'Ofcom has made "urgent contact" with Elon Musk's company xAI following reports its AI tool Grok can be used to make "sexualised images of children" and undress women.' The slumbering regulatory giant wakes?

I'm looking for scholars of Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Armenian to comment on and to test my approach, as well as generalist historians wanting to explore new content and archives @timhitchcock.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com #history #ottoman #turkey

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

For New Year’s Day 2026, a hellenistic glass vase shaped like a pomegranate. 2nd century BC - 1st century AD. A symbol of abundance and good luck for the year ahead! 📷 Phoenix Art phoenixancientart.com/work-of-art/... #Archaeology

I've published my Pavia University digital mapping lecture slides and workshop notes on my website: historyofpublicspace.uk/political-me...

Hooray! The British Library has just released a beta version of its rebuilt Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue: searcharchives.bl.uk 2,619 hits for 'petition' in Western Manuscripts, texts in English, in case you're curious. 🗃️

WINTER Term Card: We are excited to share our seminar schedule for next term! Our slate of speakers cover a range of #18thc British history topics. Registrations are now open (with paper abstracts) at the link below 👎 @ihr.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

So I am confused. The US is replacing a Dutch font with a British one. Can't they come up with anything of their own?

Great to see the programme for the @long18thsem.bsky.social for next term @ihrlibrary.bsky.social . You can register to attend either in person or online here: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Beyond the slaughter, the #Genocide seeks to erase existence. DESTROYING COUNTLESS PALESTINIAN #archives & #documents is #IdentityTheft ON A MASSIVE SCALE. The IOF is trying to make Palestinian history, identity and claim to the land impossible to prove... 1/2 #CulturalCleansing #HistoryCleansing

I think before that there needs to be many more conversations about what that might look like and how to address IP and copyright (my personal view would be OA and non commercial). Also, funding!

More importantly, there needs to be infrastructure to support collaborative digital projects like this.

100% talk to folk at your national libraries and archives about what they're doing, and find communities of folk like #AI4LAM collaborating to find the best methods for different materials! (she said, knowing that she got an email from Colin Greenstreet this morning!)

Great to see Helen Wilson's talk on Black participation in Georgain politics available online (it starts 30 seconds in - my fault) @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social : www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Yep, having this as a serious element of both undergrad and postgrad history degrees is essential, and yet still mostly lacking. Kudos to departments doing this by now!

I am both envious of the tools now available to scholars and lost as to how anyone will be able to make sense of everything we’ll have access to. But there is already some wonderful digital history work being done, so I am optimistic for the long term—and grateful to have wrapped up my own work.

British History Online is looking at using LLMs for transcription. But this is at a very early stage right now.

I think I might be more inclined to language learn if a tool could help me do some of the work. Double checking remains the historians' job.

Most projects (Slave Voyages, Amsterdam Municipal Archives, etc) do very little besides giving the transcriptions side by side with images. More detailed cataloguing like the Prize Papers indeed require quite a lot of effort - although LLMs can speed that up as well.

100% - all of my (collaborative) work with creating datasets of transcriptions/visual annotations from historical docs has been done so that these derived datasets become parts of the digital coll. where the physical collections are held, & the work is done in conversation with the curators. 1/2

And I worry when I see historians creating this data in a personal research capacity that excludes archivists and librarians and infrastructures supporting digital collections. This raises questions about quality/evaluation of outputs, reproducibility, & more (lots more to say, maybe not here!) 2/2

Yes - this is a big area of discussion that spans language training, historiographical background, ability to work on site as well as with scanned documents - and of course there is not only 1 correct answer - it will depend on the research aims/ experiences, and risks around archival preservation

I'm going to a digital history workshop conference at Pavia next week, thanks to Adam, and there is a session on AI and translating archives. I'll report back.

NLS Data Foundry models works well, other libraries create catalog records for derived data. But it all requires lots of infrastructure & new staff that rarely gets funded.

The time lag between creating transcription data & infrastructure systems to store+make them discoverable @ institutions is at the heart of this gap in established practices around who makes, evaluates, curates, preserves, and reuses derived data.

I’ve talked to people at the BL and the NA who are thinking about transcription. The BL intends to fully integrate digitization and transcription at some pointX and isn’t transcription part of the Prize Papers project?

To venture into the fray a bit here - I've seen these conversations happening at the AHA in last 2 years, but there hasn't really been a forum for this in the UK. Would be nice if the @royalhistsoc.org could convene a forum or other conversation about automatic archival transcription + translation.

The results that @marinelives.bsky.social is getting using Gemini 3 Pro, transcribing and translating Armenian ms materials are stunning. Historians, teachers and archivists really need to be discussing where we want to be with this stuff. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

I have a new Substack article about the potential of Gemi 3 Pro to assist with machine transcription of medium and low resource languages #history #translation #palaeography #digitalhumanities @timhitchcock.bsky.social @dancohen.org @tedunderwood.com open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Such a terrific, informative talk - I'd had no idea about the numbers of Black men we know voted in the 18th & 19th centuries, let alone that two of them were MPs! Particularly interested by William Cuffay/-ey: not an MP, but tailor, Chartist organiser, and short king (4'11").

Great audience for Helen Wilson's paper on Black participation in 18th Britain. @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social

Thanks to @long18thsem.bsky.social and @ihr.bsky.social for hosting my talk on the convergence of medical and maternal approaches to childcare in Georgian England. A vibrant forum with a really engaged audience. Pleased the recording is now live for anyone interested.

We are hiring at the University of Arizona libraries for a Data Science Specialist/Librarian. Expertise/experience in Python is a must. Not on the search committee, will be your colleague. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Next Wednesday 3-12 we are holding a joint seminar with @histparl.bsky.social! Join us at 17:30 at the @ihr.bsky.social or online via zoom to hear Dr Helen Wilson discuss ‘Black & Political: Black Political Participation in Britain, 1750-1850’. Register now! 👎 www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Donkey 17th century Pieter Jacobsz. van Laer (Met Museum)

Looking forward to Helen Wilson speaking on Reconstructing Black Participation in British Politics, 1750-1850, to a joint session of @long18thsem.bsky.social and the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome, but please register at www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

For all postdocs and ECRs: don't miss out on this great opportunity with the Turin Humanities Programme! voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/tu...

Just posted a review - a reflection really - of the exhibition of Ruth Asawa's work at SFMOMA on my rather neglected blog - historyonics.blogspot.com/2025/11/ruth...

I am relaunching the ai-and-history collaboratory I ran last December. First meeting Tuesday, December 9th 2025. Then roughly monthly by ZOOM. Let me know if you are interested. github.com/Addaci/ai-an... #ai #history @timhitchcock.bsky.social

Really pleased to see that Helen Esfandiary's excellent talk last week to @long18thsem.bsky.social is now available on the @ihrlibrary.bsky.social website: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Long ago on the hell site I made long list of historically interesting things to use in dnd ttrpgs and I'll start dragging them over here starting with 2000 years-old sapphire ring presumably belonged to Roman emperor Caligula, depicting his fourth wife Caesonia.

Part 218 of 200 in historically interesting things to inspire your ttrpg dnd Ceramic hedgehog dated to the Neolithic period found at the Hamin archaeological site near Shebotu Town in Inner Mongolia, China

Status update: fiber cut between data centers - trucks are rolling. Services are slow but functional, except for the Wayback Machine, which is still offline.

Helen Esfandiary giving a great paper on elite maternal authority over the care of children in the context of the professional medical market place in the 18th c. @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social

Just a reminder that if you're attending our seminar in person rather than online this evening, we're in the Institute of Education rather than at the IHR (which is closed for Founders' Day). All welcome! #Skystorians

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

Research Fellow x2 (109856-1125) University of Warwick - #History - #skystorians 🗃️ www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPK288/r...

It's sobering to reflect on how much work and how many people have been involved in creating those datasets. Here's MOLA's *long* write-up of the creation of the LLP map data (and that was in part enhancing data previously laboriously made by Patrick Mannix): www.locatinglondon.org/about/mappin...

I'm a bit chuffed with this tbh: it brings together data from 4 different sources - my/LondonLives inquests, @camunicampop.bsky.social bills of mortality, Locating London's map polygons, and a bit of population data by @timhitchcock.bsky.social . And I learned some new JS and observable plot tricks.