Because LLMs routinely hallucinates information, including entire journal articles. Because LLMs damage your critical thinking. Because it’s built on plagiarized material. This tech is the antithesis of education, curiosity, and inquiry

So, have any historians here used Retool as a front end for data entry into a PostgreSQL database? Not sure what the right #DigitalHumanities # are, but perhaps #DigHum #DH 🗃️

if you want to do a PhD in history, fully funded and join an incredible community of people researching Europe and the world, 1500-present, you have about a month!! Don’t hesitate to ask me questions.

Today was the best day of the academic year. Why? Because it was the annual Ceaseless Revolution pub quiz in the final class of the year, of course!

The answer! Digital newspaper historians or those supervising students working with this material -- see Vicki's post here about access via places that use _TheCloud wifi

Digitised newspaper people: am I remembering correctly that Caffè Nero has subscription access to the British Newspaper Archive? If so, how does that work exactly?

The ad for the second postdoctoral position on our @leverhulme.ac.uk Britain’s Early Medieval Letters project is now live. We’re looking for an Old English specialist (who also works with Latin). 32-month FT post. Deadline for apps is 16 Jan 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

For my book I thought a lot about this position, which really does rest on a presumption, nurtured by first world, usually male perspectives that have been shaped by habituation to empowerment, that for something to count as victory it has to be total & complete; anything else is “failure.” +

This whole thread is great. This post cuts the the core of what I teach (1848, 1871) as well as what I research (early “failed” attempts at housing reform before “the welfare state”). History is much more productive when we abandon win/lose, success/failure binaries and take a longer perspective

The @royalhistsoc.org is running a charitable donation campaign to fund the research of historians who lack support. The number of applications we're seeing is way up. I've been very lucky to have a career as a historian, I've donated, and I think this Christmas you should too. Pay it forward.

Really interesting to hear about the new HistoryUK resource, 'History in Practice', which is a space to collectively share, reflect, and collaborate on all things related to history teaching in universities 🗃️ #skystorians www.history-uk.ac.uk/history-in-p...

🕯 Today we pause to remember the trans people whose lives were taken by violence this year. Those lost to hatred, and those lost to the unbearable weight of living in a world that too often refuses to see their worth. We hold every name and every story in our hearts. #TDOR

Shabana Mahmood has decided that her political future will be secured by being evil to refugees, just as Wes Streeting decided to be evil to trans kids. This is where the Labour Party is now.

Does anyone have any recent reading recommendations on how people (particularly working-class people) adjusted to technological change in the long c19th? By reading list feels a little dated... Thanks!

Today I learned: having taught about Alexis de Tocqueville for a decade now, apparently the way I say his name sounds like ...

Without wanting to stick my oar in too far: It's possible to recognise that we have a higher standard of living now than in the past and *also* to believe that inequitable distribution is wrong and that widespread precarity for everyone but the very rich should be fought tooth and nail.

Did you take part in a mock election at your UK school or college between 1983 and 2001? Share your memories for a research project on young people and democracy in modern Britain! Write to us about your experiences here: forms.office.com/e/FNAwjfFR7f

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

“The researchers aim to show that the ‘inevitability’ of AI is just a marketing frame perpetrated by the industry and that pushback is a lot more possible than we often see.” Yes!

In Jan 1875, a young servant asked for and was given a Friday night off. She went home to see her boyfriend, who had five days leave, and he said... you should have more time off. Harriet, the servant, agreed. She wrote to her employer and said "I will be back on Monday"

Today is David Harvey's 90th birthday! To celebrate, preorder his upcoming book The Story of Capital and take 30% off all of his previously published works

If you're a National Trust member, it's that time of year again: Midnight tonight is the deadline. It's a shame people have to keep doing this to keep a toehold on historical truth in this country, but here we are. Voting link: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

I am pleased to unleash upon the world my latest attempt to persuade people that the French Revolution was a very complex set of events that happened to a very complex society in ways it's best to try to understand as such.

Politico: "MPs should consider deleting X, according to a committee led by Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle... "On social media, the report said MPs should feel “empowered to step away from platforms that pose more harm than benefit.” Absolutely. Please get on with it.

This came through the door agents yesterday from two local estate agents. I’m going to keep it and set it as a primary source on the History of Housing/Tenancy module I’ll design one day. Easy 1,500 word assessment on the context, authorship, intended audience, symbolism of this.

"In 2023, 3.8 million dwellings failed to meet this ["decent"] standard. Private rented dwellings were most likely to be classed as non-decent - in all 21% were." Over one in five privately rented dwellings as 'non-decent' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

As I considered Hegel’s remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice, I couldn’t help but think that he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

2/ ... which houses one quarter of the city's population: municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/m...

1/ Interesting piece by @PeteApps on cooperative housing in Zurich. Switzerland is a country which shows how well high quality public housing serves a mixed community. See also the next tweet in which I write about Zurich's municipal housing ... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The students *loved* it. One said it was the best thing they've read at university. It is extremely teachable, especially alongside/against some of the more traditional Terror primary/secondary stuff.

Thrilled to say I'm a judge for the first ever Inspiring History Teaching Awards, in association with Historic Royal Palaces. Do you know a great history teacher in the UK who deserves to go down in history? Nominate them here bit.ly/42yhGZP

Really cool work here… returning to a time and place that was a foundational moment not just for urbanising Britain but also for the discipline of urban history and using new techniques to challenge a deeply embedded viewpoint! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Cofio Aberfan 🖤 We will never forget those that tragically lost their lives on October 21, 1966.

Congrats @emvchung.bsky.social for this guardian coverage of your new @historicaljnl.bsky.social article. Can’t wait to set it for first-year historians at @manchester.ac.uk to read alongside Engels on our course on capitalism

It might be a stretch for 41-year-old Adam Driver to play a 26-year-old, but I'm surely not the only one who thinks he would be a perfect casting for Saint-Just, right??

My intellectual and emotional response to reading this is that I want to get a hammer and physically destroy every AI machine on the face of the planet. It is a fundamentally anti-human device and its purveyors are as great a danger to our shared future as any gang of criminals or terrorists

Very excited to teach the Terror next week to my Level 3 students, using Michaela Kalcher's brilliant @historyworkshop.org.uk article as key reading doi.org/10.1093/hwj/...

It's Electric Wind publication day!💨 Join @dudleymarianna.bsky.social for the launch of her new book, online and at @bookhaus.bsky.social. Details on the MUP Events page🎟️👇 A cutting-edge history of wind power in Britain from the industrial revolution to the present. Electric Wind is out now💡

Whenever I see academics say this stuff, I physically wince knowing the environmental, ethical, and moral impact generative AI has. Academics using LLMs essentially validate the theft of colleagues’ work, condone its disastrous energy usage, and undermine the benchmark for academic integrity.

At @ihr.bsky.social we can now offer PhD by Publication in History! For those with a substantial body of existing published research (within past 10 years), but without a PhD, should be of particular interest to #heritage professionals and independent scholars!

Another case of MS spellcheck being selective with its wrongness: it auto-replaced my "Franco-Prussian" with "Franco-PRussian", then also flagged its new creation as a spelling error. It... it was once better than this, right?

300 applicants; no appointment

there’s this weird idea a lot of people seem to have about how all of us writers and artists must secretly want to use AI and are merely resisting temptation for ethical reasons, and like, no, it’s not hard for me to resist drinking the bowl of Piss With Glass In It actually

while I acknowledge that LLMs do have some uses for stuff like “producing code with knowledgeable human supervision,” this perfectly reflects how I feel about using it for my own creative work

I agree with every word Zelda Williams says. And this at the end from OpenAI makes me want to go full Ned Ludd. Creators can’t have a blanket opt-out on copyright infringement of their work and have to fill out a form appealing to OpenAI’s mercy every time? Fuck off into the sun

Join us online for another instalment of the Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar on October 15: Iason Jongepier and Vincent Ducatteeuw will present their digital historical work on the river Scheldt.

I'm developing a new course on the history of policing (with England, France, and USA as cases we will use) and am surprised that I'm not coming up with many examples of already-existing courses. Anyone teach something like this? #skystorians

Thoughts, @urbanhistorygroup.bsky.social ? @magdamaaoui.bsky.social is looking for social housing pioneers beyond France — who comes to mind?

Currently doing some work on Renée Gailhoustet and her pioneer work on French social housing. I put her in the same category of genius as Charlotte Perriand. Any other names that should be included in that group in your opinion?