As @climatechirper.bsky.social says, "The deliberate actions of colonialists in the 1870s disrupted local systems that communities relied on for being resilient to climate variations." So, it's wrong to claim that it was #ElNino that killed millions in 1877. www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026...

"Using an innovative blend of record linkage, machine learning, and historical geocoding, the team ... will give an unprecedented, population-scale view of life over this period, and unlock questions about major social, economic, and demographic changes that were once impossible to answer."

Residential school denialists are led by about twenty retired academics and lawyers who "form a closed community that cites each other in a loop to suggest legitimacy" thetyee.ca/News/2026/05...

Hey, luckily we’ve doubled down on fossil fuel extraction and ended environmental protection to pander to far right separatists in AB.

At this point I don’t know what is worse: Starmer’s ineptitude or Carney’s competence in moving Canada aggressively to the right? We don’t have a climate policy anymore, but our far right clowns are in disarray. There must be a better third option?

Congratulations! #USaskArtSci alumni and faculty won big at the 2026 Sask Book Awards. greenandwhite.usask.ca/articles/202...

Graham Platner went to prep schools? He obviously stepped away from class privilege enlisting in the Marines out of high school during the Iraq War. But I didn’t have him pegged as the son of a lawyer.

I'm so excited to announce, with Jim Clifford, a Working Paper Series on Critical Search. We'll be publishing our own and others' experiments with AI, design, and pedagogy in a format built to reward quick turnaround and rapid ideation -- forging a track from lab to the world of journals.

Just keep kicking that environmental policy down the road while glaciers melt, forests burn, species go extinct, and the earth gets hotter.

Doesn’t the UK already have accelerated degrees?

The Canucks drop 2 spots in the NHL draft lottery to pick 3rd. They’ve never gone up in the lottery, never picked 1st, and that trend continues for another year.

I'm launching a new project with @joguldi.bsky.social today: Working Papers in Critical Search. Today we're publishing the first working paper: "Why a Working Paper Series on Critical Search Now" #digitalhistory #digitalhumanities working-papers-in-critical-search.github.io/paper-001-in...

You can apply lots of normalizing frameworks or you can just make a timeline of his calls with Putin. We don’t have a sovereign foreign policy. We have superpower suicide.

Yesterday I downloaded PDFs from 1911 to 1944 listing grain elevators in Canada. I ran them through Chandra 2 OCR on our local cluster. Today I parsed the raw OCR tables and worked on matching them to historical railway GIS data. jimclifford.ca/wheat/

Talkie LLM is a hot mess. There is a fundamental danger in treating a historical LLM like an archive. When we read primary sources, racism is anchored to a specific context and author. Talkie strips away that provenance, synthesizing the worst pre-1930 biases into a confident chatbot.

Reid Hoffman should read a few more books on the history of the industrial revolution.

"Nineteenth-century Londoners ... experienced a hierarchy of urban environments. While the wealthy laid claim to healthier, higher ground, much of the working class crowded near the docks & factories in the Thames Estuary and Lea Valley." - @jimclifford.bsky.social niche-canada.org/2015/11/25/t...

Spoiler: It's not safe

Demis is a lot more thoughtful than Sam and other AI boosters, but he doesn’t have a strong grasp on the history of the Industrial Revolution. It caused hight infant mortality; social democratic finally helped bring it down in the early 20th century. youtu.be/SSya123u9Yk?...

To understand the scale of this accomplishment, get warmed up and try and run 1 km in 2 minutes and 50 seconds. When that fails, see if you can run a 17 seconds 100m. I don’t think I could hold that pace for much longer than 100m and I’m in good running shape. www.bbc.com/sport/athlet...

ESRI killed their original StoryMap platform and one of my earliest digital history interactive maps in the process. I managed to rebuilt it with some help from Claude Code. jimclifford.ca/london_indus...

Another good post by Louis Hyman open.substack.com/pub/computat...

You think the political left is shutting down speech (I'm looking at you CBC and Ric Esther Bienstock)? Yes, I am aware of some cases of out-of-control political correctness, but there is actual full-blown academic censorship & book burning in parts of North America that is mandated by governments.

Got it done. Boston is a hard course. It was unlike anything else I’ve done.

New article by James Juip, D. Lafreniere, S. Fayen Scarlett, and M. A. Rhodes Creating and Sustaining Public Engagement in Spatial Humanities and Deep Mapping Projects www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

My own recommendation would be: decarbonize electricity production use antitrust to break up oligopolies permissive IP laws limited, strategic public funding of open-source alternatives

A key post by Mark Humphries. After a decade of crypto BS & internet enshittification, tech skepticism is healthy. AI isn’t conforming to this model, even if Altman feels similar to Elon. We’re moving fast to a world where AI transforms our economy & universities. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Knowledge graphs are transforming my research methodology. Claude Code allows me to build knowledge graphs as I take notes from primary sources. open.substack.com/pub/computat...

In Ottawa to kick off a workshop to using agentic LLMs to transform Historical GIS datasets into CIDOC-CRM Linked Open Data. The goal is to help build the foundations of research knowledge graphs for Canadian history researchers in the coming decades.

Scarborough Southwest was an NDP seat in 2011. I know Lewis has only been leader for a few weeks, but this is a tough night with only a 1% bump from 2025 in the kind of seat the NDP needs to win to become a major force in Canadian politics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarbor...

Orban lost. I hope the country can recover and rebuild its democracy.

Concern about the cognitive effects of LMs is based on the premise that they're an answer machine. And they can definitely be used that way. But I think ppl who are using models to solve actual problems (not homework problems) experience the tech as a free-writing, dialogue, and revision machine. +

LLMs are very disruptive in education. They are also transformative in positive ways for a lot of neurodivergent people (my family had dyslexia and ADHD). How do we adapt our response to better recognize the positive aspects for one fifth of the population? www.the-bunker.it/en/rubrica/d...

Prediction: Glasswing is mostly misdirection. I am sure it is better than and thus finds more security bugs than Opus. But Opus was the change in kind. This is marketing cover for fact that top-end models are now gated by enterprise agreements and no longer available to small labs to distill.

What is true? How do we piece together fragments of evidence to try and get close to the truth? Historians have centuries of experience puzzling over this question. AI researchers need these humanities methods to solve fundamental problems with the current LLM approach.

Another important post from @joguldi.bsky.social "AI needs historians as much as historians need AI" open.substack.com/pub/computat...

Stage 5?

I knew about the 1969 moon landing. And knew that news of the My Lai massacre came out in '69. But I had those events in separate boxes. Occurs to me now that it must have been disorienting to feel proud of (one aspect of) your country, while also deeply shamed by its crimes.

#Artemis II - We have the first image from yesterdays Lunar flyby captured by the crew on Orion EARTHSET. April 6, 2026. Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon. 🚀🌕🌍

Good post from Loren. “You Deserve the Cluster”. Learning to use research super computers has transformed my projects. It allows historians to use small and medium sized open language models for OCR, NER and relationship extraction at scale. open.substack.com/pub/computat...

I'm reading the new book The Infinity Machine and Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. I didn't realize how important Canada was in the AI breakthrough, but students needed to leave universities and Canada to bring the Alberta school (reinforcement learning) and the Toronto school (deep learning) together.

The Gemini Deep Research tool can surface significant primary sources, BUT, if the answer isn’t available in online collections, it will bullshit plausible but wrong answers every time. It is easy to spot in the citations. The inability to say “I couldn’t find the answer“ remains a massive issue.

"A machine learning approach for nominative record linkage in Chinese historical databases" An important new articles from Yue Yu, Yueran Hou ,Yibei Wu & Cameron Campbell that I had the pleasure of editing. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Digital history didn’t fail; it stopped short. It built archives, not cumulative research programs. Now AI is asking the questions DH left unresolved. Computational history is what comes next. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/the-lost-p...

The Lost Promise of Digital History Jo Guldi outlines an ongoing problem that dates back to at least the 1980s in Canada went a senior colleague admonished Chad Gaffield for pursuing advanced computational methods at the University of Toronto. open.substack.com/pub/computat...

Of course, I was not convinced Justin Trudeau could overcome his privilege to become a successful politician and he won three elections. So my frustration with democratic aristocratic families is probably a minority view.

Canada needs a coherent voice on the political left making the case for climate action and fighting for working-class Canadians. I hope Avi grows into this role. But I have serious doubts that anyone with his privileged background is going to connect the people the NDP has lost in recent years.