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.

What if the first great generation of data activists were not in Silicon Valley, but nineteenth-century Ireland? open.substack.com/pub/joguldi/...

Historians warned against cherry-picking. But now others are making big historical claims at scale—and shaping public debate. We need a response. Critical search. Disciplined selection. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/beyond-che...

Coming in 2027 from Dutton: THE WAR OVER RENT. A history of tenant struggle, data activism, and how ordinary people used records, maps, and evidence to challenge concentrated power. Booking talks from Dec. 2026 onward: AI, tech ethics, urbanism, housing, civics, universities.

AI’s hardest problems — retrieval, ground truth, alignment — aren’t just technical. They’re historical. The future of trustworthy AI may depend on historical methods. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/ai-needs-h...

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...

Look around, the case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever.

I can't stress enough how studying philosophy at a liberal arts school prepared me for my career. Logic problems, organizing abstract concepts, neural nets and models of cognition, language and conversation, the nature of experience. Honestly expected never to see a trolley problem again tho.

3 tabs opened, a note-pad with a to-do-list in front of you, and a pair of spectacles handy. Surfing on the #earlymodern internet in 1622. #skystorians

Is it too late to give Sacha Baron Cohen an Oscar for this? Not a damn lie told. 🇺🇸

This is cool. Johannes Uhl and colleagues use historical maps and settlement data to generate a dataset of the approximate date of every road in the United States. Check it out: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16625 @jhuhl.bsky.social

So. Less ability to forecast hurricanes, and a crippled FEMA so you can’t get federal aid for the damage…

Now if only they would publish the data on their findings so that we could understand the work of government and the sacrifices of public servants. Because every past government committee in a democracy committed to transparency publishes its findings, right??

Exciting new threshold in dh!

Profound personal statement about the power of the humanities, the risks associated with losing the university as a bridge to social mobility, and how much is at stake as we abandon the infrastructure of research. Thank you for writing this, Karin. We need the long form version.

I wish more of my neighbors in Western North Carolina realized this.

I do love that it was helpful to a China scholar, Tom! I’ve been hearing the same thing from sovietologists as well. Thanks for weighing in!

Super powerful Sunday meditation on America in despair by theologian Diana Butler Bass @dianabutlerbass open.substack.com/pub/dianabutle…

Chicago

This is a remarkably thoughtful essay about standing ruins in urban landscapes today and what they mean -- a portrait of Austin's long battle to attract IT, and about international bulldozing as a way of life in our wasteful economy.

Reading Albert Camus's A Short Guide to Towns Without a Past (French edition 1950) -- new to me, but essays written from 1937 to 1950 in northern Italy and Algeria. I'm used to the dour short stories of Camus assigned in high school, but these are different.

Listen to my new podcast/interview with the brilliant young British folks at NovaraFM, where I talk about participatory mapping, land reform, and their fascinating histories -- "How to Redistribute the Globe" novaramedia.com/2025/06/13/h...

Modern https://xkcd.com/3089/ #histodons

FYI @joguldi.bsky.social

Delighted to be in Warwick -- nest that nurtured so many greats of history (EP Thompson, Ed Countryman, Maxine Berg) -- giving talks on environmental history and AI this week. Say hello!

Check out the handout from the AHA’s Congressional Briefing on the history of deportation. Panelists @hidehirota.bsky.social, Ana Raquel Minian Andjel, & @yaelschacher.bsky.social shared policies concerning immigration & deportation throughout US history. 🗃️

My second talk at the University of Glasgow will connect the history of land politics to affairs in Scotland: “The Long Land War: Scotland and Ireland in the longue durée” eventbrite.co.uk/e/jo-guldi-t... (alt text: The Long Land War, 1881-1990)

I'm thrilled to be giving a series of lectures at Uni Glasgow in a few weeks! Here's one: "Will AI Kill Democracy or Spur a Democratic Revival?" eventbrite.co.uk/e/jo-guldi-w... (alt text: human silhouette with a question mark, robot head, and the slogan, "Crisis of Fact")

AHA members @joguldi.bsky.social, Peter Roady, @laraputnam.bsky.social, @kalanicraig.bsky.social, Arlene Díaz, & Katherine McDonough were featured in an article in PNAS, one of the most-cited & comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, on how historians use data science to mine the past.

The irony when people happy to use pronouns misgender me as "Joe," an honest mistake that nevertheless always makes my skin crawl a little. Mainly I think it just points to the fact that gender subtleties are hard for many of us.

wow, that's quite a letter.

✨✨Maps & newspaper research from LwM & MRM teams (@danielwilson.bsky.social @joshrhodes.bsky.social @jonhistorian61.bsky.social @nottinauta.bsky.social @ruthahnert.bsky.social @npedrazzini.bsky.social @kallewesterling.bsky.social + more) featured in @pnas.org this week! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thrilled to be featured (along with a few of the many rising stars of digital history) in this week's PNAS Front Matter: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Historians Use Data Science to Mine the Past"

Pope Francis moved last summer to make Vatican City the first nation to run entirely on solar energy. In his writing, he made it clear that the climate crisis was about power in all forms--and about human dignity. The world feels much poorer today billmckibben.substack.com/p/pope-franc...

“One must be mad among the sane, but sane among the mad.” Strindberg, Master Olof

Back at it today.

I want a Brutalist Scabby

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

In which America took it upon herself to relearn all the lessons of history simultaneously …

Walking the Philosopher’s Way in Heidelberg … this is extracurricular, but while I’m communing with the spirit of Hegel, let me mention that I’ve just been doing a short tour of EU institutions with a wish list of what DH can do to advocate for democracy in my nation and in the world.

hear hear

Curricula are camels, written by committee, & heteroglossic, reflecting the various aims & discourses of their multiple makers. Excited 2C this @kossnetwork.bsky.social paper published - reflecting on history curricular aims comparatively, across 3 countries & combining conceptual lenses. 1/2

My interview on the social histories of council housing with the 'A is for Architecture' podcast can be found here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/j...

Departing Essen for Köln by train. Delightful shaded bike paths by the railway line, with families pulling kids in bike trailers. Springtime.

Here's a demonstration of what "digital reading" can do in historical research. Take, for example, John Duncan’s treatment of the Andong Kwŏns in _The Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty_. It is apparent that the picture is incomplete, restricted primarily to the most prominent patrilineal descendants.

Starting now, “Words in Numbers,” wherein I get to meet the next generation of German humanists and social scientists experimenting with DH… excited! 😊

Check out the posters that Luxembourg made me for today’s talk, “An infrastructure for reparative democracy!” . Since I was putting together a full-throated plea for data projects to defend democracy & the planetary, I couldn’t be more pleased with the patriotic image.