🎵 10 March is #InternationalBagpipeDay! A 🎶🧵
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“It looks as if a Man could Toot himself to Heaven upon the Whore of Babylon’s Bagpipes”
—how #C18th English satirists used #bagpipes to signify Jacobitism & Catholicism, & the threat to the Establishment
www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2013/05/the-...
The automation paradox (that invariably automation ends up making more work in a variety of ways) is a thing. Which is why it's best practices for the people actually doing the work to have a say in how automation technologies are deployed in their workplaces, which can only be done collectively.
News! EHR is hosting a free one-day symposium at St John's College, Oxford, on Friday 17 April, 10-6, on the theme 'When there are no sources'.
Further details and how to sign up here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-there...
A DOGE staffer assigned to the National Endowment for the Humanities to flag grants for "DEI" tries to explain what "DEI" is. This deposition is part of a lawsuit by the @acls1919.bsky.social, @historians.org and @modernlanguage.bsky.social.
Universities pay copyright fees. Libraries pay copyright fees. Theaters pay to perform copyrighted work. Artists and authors pay licence fees to quote others in their own work, usually out of pocket.
really good piece and I want to highlight this theme here, something I’ve become obsessed with: LLMs simply cannot evaluate the objective truth of any claim or the relative value of any information
Yup, LLMs are so woefully bad at history, so I'm never trusting them with anything else... but I keep meeting smart people who "ask ChatGPT" for so many things, and it's driving me to despair
We have just launched our IHR 2026 internship with the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH), focusing on environmental histories. For more information and to apply visit: buff.ly/Vzpz6G3 (application deadline 15 April 2026, 11:59 pm BST).
All of the information in the image is available via the web link.
New free online research training course 5 May 2026. Engaging Histories: Working with/in the Media as an Historian.
www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
I would love to think along side any historians working on preserving historical memory, records, and archives in the age of AI.
When mass manipulation of info is possible, how do we make sure the records we have can be authenticated, traceable, and withstand multiple chain of custodies? 🗃️
Lovely colours!
"Disciplines reject what isn’t intellectually valid... If the discipline of Geology determines that the flat-Earth theory doesn’t meet its standards, geologists do not need to hire flat-Earthers and provide lessons in flat-Earth theory to their students."
stanforddaily.com/2026/02/17/v...
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
Amazing treasures of medieval legal history - the Catslechta ˙ (or Cat-sections) - an old Irish legal text on cats and part of an Old Irish legal compilation (the Senchas Már) #medievalsky
Lovely to see this review of our 'London in the Second World War' exhibition published on its last day. Huge thanks and congratulations to our staff who worked hard to curate it 🥳👏
Our next exhibition, 'Londoners on Trial' opens on the 9th March.... 👀
www.thelondonarchives.org/visit-us/exh...
My Biographical Memoir of Jinty Nelson for the British Academy is now available on their website, open access on this link www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/m...
The AI discourse has been particularly unhinged lately. Here are five things I think are behind it:
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/five-takea...
This won’t give my management a second’s pause.
👌
Countries that don't eat crisps will die, says crisp salesman.
This is why archeologists don't like us ... Get it together historians.
Sobering quote from the article linked to in this thread:
"The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters."
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This is a good read
Yet again the fees regime - so eagerly embraced by university management - returns to bite us on the arse. Fees for HE are retrograde shite, universities should have fought this, not welcomed it, and the pain will end up - yet again - being borne by staff put, as usual, in an impossible position.
America's Richest People Are Not its Most Generous
Fascinating chart with one outlier: Warren Buffett.
At the low end, giving 0.06% of one's wealth is equivalent to:
Net worth -> Lifetime Giving
50K->$30
100K->$60
500K->$300
$1M->$600
Most folks give far more by % in a *single year*.
www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...
Can historians benefit from creative works for historical research? In this @hsnatsci.bsky.social short piece, I share how I worked w/ different types of making to research and write my recent book on 17th-c. florilegia. Thank you @dominikhhh.bsky.social & @mbaldwin.bsky.social for the invitation!
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?
