Murder. Theft. Tischendorf. Codex Alexandrinus. GA 81. What brings those together? A journey to Alexandria, a trail of manuscripts, and a mystery with more twists than expected, hidden in the story of a grieving library: futureofthepastlab.com/2026/05/27/c...

Codex Alexandrinus and GA 81: Lessons from a Grieving Library

May 27th, 2026 By Mina Monier The ‘Walled-Up’ Library and GA 81 Mina Monier, MF Norwegian School of Theology In October 2017, less than two months before my PhD defence, I travelled back to Egypt i…

futureofthepastlab.com

I just updated my Greek Minuscule LLM HTR Benchmark and added the latest frontier models in addition to some open weight and other models. Some spoilers: Gemini is still far ahead for all metrics. Grok and Llama are about as bad as it gets. d-flood.github.io/paleo-bench/

Paleo Bench | HTR Model Leaderboard

Compare handwritten Greek text recognition performance across LLM vision models with ranking, CER/WER quality, latency, and cost metrics.

d-flood.github.io

As always, you can check out the source code directly on GitHub, or you can install the latest version easily with pip via pip install teiphy

🚨 Job Alert: We’re hiring! The information infrastructure project INF of @sfb1475 currently has two openings for #DigitalHumanities researchers (full time, 3,5 years). We build the central research infrastructure for a collaborative research center comprising researchers working on metaphors in […]

I enjoyed being a guest on @talkpython.fm discussing my journey into digital humanities and some of the projects I work on. #DigitalHumanities talkpython.fm/episodes/sho...

Python in Digital Humanities

Digital humanities sounds niche, until you realize it can mean a searchable archive of U.S. amendment proposals, Irish folklore, or pigment science in ancient art. Today I’m talking with David Flood f...

talkpython.fm

I've just published Paleo-Bench a simple multi-modal bench test for how current frontier models transcribe Greek minuscule manuscripts. d-flood.github.io/paleo-bench/ You can see the human transcribed transcription side by side with the model transcription and with IIIF image viewer.

Paleo Bench | HTR Model Leaderboard

Compare handwritten Greek text recognition performance across LLM vision models with ranking, CER/WER quality, latency, and cost metrics.

d-flood.github.io

Refreshed personal site: davidaflood.com Finally retired the Django version. Not because I've soured on Django (I haven't), but because a static site is basically free forever and it'll never go down.

David Flood

Portfolio of David Flood, a Software Engineer for Arts & Humanities Research Computing at Harvard and textual critic of the Greek New Testament.

davidaflood.com

We've been talking about how generative AI produces average results. I've been thinking about pastors who use AI to write their sermons. I'd bet that this is an upgrade for a lot of churches. It must be true that for many, this means better sermons because the floor is higher.

I'll be joining Michael Kennedy on the @talkpython.fm podcast tomorrow to discuss Python in my corner of the #DigitalHumanities Tune in for the live stream to ask real time questions www.youtube.com/live/ZaI2AxR...

Python in Digital Humanities - Talk Python Live Stream

YouTube video by Talk Python

youtube.com

I stood up a demo site for my new (work-in-progress) IIIF image viewer d-flood.github.io/triiiceratop... Goal is to be sleek but powerful. Supports IIIF search service and annotation rendering.

Wow, thanks to the CloudFlare outage for illustrating why online research platforms should be offline capable PWAs!

David A Flood@davidaflood.com · 9mo ago

A short demo of Apatosaurus v2 offline functionality for the TEI compatible transcription editor. #digitalhumanities

A short demo of Apatosaurus v2 offline functionality for the TEI compatible transcription editor. #digitalhumanities

My team is looking to fill a technical #DH #digitalhumanities 2-year position. This is for a senior full stack software engineer with fluency in modern and literary Chinese, advanced knowledge of ML and gen AI, and academic research experience.

Zach Butler has just posted an instructive overview of @davidaflood.com's Apatosaurus app for working with a digital textual apparatus. He even mentioned my open-cbgm software, and it sounds like he's planning to post more about that next! Check out his post below, and keep an eye out for more!

The Digital Orientalist@digitalorientalist.bsky.social · 2y ago

🗃️ Zachary Butler explores how to examine and analyze collation files through the web app www.apatosaurus.io/about/introd..., a tool for creating, editing, visualizing, and analyzing digital apparatus. 💻 #digitalhumanities #coding #DataAnalytics digitalorientalist.com/2025/01/14/a...

We (wife and other kids) agreed to play a bit of DnD with my son; he wanted to GM, but none of us had played before. My character's commitment to pacifism kinda threw a wrench into the plans.

I've been using this _super_ simple queue and task consumer for my Django projects for two years and I've finally written a README for it so people other than myself can make sense of it. Now that it has a little test suite I think it's fine to make it public github.com/d-flood/peas...

One of my personal project papyrus46.com is online. It brings together a complete set of the latest digital images and the transcriptions I produced for my doctoral thesis. You can also add images and transcriptions from Kenyon's ed. pr. for comparison. It also contains an extensive bibliography.

I'm so jealous of everyone getting ready for #SBLAAR. This is my first year both missing it and not presenting since 2019. This year's travel budget went toward my graduation in Edinburgh. No regrets, but bummed to miss my first year as Dr. Flood. Have fun all! #sblaar24

PhD: conferred.

#PhDone All requirements satisfied, nothing to do now but wait for my degree to be conferred.

With the fracturing of my Biblical studies and digital humanities social media communities, I've forgotten about Bsky (I like browsing Mastedon with the Phanpy client more and more lately). So here is my obligatory conference attendance post: I really enjoyed the #iiif annual conference.

Find owls spotted near you www.owlsnearme.com #SupberbOwl

My team, Arts and Humanities Research Computing at Harvard University is hiring a software engineer to work on digital humanities projects. sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

BIG NEWS: My latest article with Rob Turnbull, "Using Bayesian Phylogenetics to Infer Manuscript Transmission History," is now accessible as an open-access advance article in DSH: academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...

I was looking for some information on decomposing extended Greek Unicode characters in Python; look who popped up in my search results with the answer: jktauber.com/articles/pyt... @jtauber.com

I've been working with the Arts and Humanities Research Computing team and Harvard University since June. This week I will visit campus for the first time, including a tour of Houghton library's rare book collection! They have a few NT manuscripts I wouldn't mind seeing....

I did it. My SBL presentation will be accompanied by a web page instead of slides. I could run my talk with my phone (I went ahead and made it mobile friendly too)

David A Flood@davidaflood.com · 3y ago

I think I'm going to use HTML/CSS/JS for my SBL presentation instead of slides

I think I'm going to use HTML/CSS/JS for my SBL presentation instead of slides

Yikes, SBL is coming way too fast. Since there isn't a scheduled NTTC dinner this year, I hope we still find a way to get together!

If you are into historical network research + manuscripts, this special issue of JHNR will be something for you. 📄 Six great papers applying network analysis to manuscripts and textual transmission. jhnr.uni.lu/index.php/jh...