a poster to tell people in nearby neighborhoods about the partnership between flock and ring, and this is what i came up with. it can be printed on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

Yall outside of MN need to know that observers are STILL out protecting their neighbors. Right now. They know the news and they’re still out there.

Applications due January 16th! Apply for research fellowships at Houghton Library! Work with collections including Printing & Graphic Arts! Bother me irl with your ideas, questions, and quandaries! (It’s not a bother.)

"As I have been working on an inventory of our medical instruments..." Archivists really do have the coolest jobs in libraries. From University of Louisville Libraries 📚 uofllibraries.wordpress.com/2026/01/07/f...

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!! Thinking of the Children: Book Bans, Censorship and Literature for Young People 11-13 February, over three afternoons (2-7pm CET / 2-7pm CET / 12-5pm CET) Free, online, all welcome. Please share with interested colleagues and students! indico.uni-muenster.de/event/3505/

Far too many Brits underestimating how many people in parliament would happily create a British ICE. Also astonishing that people have to be reminded that no one should ever be murdered by anyone.

Just to back up Anthony as a medievalist, that’s one of the dumbest fucking claims imaginable. There have never NOT been people from continental Europe, Africa, and Asia moving to/ from the British Isles for 2000 years. In early modernity, this included the Americas!

Interested in AI, ethics and open access? I’ll be speaking at this @uksg.bsky.social webinar on 5 February - it’s free to register, so please come along! www.uksg.org/events/free-...

The most unsubtle, heavy-handed claims made by pomo academic types have turned out to all be true. Gender is a relation of domination that requires constant, affirming witness. Capitalism will require extractive colonial relations. There’s no subtlety. Every day is like a 101 seminar at Oberlin.

Finding novel ways to get moving on the first day back at work

The politics here are reprehensible but also really sad. He was a great scholar once. He had philological skills that no one has anymore. There are very few people who could produce that kind of work today. And to some extent, that's what this is about. He's mad that our field lost its former status

Happy tenth anniversary to photographer Joel Goodman’s classic image which by rights should be hanging in the Louvre.

I am distressed at how little attention the hunger strikes are getting. These people are being held without trial. Will we only get news when one of them dies? Will MPs laugh then?

It was amazing to write with @ehayot.bsky.social & each of us put our stank into every part of this essay. I have no memory of how we drafted it in October, but when we came back to it a couple weeks ago, I felt this paragraph in my bones.

If anyone wants to have an excellent time, join me in reading the scathingly-titled "VIAF Governance Concerns about the Refurbished VIAF Web and API Interfaces": doi.org/10.5860/ital...

Starting your "research" with ChatGPT is like filling the foundations of your house with cotton candy or building your menu around radium.

Restarted a 40 year old row between the National Archives, Bodelian and Newcastle University over letters which each swore the other had. Eventually the Bod conceded that they had them on microfiche. Off I trotted, swore not to kindle flame etc, 5 minutes in, microfiche reader started smoking.

In the late 1970s, Carolyn Lougee of Stanford was doing early digital history work, creating a database of her research. In 1980, Stanford's IT dept *erased* her database. #Oops. And they couldn't restore it. (how do I know this? from a paper archive at Stanford. don't just worship the digital!) 🗃️

I had the brief pleasure of working on this Newton project, and the time I spent learning the system Alex developed had a large impact on my current work in computational bibliography! So glad to see this article out in the world.

FLIPPING OUTSTANDING WORK, of interest to 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks and #histSTM

Niche variation of a niche complaint: what on earth is up with the VIAF search indexing??? Why does the exact match, formatted as I know the authority record to be, show up as result ELEVEN???

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

"I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansive vision of the future than the one that is telling us that the future is already settled and decided. That's my daring idea. Just say no."

In 2014 I ran a daylong unconference on magic and technology and he just summarized it in one minute

A hard problem with literary data is navigating btwn editions of books and what the "work," or the theoretical text that unites all editions. I've been lucky to work with @thisismattmiller.com and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, who built a tool to address this + do much more arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

To propose that GenAI can compensate for "archival silences" perverts Trouillot's work. It's is a contradiction to say that a product whose logic exacerbates power imbalances--creating a most-likely guess based on the existing record--can restore absences that are the product of those imbalances.

This is unreal. The 2026 code4lib conference has been cancelled unilaterally by Carnegie Mellon University because the Department of Education raised issues with the diversity scholarships: > An applicant must be a member of a group not well-represented within the code4lib community, including […]

The narrow answer to "why can't computer vision see the past?" is bc CV is linear algebra & I reject the premise that math is sight. But the big answer is that the data extraction industry is leveraging computer vision to engineer an anti-human future. sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

So I just went through and put all of the 2025 contingent-authored pieces from a journal in my subfield on the list. You can do the same if you want to boost contingent scholars in your subfield! It only took me 10 minutes.

Have you booked our 9 Dec virtual lectures evening? Join 3 expert speakers inspired by recent research into how we investigate the history of libraries like the collections of @rcphysicians.bsky.social. Book👉 history.rcp.ac.uk/.../body-kno... #BodyOfKnowledge #LibraryHistory More details below👇

*small embarrassed voice* A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s. doi.org/10.1093/libr...

I am currently, because I know how to enjoy a Saturday morning, writing some guidance for people on filling this consultation in. As I do several things are highly apparent. Before I go through them though I don't want this to put people off of filling it in. It is important to do so nonetheless. 1/

Last night @chethamslibrary.bsky.social: Dr. John Dee, warden of the college at Manchester, dreams of books! Part of the event “From Mortlake to Manchester,” which invited visitors to explore the medieval building through Dee’s eyes.

Oh wow! This is what happens when you're photographing MSS & don't capture the text in the inner gutter. 1st, here's the photograph (made about 100 yrs ago) of the Codex Salernitanus, f. 82ra. Although that big tear of the page is obvious, the inner gutter hasn't been fully captured in the photo.

#BookHistory! This is a hybrid panel so please do join us even if you’re not in Bloomington!

#GLAM friends, quite a lot of you went to IU for your undergrad, MLS, and PhD! Those of us still here would appreciate alumni support against the upper administration’s nonsense, especially in regard to academic/intellectual freedom