Work in progress: quantifying work/register distinctiveness of lemmata in Homer. One interesting result: "god" [θεός] and "human" [ἄνθρωπος] are much more likely to appear in speech than in narrative. HT www.dices.uni-rostock.de (for speech references) and github.com/francescomam... (for treebanks)

It’s weird that Helen of Troy being played by a black actress is a problem, but most of the rest of the Mediterranean, Greek and Turkish characters being played by incredibly fair and blond haired people of British, Irish and Scandinavian descent isn’t. And by weird, I mean entirely predictable.

I asked students to choose two Programming Historian (programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/) lessons beyond those assigned in class. So many lessons broken by Python and/or dependency updates—maybe we should prioritize platform stability? (I *love* PH; I do not love how frequently Python libs break)

Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS

Related to my last post: has anyone taught a digital humanities class that banned student laptops? #digitalhumanities (is that hashtag the right bat signal?)

Revisited repl.it to evaluate using it to teach an Intro DH class. It’s nuts how AI enshittification (which is just three MBAs in a trench coat, i.e. standard mismanagement) has ruined a once-useful product. You can’t even start a REPL without being bombarded by prompts to use their chat agent 🫠

I mean, he's right that American defense strategy going forward is going to consist of subordinating ourselves to our traditional enemies in order to secure the subsidies to win internecine and domestic struggles.

Also, the entire vocational case for <not> majoring in the humanities/liberal arts rests on approximately no data at all:

Announcing—LatinCy Readers v.1.0.2, i.e. LatinCy-powered corpus readers for Latin text collections. Quickly get sentences, lines, words annotated for lemma, POS, morphology, NER, etc. Supporting .txt, .xml, .tess, .conllu, and more. github.com/diyclassics/... #digiclass #nlproc

The dj on the MIT station just went on a gorgeous tangent about how this semester he’s taking all liberal arts classes, and instead of asking him to reproduce established knowledge (as in most MIT courses) they push him to think about how he thinks. My Super Bowl MVP.

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

Excited to release the new minimal-computing Pausanias Reader in Progress: pausanias.opencommentaries.org/about (If you find an empty comment, that's the "in Progress" part) Enormous thanks to @eltonteb.bsky.social and the rest of Digital Periegesis team for their help with named entity linking!

I'm thrilled to report that the Perseus Digital Library has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Read more about our plans here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...). .

I'm honored to be part of the team alongside @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social, @pnadelofficial.bsky.social, @charlespletcher.org, Lisa Cerrato, Gregory Nagy, Riccardo Strobino, Clifford Wulfman and Ph.D. candidates Sarah Abowitz and Si Wu.

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!

Who “writes” an LLM-translated work of literature? Even if it isn’t a 1:1 copy, is an AI translation at scale just pure plagiarism? Any middle ground between stealing and creating new resources? (maybe relevant article: www.theguardian.com/books/2024/m... — Venuti probably relevant here too)

This is how news/media got around for most of human history. Sophocles' _Women of Trachis_ provides something of a thought experiment in what happens when the traditional avenue for news delivery becomes unreliable (hint: it ain't good)

I think the belief by the powerful that "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing in terms of understanding How We Got Here

From today's Chronicle of Higher Ed briefing. I am *never* an advocate of cutting programs. But I am curious to see if there will be the same type of "students aren't majoring in this, so let's cut the program" discourse around computer science as there always is for the arts and humanities.

lol

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom Zohran completely blew away: His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. You don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! Part of re-establishing norms is speaking like an adult.

The <?xml-model?> processing instruction found in many TEI documents—which never advanced past Working Group Note www.w3.org/TR/2012/NOTE... —breaks some XML parsers (Non-standard processing instructions cannot include the string "xml": www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-pi) So why are we still using it?

the power of uh, reading books

Cleaned up the previous sentence embeddings comparisons—cleaner calculation of similarity for tragedies, and now both charts use the same scale (in autumn hues 🍂) It makes sense that tragedies overall are v. similar, but their similarities alone don't explain the lower-right messenger cluster

I might need to update the original plot, but so far it's interesting to note that the messenger similarities don't seem to be a result of consolidation across tragedies, which remain quite distinct (at least from the perspective of sentence embeddings) #dh #ancmedsky

So sentence embeddings of messenger speeches in Attic tragedy show a modest but notable bump in semantic similarity toward the end of the 5th century (see attached image) — generic consolidation, maybe, but why? #ancmedsky #dh

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

Could I repurpose this for an upcoming Greek midterm? Give students a ChatGPT- or Claude-translated passage (that we have translated in class) and ask them the same question(s)

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM. Hope this helps

i agree. there's something very dostoyevskian about how the modern sources of terror don't seem to be formally ideological but just seem to be purely postmodern terror, causing terror for the sake of terror

Chris Rufo being an idiot about Leo Strauss:

10/10. Chef's kiss. No notes. 💯

*reading the great books* Yeah, you can see it right here in Sophocles. The point of Antigone was that Creon was too even-keeled. We should get a guy that is only id.

There’s an essay to be written about how the “conservative” movement that’s spent the past 90 years trying to undo the New Deal has embraced the New Deal’a aesthetic as its propaganda genre of choice for promoting its regressive, anti-worker policies.

Sovereign is he who decides the state of exception

“Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball” 🏀

Any diagnosis of the problem that doesn’t clearly see the “lecturers” doing the grunt work as the *colleagues* whose research careers are already being sacrificed on the altar of Capital isn’t going to identify a path forward for the future of the academic humanities /5

As preparation for the upcoming @dracor.org summit, I've been experimenting with how to visualize a dramatic network over time. Early results from a test case with Euripides' Andromache here: observablehq.com/@pletcher/ne...

Private equity vultures have been circling Philz for a while, I guess, but it doesn't make this news any easier to read. (I have no nice things to say about PE, but I also don't have anything pithy-spicy to add.) missionlocal.org/2025/07/phil...

You kan not run educacioun lyke a businesse. A businesse ys ther to make a profit. Educacioun ys ther to make the future.

Good acidic piece in @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2025/07/ultr...

Faculty need unions like a fish needs water.

First thing they did is take over the Kennedy Center. They canceled Colbert. Superman is a weirdly powerful icon right now, bothering all the right people. Don’t let anyone tell you the arts aren’t crucial.