Where should I be looking for solid coverage of AI changing conditions in translation work?

If you want to earn a PhD with a study of the medieval readers of the earliest MSS of Aristotle's De anima in Latin, only two days left to apply!

Pieter Beullens@pieterbeullens.bsky.social · 4w ago

We are hiring a PhD-student! #Philosophysky #Medievalsky #philjob www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Continuing with the "someone made a horrific database of poor AI translations of early medieval letters" thing, I had a good laugh at these entirely hallucinated ones. They aren't even based on existing letters! www.lateromanletters.org/letters/epis... www.lateromanletters.org/letters/epis...

Arioald to Pope Honorius I (c. 627 AD) | Roman Letters

Arioald, king, to the most holy Bishop…

lateromanletters.org

Some notes by little me on recent, hugely damaging, shamefully shameless events at Cambridge University. rorywaterman.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-cambridge-debacle If you read only one article about what has happened, try the new piece by Lanre Bakare in the Guardian, linked in my blog post.

Notes on a Cambridge Debacle

I’ve written this very hastily, but there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest and the situation seems to be evolving quickly. Pleze ekscus eny leters getin in the rong plaices etc.

rorywaterman.substack.com

Anyway, palaeography is essential to medieval studies, as is Latin, and if we lose these from our unis we leave medieval studies to the privately-educated and independently wealthy. Medieval studies is important: everyone deserves to spend their time on this floating rock doing what they love ❤️ /FIN

Rare Book School mourns the loss of medieval manuscripts expert and RBS emeritus faculty member Albert Derolez. "His kindness as much as his brilliance will be remembered by those who knew him," said Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. rarebookschool.org/resources/2026/07/rbs-mourns-albert-derolez

Rare Book School Mourns Emeritus Faculty Member Albert Derolez (1934–2026) - Rare Book School

It is with profound sadness that Rare Book School announces the death of RBS emeritus faculty member Albert Derolez on 11 July 2026, at the age of 91.

rarebookschool.org

Martyn Hammersley's comments at the end of this article that Cambridge could have dealt with this from the outset are spot on - it will now be a field day for the right

Retraction Watch@retractionwatch.com · last wk.

After Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send @timeshighered.bsky.social a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

We finished work on the R volume of the Thesaurus months ago. The last two parts are now in print and reached us today.

“The actual epistemological crisis [is] better exemplified by the Vanderbilt report’s AI-generated analyses: automated data collection, sloppy analysis, and a growing sprawl of LLM-generated pseudo-evidence. Meanwhile the AI ensloppification of [academic publishing] continues apace” archive.is/6qf0b

Gabriel Hankins@gabrielh.bsky.social · 3w ago

My response to Appiah's "field report" is up: please repost www.chronicle.com/article/kwam...

Academics who discreetly email journals to inform them of academic malpractice are doing those journals such a big favour. To see those journals shrug their shoulders in response is mystifying and unacceptable. I fear the only solution might be to call those journals out publicly

Marc Hudson@marchudson.bsky.social · 2w ago

From the LinkedIn of an academic I have a lot of respect for.

I don't suppose there's anyone here doing some work in the Archives nationales (Paris, not Pierrefitte) right now who wouldn't mind grabbing a couple of photos for me...?

Lexicographer wanted at the TLL! Deadline end of August. Somewhat surprisingly, the advert doesn’t say how good your German needs to be – the TLL is based in Munich, and it’s in the nature of the job that you need to be in the office – but of course the dictionary itself is written in Latin anyway.

Nigel Holmes@nigelholmes.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae has a post open for a classicist (preferably with doctorate, lexicographical experience an advantage): job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/6...

The intricacies of the earliest stage of the mass production of printed books (Flood 2003):

A dark warning from a search results page with its listings upgraded from stodgy verbatim extracts to predigested robovomit. (Source: “When George Molland died in September 2002, it was a great loss to the history of medieval science and mathematics, especially of the fourteenth century.”) #progress

A dark warning from a search results page with its listings upgraded from stodgy verbatim extracts to predigested robovomit. (Source: “When George Molland died in September 2002, it was a great loss to the history of medieval science and mathematics, especially of the fourteenth century.”) #progress

Sad news I've only just heard: Albert Derolez has left us. He was 91, and one of the foremost palaeographers and codicologists in the world.

I beg your finest pardon?

Last summer I gritted my teeth and paid 20 € postage to buy a 21.58 € paperback from Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Today I see they’re charging 50 € to deliver to the UK! Happily I can get the book I want elsewhere, but this isn’t the only ludicrously prohibitive postage fee I’ve seen recently 😠

Also, in the age of deepfakes and deliberate history erasure, the only unalienable truth lies in original documents and artefacts. Our last safeguards of authenticity are preserved in museums, libraries, and archives.

Beth DeBold@elizaaudacis.bsky.social · 3w ago

To the inevitable cries of “just digitize everything, then;” not an answer. Making digital facsimiles accessible requires huge investment: staff, metadata, preservation. Orgs are currently not funded to meet these needs. While digital objects are great, they’ll never replace looking at originals.

Going to try to make this accidental 'livelihoo' on the OUP website into a thing: capricious quality of life and lifelikeness, essayistic esprit, careless brilliance.

Franciscan Studies 83 (2025): among other articles, a "total study" of the recently identified Franciscan collection in MS Paris, BNF, NAL 3245; Bonaventure's reception of Avicenna's psychology; and Jean de Roquetaillade's apocalyptic alchemy. buff.ly/YHi1npO

Today is as good a day as any other to think about giving back to something in your life that comes free to you. Do you have special skills or interests - for instance, you know Hebrew and are proficient at typing it? The digitized Lewis and Short could use your assistance with a few words.

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 67 (2025): Ibn Ḥazm, Ibn Ṭumlūs, Durand on evils, Guy de l'Aumône's Sentences commentary, Jandun's commentaries, new MSS from the Paris arts faculty, Konrad Wimpina's citations, future contingents in Aurifaber. buff.ly/KhDj8Sb

Are you headed to the @imc-leeds.bsky.social next week? Do you like Lollards and/or rebels? How about historical documents and the people, events, and networks they help us explore? Join us on Monday, July 6 at 4.30 for "Lollards and Rebels."

So in summary from today’s unexpectedly viral thread: the methods and the tech here are not AI in the way that’s commonly understood right now. The methods are sound. The findings are important. HOWEVER 1/

Dr Naomi Scott@drnaomiscott.bsky.social · last mo.

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.

Not even rare, old books are safe from AI companies

www.swr.de/kultur/liter...

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · last mo.

What I said here about an earlier project still holds. 2/n bsky.app/profile/sonj...

It’s not too late to book your place for the Palaeography Summer School in Birmingham in July! 📖✏️👨‍🎓👇 #MedievalSky #Skystorians #Latin palaeography.uk/study/short-...

The 49th Latin and Palaeography Summer School, 27-31 July 2026

The School, formerly the Keele Latin and Palaeography Summer School, returns for its 49th year. In 2025 The Ranulf Higden Society took over the organisation of the Latin and Palaeography Summer Sch…

palaeography.uk

This looks very interesting, with a strong review from Drew Jones. We don't often get new literary studies of Medieval Latin poetry these days. Plus: Baudri! I love Baudri. www.brepols.net/products/IS-...

The 25th European Symposium on Medieval Logic & Semantics will be held in the Netherlands on 23–25 June. Please email esmls25@proton.me if you’d like to attend online. The programme is as follows (on Central European Summer Time, with some titles trimmed and names omitted to fit): #medievalSky