Drew Thomas
@drewbthomas.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @unisalzburg.bsky.social | Digital History | Applying AI to early modern print & visual communication • The Industry of Evangelism (Brill) • FRHistS
Come join me at Salzburg! Join IMAREAL in Krems as a Senior Scientist in Medieval & Early Modern Archaeology, with a focus on material culture, interdisciplinary research and digital humanities. 📅 Apply by 26 Aug 2026 💶 From €70,200.20/year 🔗 karriere.plus.ac.at/en/jobs/9bdf...
Universität Salzburg
karriere.plus.ac.at
Whether your urine bottle was allowed in a library reading room of around 1400 AD depended on the specific location and their zero tolerance policy for any liquids near rare books. #bookhistory
For my digital history exam, students receive a research topic and must design a DH pipeline. It’s inspiring to see the range of tools they choose, the results they imagine, and the ways their backgrounds, interests, and creativity shape each answer. Their personalities really shine through.
A really great mapping project with a usable dataset to trial with students.
Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EMDigIt)@emdigit.bsky.social · 2mo agoAfter a hiatus, EMDigIt is back with BIG news! 📯 The Core Italian Itinerary dataset is now publicly available as feature layers published on ArcGIS Online. More than 3,700 georeferenced way-points and 6,000 route segments taken from 8 Italian-language itineraries published from 1562-1720.
Early modern hangry: "You're not you when you're hungry. Grab a Snickers." 🍫
Daniel Bellingradt@dbellingradt.bsky.social · 5mo ago1749 AD. Just a regular elephant at the bookseller, having an argument about enlightenment ideas...
A manuscript nearly destroyed by fire is becoming readable again. New multispectral imaging at the British Library is revealing text, images and annotations in the 5th-century Cotton Genesis—one of the earliest surviving illuminated Bibles. 1/6 www.bl.uk/stories/blog...
Rescued from the flames: the Cotton Genesis restored to life
New multispectral imaging at the British Library has helped us to read one of the earliest surviving illuminated Bibles.
bl.uk
Join us in Salzburg for DigiHist2026: Doing Cultural Heritage! 📅 28 September–1 October 2026 📍 Rudolfskai 42, Salzburg 🎟️ Free registration 🔗 REGISTER: www.plus.ac.at/geschichte/t... #DigiHist2026 #DigitalHistory #CulturalHeritage #DigitalHumanities
Are these poop smears going down the side of that building? 🤭 (Nuremberg, 1548; VD16 D 1632)
Three great postdocs are available in Trento as part of the "Travellers’ interactions in early modern Italy" project. Deadline 8 May: jobs.fbk.eu/Annunci/Jobs...
Jobs | Humanities and Social Sciences Hub - Trento | FBK is looking for three Postdoctoral Researchers in the field of Early Modern History
jobs.fbk.eu
Just beautiful elephants of the past, printed by (European) humans who likely have rarely seen an elephant before or were just bad printers. A short 🧵
Excited to begin the new semester as Assistant Professor of Modern History (Digital History) at @unisalzburg.bsky.social. Looking forward to strengthening Digital History within Salzburg’s DH community and continuing my work on AI and Reformation print culture.
We all need our emotional support Mesopotamian tablet.
Devin Fitzgerald, bibliothot@devinfitz.bsky.social · 7mo agoAll hail this undergrad who is just here to look at cunieform tablets despite being unable to read them.
langextract: A Python library for extracting structured information from unstructured text using LLMs with precise source grounding and interactive visualization. github.com/google/lange...
I just noticed that today is the final day to download "How to Use Generative AI in Educational Research" for free from Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/9781...
How to Use Generative AI in Educational Research
Cambridge Core - Education policy, strategy and reform - How to Use Generative AI in Educational Research
doi.org
Interior designers in 2025: “Arrange your books by color, it’s chic ✨” Lady Bindloss in 1671: “Been there, done that.” 📚🎨 earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/l...
Lady Bindloss Buys Some Books (1676)
Of the various kinds of documents that provide evidence of book ownership in the early modern period, purchase records are among the scarcest survivals: most booklists take the form of wills, inven…
earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com
Vandalism! At some stage in its nearly 500 year history, someone cut out the printer's ornament from the title page of our 1544 copy of Aesop's Fables.
Bookworms in the news! 📖🐛(ok, in this case, beetles) wapo.st/44FIveA
Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation
A medieval abbey in Hungary is battling a beetle infestation threatening its ancient book collection
wapo.st
When did libraries realize their Luther pamphlets were fakes? My new Open Access article, "Provenance and Deception: Tracking Counterfeit Luther Pamphlets in Wittenberg", traces how centuries of provenance work slowly brought them to light. 📚 Read here: doi.org/10.1080/1357...
Provenance and Deception: Tracking Counterfeit Luther Pamphlets in Wittenberg
This article explores the phenomenon of counterfeit copies of Martin Luther’s pamphlets within the Reformationsgeschichtliche Forschungsbibliothek (RFB) in Wittenberg. Following the rise of Luther,...
doi.org
I had a great time in Saint-Étienne recently, speaking about multi-modal computer vision and Iconclass. Got to see a bit of Lyon too.
Excited to present this week at "Computer Vision for the Investigation of Ornaments and Ancient Documents" @ Université Jean Monnet! My talk: Captions, Codes & Clusters—on using multimodal AI to map visual culture & religious messaging in the Reformation.
Among the many characteristics of being the Catholic King of #France in seventeenth-century Europe was to burn and ban Protestant books. In this image from 1691 you see Louis le Grand banning, burning and condeming books by Luther and Calvin. A symbolic #bookburning event and a religious #bookban 📚
What a fantastic find! In Harvard’s archives, British scholars find a lost Magna Carta www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...
In Harvard’s archives, British scholars find a lost Magna Carta
At a moment when Harvard is battling the Trump administration, a scholar who helped discover the charter said it was an “almost providential” find.
washingtonpost.com
Exciting that my book "The Industry of Evangelism" just got a great review in the latest Renaissance Quarterly: “Definitive... a major contribution to early modern European print culture that cannot be overlooked.” 📖 Review: doi.org/10.1017/rqx.... 📘 Book info: doi.org/10.1163/9789...
A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope
Giving a talk in 2 weeks on how AI is transforming historical image analysis. Illustrations, iconography, and algorithms collide. Join me! 📍From Text to Image 📅 29 April | 11:00-12:30 📡 Hybrid event at Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento 🔗 RSVP: isig.fbk.eu/en/events/de...
From text to image: Visual and multimodal AI in the Digital Humanities
While text-based AI applications are well established, images present unique challenges: they are not inherently machine-readable, posing significant challenges for large-scale analysis.
isig.fbk.eu
"Tell your students you will be giving the same essay question to a tool such as ChatGPT. They will be marked on how much better their version is than the machine’s: how much more original, creative, perceptive or accurate..."
Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · last yr.Great article this. Informed by lecturers who are actually setting and marking assessments. More like this please.
