It feels like a good time to re-post this thread and remind people of the benefits of #vaccines.

Dr Lindsey Fitzharris@drlindseyfitz.bsky.social · 2y ago

With science falling under increasing attack, this medical historian is here to remind people of the power of vaccines. THREAD👇 Hard-hitting polio advert from 1958. In the first half of the 20th century, polio was the leading cause of death in children and young adults. 1/7 #history #skystorians

*Only* four great B/W films?! That’s so hard… Faust (dir. Murnau, 1926) Casablanca (obv!) Captain Kidd (1945) It (1927: so funny!!) The Chess Player (1927, technically colour tinted, so might not qualify)

Hugh Jones@hbsj.bsky.social · 2w ago

Four Great B/W films: Passport to Pimlico Went the Day Well? Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Lavender Hill Mob

I don't usually share petitions but this is one I must highlight... The way Making Tax Digital is being implemented is disgraceful. It punishes people who are already fastidious about their tax reporting by forcing them to share data with commercial firms. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/76...

Petition: Create a government-owned, free software for Making Tax Digital (MTD)

With the roll-out of Making Tax Digital going ahead, HMRC must provide an in-house, government-developed, fully-functional software that allows easy and confident compliance with MTD. Self-employed pe...

petition.parliament.uk

With immeasurable sadness I must announce that Napoleon, our best boy, went missing a few nights back. if you see a small black kitty with two white toes around Boundary/Markhouse roads in #walthamstow do DM me. if i post no photos of him anymore, this will be why. he was my very best boy 💔

It's not OK to wear smart glasses around other people. It's not cool. It's creepy, disrespectful. It pollutes the public sphere with the oppression of surveillance. It puts the onus on non-Glassholes; that's not asking for consent. www.vogue.com/article/do-s...

Do Smart Glasses Have a Surveillance Problem?

Big Tech is investing in fashion’s cultural legitimacy to make AI smart glasses socially acceptable, but consumers view them as synonymous with surveillance. Is removing the camera the key to adoption...

vogue.com

This is why the use of “AI” as a marketing term is so corrosive. It means nothing, hurts good tech, shields harmful/useless tech. It’s a gimmick, it’s a sign of ignorance, it’s doublespeak

Dr Naomi Scott@drnaomiscott.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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.

In case you didn’t know, Exeter uni, where I work, has announced a plan to make 25% of staff in my English department redundant. Left-over staff will do double the teaching while their research time will be shrunk to 1%. Meanwhile admissions for English at Exeter are HIGH, and on the rise this year

🚨 PLEASE SHARE WIDELY 🚨 If you are an Exeter alumnus, and wish to express your horror at the proposed cuts to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, please sign the Google Doc petition below. Not an alumnus? You can still help by signing the Exeter UCU petition at c.org/msXfsb2g5b 🗃️

Alumni petition against the cuts to the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Any Exeter alumni who wish for their names to be added to the petition below should please complete the form at this link: https://forms.gle/SpdYvmmsCaJbmZft6. If you are not an alumnus, but still wis...

docs.google.com

📣 People are understandably up in the arms about this (it is horrible). But just want to wave a hand out there 👋 as we're going through the same thing in Humanities at Northumbria (1 out of 5 staff need to go by end of July). 1/?

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

'About 150 academic roles are set to go at the south-west institution, which said it was targeting areas that are “no longer sustainable” or have seen changes in student demand.' History and English are name-checked. 1/3

It would be really nice if the government could spare some attention for the accelerating dissolution of our country’s knowledge factories, instead of wasting time playing fantasy football teams with the cabinet top jobs

Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

University of Exeter plans to cut 150 jobs. The Russell Group institution said it is consulting its staff over “limited and specific potential changes” across some academic faculties. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

So 'limited' it reputedly entails making 25% of the History Department (which took how many additional students last autumn...?) redundant.... Is the targeting specifically directed toward top-performing departments, in a 'specific' effort to degrade the UK research base? Asking for some friends.

Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

University of Exeter plans to cut 150 jobs. The Russell Group institution said it is consulting its staff over “limited and specific potential changes” across some academic faculties. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

!!!!! My C18 and long C19 colleagues — *THE* Olaudah Equiano’s original letter to Josiah Wedgwood on the abolition of the slave trade 1793 At V&A East “The Music is Black: A British Story”

My 500 year history of disabled people's political activism is out now! Thanks to The Independent for making it their non-fiction book of the month! www.penguin.co.uk/books/455782... #disabilityhistory

Disability

A ground-breaking history of modern Britain that puts the experiences of disabled people to the fore for the first time. Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disa...

penguin.co.uk

Years ago, before I started my PhD, I had a small RA job that required bibliographic references to be compiled & logged using citation software… and that experience convinced me to always, *always*, hand type footnotes for my own work

Dave Andress@davidandress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Cowardly **** has turned off QTs. So, yes, I've just finished a 120,000-word research monograph, and I typed every single one of the footnotes myself.

In my latest article "Unveiling Community in Kuang's Babel" I explore how contemporary fantasy literature uses language, translation, and community to expose the hidden structures of colonial and institutional power that still shape our world today. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

“To Make the Unknown Known, To Make the Other Familiar”: Unveiling Community in R. F. Kuang’s Babel

This article examines R. F. Kuang’s Babel or The Necessity of Violence through the theoretical lens of Critical Transparency Studies in order to illuminate the novel’s reconfiguration of community ...

tandfonline.com

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI. I deleted my account this morning.

Arte es Ética@arteesetica.bsky.social · 3mo ago

¡ATENCIÓN! 🚨 El 5 de Julio de 2026 entra en vigencia la actualización de los ToS de Linktree. Esto incluye el uso de IA generativa (Dall-E de OpenAI) con los textos, imágenes y links que el usuario suba a su cuenta. Incluso compartirán toda la info del usuario con otros proveedores externos de IA ⚠️

Anyone with a keener eye than me able to decipher the underlined words here? I have suspicions but the second one I cannot fathom 🫣

Ask your local brick and mortar bookshop if you want to pre-order. And if there isn't one near you, more details here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/this-litt...

This Little World

'A perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic terms. A ground-breaking masterwork' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'Triumphant . . . Cinemat…

bloomsbury.com

Don't write your manuscript reviews using AI. DEFINITELY do not feed someone else's manuscript into AI and have it write the review for you.

Out Now! The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho, edited by Nicole Aljoe and Kristina Huang with 14 original essays. My chapter revisits Joseph Jekyll's 'Life of Ignatius Sancho' and offers a new theory on how Sancho got from Cartagena to Blackheath. www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho | Cambridge University Press & Assessment

cambridge.org

A brilliant piece by @samfr.bsky.social on why our universities are in trouble - and why it’s in ALL our best interests to save them.

Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm in @theobserveruk.bsky.social today looking at why so many unis are in financial trouble and what the government needs to do to save HE. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Today's university job losses info is from Edinburgh Napier. The crisis is still accelerating. Nothing will be done. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2610095...

Almost 200 staff leave leading Scottish modern university after job cuts threatened

The university said that 55 people had departed via “targeted voluntary redundancy” since August, as their jobs had been deemed potentially…

heraldscotland.com

Every single member of the History Department at Uni of Nottingham is at risk of redundancy. Every single one of us.

This is a long shot because this isn't the old twitter, but I'm looking for history articles/books that look at cases of British/Irish settlers/squatters being prosecuted for crimes against Indigenous/colonized people. It can be anywhere in the world, but ideally the late C18/early C19.

Well that’s one sale he’s just lost for his new book…

KJ Charles@kjcharleswriter.com · 3mo ago

Anthony Horowitz uses AI, says 'it feels like cheating'. I mean...yes? You're using the theft-powered plagiarism machine to generate text, do you expect it to feel like a good day's hard work?

Alt text is not the same as a photo caption. Captions are typically written to support a photo, and usually depend on users being able to see the photo. But alt text is meant to be the stand-in for the photo. The alt text is what a screen reader user gets in place of the photo.

This is now what passes for “science” from the BBC. Hackneyed cliches, faux mystery, factually incorrect statements. 1. Archaeologists are, once again, “baffled” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Mystery of Welsh medieval cemetery deepens

Skeletons and artefacts unearthed from the site near Cardiff Airport are baffling archaeologists.

bbc.co.uk

Who else can spot the sloppy error in the BBC iplayer description here?

OMG semi-affordable paperback edition of my and @rjdashwood.bsky.social’s ridiculous book is available to pre-order from today! Coleridge falling down a mountain! Austen feeling silly! The Woman of Colour as more comedy than tragedy! Somehow, BBC’s Ghosts! How to work with Lake District museums!

Reading the Romantic Ridiculous

Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work that decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorises the ri...

routledge.com