Joel
@sentantiq.bsky.social
Antiquity. Cats and kids. Books. Humanities. Education. NY/MA/TX contact JoelChristensen @ gc.cuny.edu Check out Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269239/storylife/ avatar by Beverly Beverung
Oct 17, Saturday, 9 am-12:30 noon PST. CCA South Fall Conference online, hosted by UCSB: Lisa Briggs, Joel Christensen, Steven Tuck, Classics alumni. It will be… epic! 😊Odyssey and Pompeii: Relics, Survivors, Reflections. Register at CCASouth.org or email CaliforniaClassicalAssociation@gmail.com
the fundamental question I have had for these applications is how can LLM or statistical based methods support the 碤 ẟ 𒃆 ⌥ ...is what I took that to mean with only your quote as context Not what @sentantiq.bsky.social meant, although on some deeper level, kind of exactly what he meant?? 😂
Either the most serious silly thing I have posted or the silliest serious thing. Or both. sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/10/09/e...
Extraordinary, but Ordinary: Reading Homeric Ideology Through Disney’s “Zombies”
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highligh…
sententiaeantiquae.com
Extraordinary, but Ordinary: Reading Homeric Ideology Through Disney's "Zombies" sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/10/09/e...
Extraordinary, but Ordinary: Reading Homeric Ideology Through Disney’s “Zombies”
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highligh…
sententiaeantiquae.com
so proud to be in an institution doing this work
CUNY Graduate Center@thegraduatecenter.bsky.social · 2d agoThe Graduate Center is proud to welcome the inaugural class in Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES), our first new Ph.D. program in more than 25 years www.gc.cuny.edu/news/graduat... @marcossgonsalez.bsky.social
c'mon, the thirty tyrants were 'greek thought'
beyond parroting the greek miracle component of white supremacy, Rubio also presents a version of Greek thought that has neither the delphic imperative of self-knowledge nor the corrective warning of "nothing to excess"
Sarah E. Bond@sarahebond.bsky.social · 2d ago90% of how Rubio described “the West” while in Athens (e.g., "fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition”) is just a rehashing of ideas plucked from Ayn Rand. Encouraging people to “ethical egoism” is how we got this level of inequality—which now sits at a higher level than Ancient Athens ever had.
90% of how Rubio described “the West” while in Athens (e.g., "fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition”) is just a rehashing of ideas plucked from Ayn Rand. Encouraging people to “ethical egoism” is how we got this level of inequality—which now sits at a higher level than Ancient Athens ever had.
I’ve said it a thousand times but Stoicism and Ayn Rand both appeal to certain politicians and technocrats because it allows for them to feel virtuous in their narcissism. Casting themselves as ambitious heroes in a “hero’s journey” is exactly why @sentantiq.bsky.social and I wrote this takedown.
The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? | Los Angeles Review of Books
LARB presents the first entry in “Pasts Imperfect,” a new column that explores the impact of ancient pasts on the present.
lareviewofbooks.org
da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum, dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus invidere possit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
Я@gertiewentworth.bsky.social · 3d ago
Thank you to David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Yale, for a timely & enlightening talk! Blight gave this year’s Leon Levy Biography Lecture, “Biography and History in Authoritarian Times,” presented with the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Video soon! @kaibirdbiographer.bsky.social
Pasts Imperfect (10.8.26). pasts-imperfect.ghost.io/pasts-imperf...
Pasts Imperfect (10.8.26).
This week, Kimberly Cassibry and Elizabeth Macaulay discuss the architectural history and political messaging of triumphal arches. Then, a new book looks at W.E.B. Du Bois and Ancient Rome; researcher...
pasts-imperfect.ghost.io
"Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her to notify her of the win."
It is notable that Anne Carson is the fourth Nobel laureate whose work has included serious engagement with Thucydides, and the second in ten years: Albert Camus, Czesław Miłosz, Peter Handke. (More debatable in the cases of Winston Churchill and Bob Dylan).
In 2012, I stood on a stage with Anne Carson as a volunteer grad student to help her perform BRACKO, an adaptation of Sappho, where my job was to say the word "bracket" every time there was a bracket, which was more than two hundred times
"and what I want to happen most of all in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again) to lead you back into her love? Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?" Anne Carson's translation of Sappho fr. 1
The latest Pasts Imperfect is out! 🏛 Kimberly Cassibry & Elizabeth Macaulay discuss ethos & triumphal arches. Then, @mhanses.bsky.social's book on W.E.B. Du Bois & antiquity; anesthesia in Ming China; an open access book on polychromy; new ancient world journals @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social & more.
Pasts Imperfect (10.8.26).
This week, Kimberly Cassibry and Elizabeth Macaulay discuss the architectural history and political messaging of triumphal arches. Then, a new book looks at W.E.B. Du Bois and Ancient Rome; researcher...
pasts-imperfect.ghost.io
Seeing a "problem" in society? Having trouble finding a "cause"? Try New Improved "Social Contagion", can be used to explain away 99% of societal ills! (As recommended by 8 out of 10 journalists)
Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 3d agoWhy people don’t want to have children any more ft.trib.al/O4zvQ9N
“When Pythagoras was asked about the purpose for which humans were created, he said, ‘To look upon the heavens’” τί δὴ τοῦτό ἐστι Πυθαγόρας ἐρωτώμενος, ‘τὸ θεάσασθαι’ εἶπε ‘τὸν οὐρανόν’, #Iamblichus
For a brief moment in 2010 this was MTA official signage. But that quickly changed: www.villagevoice.com/update-mtas-...
Update: MTA's "FML" Subway Sign to Change - The Village Voice
FML, just when New Yorkers had a funny little inside joke, the MTA had to go ahead and squash it! The subway sign we wrote about earlier today — the one that spells out FML (a commonly recoginized pop...
villagevoice.com
More recently, @wjbmattingly.bsky.social has developed a technique that identifies probable hallucinations generated by LLM transcription: wjbmattingly.com/blog/where-t... This seems very promising, but is not perfect: the reading ¨suscitaverunt cum¨ is wrong but not a lectio facilior, so ???
Where the Readings Disagree: Finding HTR Errors by Asking a Model Five Times — William Mattingly, PhD
A small local app that runs a handwritten text recognition model several times over the same manuscript page and uses the disagreement between runs to show, word by word and letter by letter, where th...
wjbmattingly.com
pattern is poisonous -- the errors are more reasonable than the original, making it impossible to spot-check the transcription. And a transcription of a unique archival document that has plausibly seductive errors is worse than no transcription at all.
This was always my criticism of people using multi-modal LLMs to transcribe (non-ancient) handwritten material: in the case of ambiguity, the statistical model would always favor a reading that "makes sense" -- the lectio facilior in textual criticism terms. For documentary editing, this error
PSA: Greek Anthology “When I’m dead, the earth can be f***ed by fire. It means nothing to me since I’ll be totally fine.” Ἐμοῦ θανόντος γαῖα μιχθήτω πυρί· οὐδὲν μέλει μοι· τἀμὰ γὰρ καλῶς ἔχει.
