"When OpenAI publishes several hundred proofs that end several hundred treasure hunts, it is succeeding brilliantly along the craft axis of science, but it is interrupting the thousand-year conversation" open.substack.com/pub/derektho...

I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep

On technological grief

open.substack.com

Incredibly honored to receive the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History for Postal Intelligence! 📯📫🗃️

American Historical Association@historians.org · 5d ago

The AHA is pleased to announce the winners of its 2026 prizes, which honor exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom, public history, and other historical projects. Congratulations to the 2026 awardees! #AHAPerspectives

This looks excellent! 👀

Alana Mailes@alanamailes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our co-edited volume is coming out this autumn!

Just an idle observation, but as I put together an all-public domain reading packet for my Reformation course, I’m struck by how much more available the treatise is than any other form of text. I wonder about the downstream effect for AI, for history or otherwise 🗃️ #reformazing

Happy Spooky Season from the most horrifying ledger book I’ve ever come across 😱

This is incredible

Garth Marenghi's Catbus@catbus.phd · 3w ago

don't bother addressing a congregation unless you're in the baroque creature pulpit

hot tip: instead of reading a thousand pages of commentary on Tacitus, you can read the censor's report and get all the juicy bits and sick #earlymodern burns 👀 🫖

🚨🚨 Job Alert: Johns Hopkins Dept of History is accepting applications in Mediev European and/or Mediterranean History, 400-1500, associate or advanced assistant rank: apply.interfolio.com/193938. 🚨🚨

I have a pile of reading for the new term but the last of the summer reading was Elizabeth Goldring’s gorgeous Holbein: Renaissance Master. It seems likely that Holbein, like many other court painters, carried out intelligence missions for his powerful sponsors. #ArtofSpying

Currently Sneeboer Bulb Dibbers

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻@oldenoughtosay.com · last mo.

hey so what’s your group chat called

how about some good news: new cat just dropped!!!!

I like this bit especially because it's true

Liberal Currents@liberalcurrents.com · 2mo ago

“Taking from students the analytical tools to recognize the often invisible or unarticulated ways that religion influences their lives is tantamount to rendering them unable to recognize the forces that are working across societies around the world” www.liberalcurrents.com/religion-hum...

In which fearless LGBTQ+ and women’s-rights advocate, BLM-supporting, vaccine-funding, literacy activist Dolly Parton is propagandised as ‘neutral’.

CNN@cnn.com · 2mo ago

"At a time when no American celebrity seems immune from the country’s many divisions, Dolly Parton was a crossover icon who stayed neutral in the culture wars while still speaking her mind," writes Zachary B. Wolf. | Analysis

The American Historical Association hired a lobbying firm to help silence member advocacy on Palestine. In this essay, Adam Rzepka covers @historians.org's relationship w/ Thorn Run Partners, its deep ethical conflicts, & the advocacy crisis AHA has thrust upon us. www.chronicle.com/article/a-sc...

Opinion | A Scholarly Association’s Secret Washington Playbook

Did the American Historical Association ask a corporate lobbying firm for advice on how to silence its members?

chronicle.com

As you prep syllabi, consider Postal Intelligence! It's available Open Access and I also love to visit classes. Perfect for #earlymodern, history of information/communication, #renaissance, #reformazing etc. 🗃️https://cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501779923/postal-intelligence/

Postal Intelligence by Rachel Midura | Paperback | Cornell University Press

Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolutio...

cornellpress.cornell.edu

Anyone here familiar with the parliamentary archives of Toulouse? I have a peeved Venetian who claims he entered some letters into the parliamentary registers/archives in 1613. Guessing this would now be in the Departmental Archives of Haute-Garonne, but am totally unfamiliar with 🇫🇷 #earlymodern 🗃️

📯 The Core Italian Itineraries are now available in easy-to-use TSV format with accompanying Data Vocabulary on the project GitHub: github.com/rmidura/EMDi...

EMDigIt/Core Italian Itineraries at main · rmidura/EMDigIt

EmDigIt (Early Modern Digital Itineraries) explores spatial data in early modern travel guides. It processes route details, stops, and points of interest from historic itinerary books using Python,...

github.com

📢TextAnalysisR is now on CRAN: an R package + Shiny app for text mining: topic models (STM/BERTopic), sentiment, and semantic networks. #rstats #NLP #LLM install.packages("TextAnalysisR") App: textanalysisr.org Doc: mshin77.github.io/TextAnalysisR/

📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.

Jesse Locker@jessemlocker.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Giving myself a headache in the archives

Matching early modern place names is challenging! EMDigIt provide us with clues, including journey bearing and distance from the last stop. "Le buisson" seems like a great match for Le Haute Buisson," but we can even guess the Italian author may have meant "Dartford" where they wrote "dole(f)ort."

Want to support TTRPG Professors? Maybe start by subscribing (for free!) to Analog Game Studies's YouTube channel, and keep an eye on the journal (FREE TO READ!) at: @analoggamestudies.bsky.social

Analog Game Studies

The official journal of Analog Game Studies. Scholarly content about tabletop, live-action, performance, and generally awesome games. Read more at our website analogamestudies.org.

youtube.com

Very excited to announce this, nearly ten years after I first conceived of this project. I've picked up a job and even tenure along the way. The brief hiatus in question was occasioned by a very cute and very time-consuming baby boy 👶 #earlymodern #digitalhumanities 🗃️

Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EMDigIt)@emdigit.bsky.social · 3mo ago

After 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.

Letter rack packed w/ exciting items: pistol, pocket violin (!), comb (natch), hunting horn, letters, almanac, spare picture frame, you name it, Cornelis Gijsbrechts has pretended that it's here. Today is his day..

We don’t talk enough about how denaturalization (what ending birthright citizenship would do) is a historical prelude to genocide.

Let's goooooooo 📕

Who Would You Have Been in Early Modern Europe? A Typology Quiz — theodramatist

A typology quiz for the years 1500 to 1789. Thirty questions, thirty types—humanist, Puritan, philosophe, magus, salonnière, mercenary. Which were you?

theodramatist.com

I had the *immense* honour of working on two of the RSA's 2025 Award-winners! My congrats to @rmidura.bsky.social and @smunozar.bsky.social !! www.rsa.org/news/721395/... www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501... www.dukeupress.edu/the-new-king...

#BookHistory gang, I *need* you to act. There had been one of an entire #ItsyBitsyGutenberg shop in 2022 and we didn't get it to the required number of votes 😭

Elizabeth Biggs@elizabethbiggs.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Hi #EarlyModern Bluesky - did you know that someone brilliant has built working printing presses using Lego and they are trying to get enough supporters so that Lego will release it as a kit? They look so cool! beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Have a medieval novel inside you waiting to be written? 🏰✍️ Join our Writing Medieval Fiction Workshop and start honing your craft. medievalstudies.thinkific.com/courses/writ... #CreativeWriting #HistoricalFiction

Writing Medieval Fiction Workshop

In this 5-part workshop, bestselling and award-winning author C.J. Adrien helps aspiring historical fiction writers with an interest in the medieval period hone their craft, balance historicity with…

medievalstudies.thinkific.com