100%. If an author has either not read or not understood a source they've cited, then that would be grounds for a desk reject. A "blessing" of AI hallucinations is that this kind of author is suddenly a lot easier to spot...

Jeremy Menchik@menchik.bsky.social · 8mo ago

A corollary to this principle is that finding a single hallucinated citation should lead to an automatic rejection. Automatic. This should be a matter of policy. And this is one of easier AI-related problems for our journals!

Whenever our students open a PDF over two pages—in other words, every reading we assign them—Adobe tells them "this document looks long, let me summarise this for you." What message does this send to MA students about the value of actually reading the sources themselves?!

Karoline@karoline.bsky.social · 9mo ago

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

What a delightful exemplar to come across, in the week my students have a book review due...

James Chalmers@jameschalmers.bsky.social · 8mo ago

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

Ah, yes, my beloved archipelago in the South Pacific, that natural bastion of "the West"

Tangentially related: I cannot understand why BA students in NZ aren't *required* to study a language—especially students like me who majored in international relations. I took one semester of Japanese, it was hard and my grades sucked, of course 20yr old me didn't think it was worth continuing!

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Even if we would stipulate that the *only* purpose of college is vocational training (ugh) if you think you, at 18 years old, not only know for sure what your future career will be but also know better than all the professors at a college what skills you will need for that career, why bother?

I wrote a book, it now has a cover, it's all feeling very real! Coming out (open access) in February, for all those with an interest in, well, religion, gender, and/or politics in Sri Lankan history. www.arc-humanities.org/978180270309...

Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka - Arc Humanities Press

The early second millennium was a pivotal moment in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Religious reforms carried out at Poḷonnaruva, then-capital of Sri L...

arc-humanities.org

People vastly underestimate how important trans* rights are in the contemporary fight for freedom. If you cannot make your own choices for your body, the name you go by, or even the very clothes that you wear, then you are not, in any sense, meaningfully free.

It's very "university IT department" to make it mandatory for us to use the VPN to check our emails... The same day that the VPN crashes. I'm sure that they've sent a very helpful email by now with a workaround! If only...

📸 New research just out revealing disturbing problems with AI image captioning. AI models can now analyse both texts and images, and are trained on vast collections of human-created content spanning centuries. Some claims these models could soon help human historians interpret and explain the past.

I shall henceforth always refer to GenAI as "the gibbering mouth froth of rabid autocomplete." (also this book and interview are both generally excellent)

Vajra Chandrasekera@vajra.me · 9mo ago

I have a new interview about RAKESFALL up at Reactor! In which I am quite verbose reactormag.com/author-inter...

The line "Señorita, feel the conga, let me see you move LIKE you come from Colombia" has never made much sense to me since Shakira actually DOES come from Colombia. Please enjoy these alternatives, with which I have been torturing my Colombian partner all day.

This is a great read, well worth a subscription to the Examiner. A substantial preview of the article is available above the paywall too www.examiner.media/conclave-in-...

Conclave in Kandy: election for the ‘highest lay office in the Buddhist world’

The Kandyans will elect the next Diyawadana Nilame this evening. He will oversee the tooth relic and the Maligawa’s worldly affairs. Seven candidates are contesting, including a university lecturer, a...

examiner.media

This could be my opportunity to stake out my own niche of academic Brunoism

will pooley@willpooley.bsky.social · 10mo ago

IMPORTANT update there are NO gifs of Bruno Latour. it just suggests various clips of Bruno Mars which honestly is not the right vibe

#WebinAAR | On Friday 7 Nov, at 12pm ET / 6pm CET, I’ll be speaking in an AAR webinar on Buddhist feminist historiography, in conversation with Steph Balkwill and other excellent folks. Q and A follows; register now and join the discussion: my.aarweb.org/event-inform...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

This is, with the benefit of Atlantic distance, hilarious. It is also deeply, deeply disturbing.

Alice Campos@ok-sure.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Open the page. Scroll down to the timeline. Go through the timeline. It’s… shocking

Good copyedits need a good kittyeditor

I have lived in Germany for two years now and still whenever I hear small children chatting away in public my first thought is "wow their German is so good, they must study very hard"

New #cfp from the Journal of Transcultural Studies for a special issue on “Transcultural Histories of Monarchy” - abstracts to be sent to jts-editors@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de by 1st Sept! The essays will explore the ways in which monarchies incorporate “the foreign” into the familiar.

Stephanie Balkwill's The Women Who Ruled China is an incredible book, with methodological takeaways for historians of gender and power in every context. Read my review for @royalstudies.bsky.social here: rsj.winchester.ac.uk/articles/10....

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. By Stephanie Balkwill. University of California Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-0520401815. 272 pp | Royal Studies Jo...

rsj.winchester.ac.uk

I've just had an article come out on a poem from medieval Sri Lanka, and what it might tell us about attitudes towards renunciation, religious paths, and the proximate goals of Buddhist practice: pwj.shin-ibs.edu/2025/7164

Buddhist Poetics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Muvadev-dā-vata Reconsidered

This article offers a close reading of the twelfth-century Muvadev-dā-vata, one of the earliest Sinhala-language poetic works to model itself on the Sanskrit kāvya. While earlier studies of the Muv…

pwj.shin-ibs.edu

Just days before Vesak, Sotheby's plan to auction off sacred relics of the Buddha—stolen in the colonial destruction of a stūpa, no less—to the highest bidder. religionnews.com/2025/04/22/a...

Auctioning the Buddha's relics is perpetuating colonial violence

(RNS) — For the Buddhists who deposited these relics — as for Buddhists today — the gems, bone and ash all belong to the Buddha and shouldn’t just be sold to the highest bidder.

religionnews.com

A new issue of the Journal of Transcultural Studies is now available open-access! It features articles by @jaydprosser.bsky.social (Leeds), Alexander Vesey (Tokyo), Ori Sela (Tel Aviv) and Dhruv Raina (New Delhi/Pune). Great reads all; check them out here: heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/tra...

This is interesting. "Leading AI Models are now very good historians". It's a total clickbait title as I will expand on below. But several of the challenges put to the models, particularly palaeographical transcription and translation, it seems to perform well. Wills @ Exeter is using it for this.1

The leading AI models are now very good historians

Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean

resobscura.substack.com

If you need a distraction today-- check out my new piece for Aeon! I say there's no universal definition of fiction b/c how "fiction" is understood depends on a culture's metaphysics. Philosophy of fiction has been taking Greek metaphysics for granted. I say we branch out. aeon.co/essays/befor...

Historian friends, here's a new years resolution for you: no more Google Maps screenshots in your powerpoints! Thanks to Technology™ it's easy and free to make maps from scratch that look professional (or at least professional enough), even with my level of extremely limited technical skills.

This is a great piece, and I love the idea of academic articles having a General Abstract for non-specialists. But let's be real: the biggest barrier to academic accessibility is paywalls. www.fairobserver.com/culture/all-...

All the Light We Cannot See: Urgency for Understandable Academic Writing

Academic writing should be clear and accessible to both scholars and the general public. To achieve this, academics must simplify their work through clear summaries and public outreach.

fairobserver.com

Feminism, to be worthy of the name, has to be something more than mere attention to women’s experience of gender. It matters what that attention produces, what it has to say about women’s lives. “Women are always, essentially this subservient and cannot be otherwise” is not a feminist statement.

I first thought that the quote was some kind of cursed new lyrics for Santa Claus Is Coming To Town and oh no it turns out it's far more cursed than that

Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they)@katjathieme.bsky.social · 2y ago

Elsevier products: ScienceDirect, Scopus, Mendeley, SciVal, SSRN, Pure, Interfolio. . .and that's not all. "They know what you are working on, they know what you are submitting, they know the results of your peer reviews. They control every part of the process and register every action you take."

Great news for students of Sinhala outside of SL: Cornell has just made six of its textbooks totally open-access, including Gair and Karunatilaka's *Literary Sinhala*. This will make Sinhala-language materials far more accessible to scholars of Buddhism and SA einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/sou...