I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

Meanwhile, the rest of us scrape together our fivers and tenners to try to stop this happening... www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-save-...

Hey UK archaeology. Let's all just cash in our years of knowledge, understanding, professionalism, trust, integrity, stakeholder partnerships, land owner networks, Professorial privilege, university accreditation. Buy a metal detector and make some (more) money. 🏺

If the finder were an archaeologist this would be an unthinkable story, our training teaches us that artefacts represent a shared past. His training is in documents, he sees objects as something to be auctioned, a source of 'reward' Is this an anomaly? Historian friends, how do you feel about this?

We are just screaming into the void about how wrong this is when the BBC and all other media outlets consistently glorify and platform these stories along with how much money the people are making from this activity.

A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.

assholes like Suleyman and the rest of the techbros salivating over how AI is going to automate all white collar jobs from lawyers to educators and make them personally trillionaires have no conception of what the jobs they claim will be automated actually involve.

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

#EarlyModern 🗃️ Rosamund Oates is researching the history of early modern deafnes - see her P&P article, book out soon I think. academic.oup.com/past/article...

I think a lot of the people who have feelings about professors rejecting generativeAI in the classroom not only have no classroom experience but cannot begin to understand that we are actually, desperately, trying to save our students from this societal pressure, from choosing ignorance.

...does he think that the problem is we're not catching them doing it and flunking them? Bless his heart, AI-proofing is about saving students from themselves, because they turn in chatGPT garbage and get flunked and head to academic dishonesty charges, not because they're succeeding.

“Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education.”

When Musk said the "cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted" for training AI, what he was really saying is that he would not pay for digitisation, and had reached the limits of useful data he could scrape for free. The GenAI house is built on sand.

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

Six (more) historians in my department have taken (been pressured into) voluntary redundancy. Since we cross teach, supervise, & tutor, politics staff now have more work to do. The solution? Pressure staff (those with the biggest caring & teaching commitments) to move onto teaching only contracts.

This is MAGA ideological imperialism. It's disguised as a "free speech" crusade. In reality, the Trump admin seeks to coerce Europe into deregulating digital environments to enable unimpeded extremist content that radicalises voters into supporting far-right populists. www.ft.com/content/f869...

I don't mean to seem alarmed, but it appears Google's book search function is, just...gone. In a sane country it would be a huge deal, front page news, that a privately owned utility that millions researches, from journalists to scholars, rely on every day to advance knowledge can just disappear.

The gravity of this is really hitting me. I rely on Google Books to do record linkage on minor 19th and early 20thC people, companies, places, who pop up in trade journals, random books and periodically I would never think of searching individually.

Quite extraordinary how little discussion of risks universities are engaging in before they sign all their staff and students up for new AI tools, at extraordinary cost, Given universities' known deficits and repeated claims of financial exigency, this is surely problematic.

Ok, let’s do this🙄 We’ll start with an explainer covering: 🕒What is a 15-minute city 🏫What on Earth is going on with Oxford 👽Where the conspiracy theories have come from And then we’ll look at the Telegraph article 🧵 1/25

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

Not going to miss Researchfish - obvs for the vampiric business model, but also their deal with UKRI that allowed them to threaten anyone criticising them online with being reported to funders for ‘abuse’, with the obvious implication it would impact on the critic’s prospects for future funding.

YES THAT'S WHAT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND THATS WHY WE DON'T USE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

'Everyone involved needs to face up to the reality of the current funding model.' Too true, but we can't 'face up to the reality of the current funding model' if we hive off undergraduates and taught PG students from universities' other core functions and their financial challenges, e.g. research.

A foster kitten visiting the amazing “Paws on Parchment” exhibition which tracks how cats were depicted in the Middle Ages through texts and artworks from around the world www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a... #medievalsky

Life ambition fulfilled! Gave a paper at the IHR! Thanks to the Medievalism seminar series organisers and attendees, especially Simon Trafford. What a beauty of a building!

True - and not only of science.

In case we thought that ecological disasters were a special talent of modernity, let’s talk about how the 13th-century peat trade of Norfolk made it permanently vulnerable to flooding, including 3 catastrophic floods just since 2013. #medievalstorytime

"Data in itself is not knowledge. Even the greatest concentration of data will not on its own bring us closer to getting to know the past. Concentrating data does not write history." I wrote this five years ago and it is more relevant then ever in the age of AI. academic.oup.com/dsh/article-...

Wow. This is devastating. www.science.org/content/arti...

Just say no, kids. AI is addictive and dangerous.

The generations of leftist schoolteachers using subversive techniques like source criticism and analytical thinking have been brainwashing British youngsters to hate their country ✏️ @mrhenrymorris.substack.com

NEW: this is how the US press would report on this if it was happening in a ‘shithole country’. It’s an execution. But it also reveals how weak Trump really is open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

Same. I found this interesting: bsky.app/profile/nbed...

lol no burn it all fucking down

The party line has gone from "women have to start using genAI or they'll be left behind" to "everyone has to start using genAI or they'll be left behind" to "everyone has to start using genAI or genAI will be left behind."

Our first seminar of 2026 is coming soon! On Fri 28/01 @linseyhunter.bsky.social will be speaking on 'Landscapes and Location in the Retellings of the Legend of Finella, Lady of the Mearns, c.1900-c.1960' 17.30 UTC in person at the IHR or online. Abstract & details: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

The costs of sector/nations-wide mass redundancies.

2026 is really not starting brilliantly, not talking about the wider world even. Too much weather and stress. Coming to terms with my loyal car failing MOT and waiting anxiously to see if the replacement part will give it a chance to live on a farm (indulge me) or if it’s off to the scrap heap.

I’ll soon be diving into this enormous and irresistible volume from Florin Curta and Sebastien Rossignol - just look at all those Central and Eastern European peoples! utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....

'The results show that the critical pedagogy, creative assignment and strong focus on supporting students to generate work that speaks to their own lived experience produced more equal educational outcomes.' An important, theoretically-informed, pragmatic, evidence-rich piece. Read it #Skystorians

Maybe also why we shouldn't have serial VCs who hop from VC post to VC post, or Deputy VCs who become VC elsewhere, or third-term VCs with seemingly no time limit: none of them have an incentive to change something about the governance & financial structures that got us in the mess we're in now.

The ICE agent who shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago tried to goad her out of her car. He said “do something b*tch” and shot her 5 times. The ICE agent who shot Nicole Renee Good did the same thing. Stood right in front of her vehicle and yelled “f*cking bitch”. They hate women & it shows.

Showing his whole arse here.

Alrighty! Decisions made: - skills focus on *reading* - no devices + designated notetakers - print books + course reader - commonplace books, adapted from @jmadelman.bsky.social - sit-down short answer hourly exams - in-class essays adapted from @katemanne.bsky.social (Links to models below)

This is so cringe. Cosplay by individuals scoring very low on standards of Christianity or chivalry. #medievalsky

“Grok says” - you might as well be quoting a Magic 8-Ball, what the fuck is wrong with you

A nice interweaving of historical analysis, social anthropology and cognitive science. More thinking like this would open up space for better policies and politics.

Years ago I co-edited a festschrift with a colleague whose work was very different from mine, who could not grasp why or how what I did mattered to the field. I was remembering him today, and started thinking about the meta-question: why is it so hard to change dominant historical narratives. 1/