Stephanie J. Lahey PhD
@sjlahey.bsky.social
Mark Andrews Fellow in #BookScience, Old Books New Science Lab, University of Toronto · #MedievalManuscripts cataloguer & researcher · #Parchment #QuantitativeHumanities 📜 🔬 📚 📊 🇨🇦
#GothicManuscripts Sherborne Missal, 1399-1407, England, detail of the Resurrection. I think the sleeping soldiers kits are quite snazzy and colorful. The brilliant patterned red sky behind Christ is impressive & the dog snoozing nearby is quite cute.
Our new paper is out! 📚📜 www.nature.com/articles/s40... #parchment #conservation #MedievalManuscripts #BookScience
Parchment damage assessment: a review of methods, multimodal workflows, and a transparent reporting framework - npj Heritage Science
npj Heritage Science - Parchment damage assessment: a review of methods, multimodal workflows, and a transparent reporting framework
nature.com
Our new paper is out! 📚📜 www.nature.com/articles/s40... #parchment #conservation #MedievalManuscripts #BookScience
Parchment damage assessment: a review of methods, multimodal workflows, and a transparent reporting framework - npj Heritage Science
npj Heritage Science - Parchment damage assessment: a review of methods, multimodal workflows, and a transparent reporting framework
nature.com
Between the 1970s and 1990s the UK state made a strategic bet to expand Higher Ed. They poured in untold billions of your money. Now it's been handed over to private creditors to burn in a furnace. Then they just laugh at you: at all the taxes you've ever paid or will ever pay. True story. (2/2)
This nonsense about the printing press and universities is simply a different form of the "the Church enforced thought control in the Middle Ages" canard and says quite a bit more about what the speaker thinks about modern institutional surveillance and control than about history.
Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2mo agoI’ve seen in two culture /higher ed magazines recently the claim that the printing press engendered a crisis of authority at universities bc anyone could publish what they wanted and people could learn things without universities. This is not true.
And if you have any interest in music whatsoever, definitely watch the whole documentary series (10 episodes in all), covering the entire history of music. The whole thing is here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Very positively reviewed by the Guardian too: www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music review – it’s amazing that this staggering show exists
Charlotte Ritchie presents a wildly ambitious and unapologetically brainy YouTube documentary that takes in Big Bang soundwaves, singing dolphins and an astonishing amount in between. Don’t miss it fo...
theguardian.com
** As it's being discoursed: I do not use any generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude et. al.) at any stage in my writing process. I write because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenge of expressing an idea, or character, or setting in such short form and tell a story with them. It's all human made. **
What's the greatest medieval manuscript discovery of modern times? Here are ten rediscovered texts that changed medieval studies. Which fascinates you the most? www.medievalists.net/2026/07/10-l... #History
10 Lost Medieval Texts Rediscovered Centuries Later - Medievalists.net
Discover ten medieval works once believed lost, from forgotten chronicles and heroic poems to manuscripts found in caves, libraries and book bindings.
medievalists.net
The problem of manipulation is on the table. Stealing the current books, buying the old books, and cooperating with large archives and collections and libraries, like in Oxford, is part of the same agenda. It is about controlling the information of the future. That’s what is really on the table.
„Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world“ (Anthropic).
Daniel Bellingradt@dbellingradt.bsky.social · 6mo agoText mining before the age of LLM training.
A tiny man shooting a word nearby, within a printed text of the European past. Welcome to another #rebus broadside of the later so-called #ThirtyYearsWar. A shootin' short 🧵 for #skystorians
I was looking at the AHA's book prizes, and if you work on Europe between 1000 and 1500, you're SoL. What's especially fascinating is that British History starts in 1485 and European Cultural History starts in 1500.
Digitization is not always the best option, either. Storage of archival images is expensive, and then there should be ongoing management of the files. That’s the IT dept. for us, staff turnover and bad communication, etc. Sometimes you must damage the book to scan it, too.
They also can't tell the difference between describing a common error to correct it and giving correct information. I've seen a search summary AI give the wrong liturgical ABC year, probably because descriptions of the common error are much more boilerplate than descriptions of the correct answer.
📢 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 agoGiving myself a headache in the archives
To the inevitable cries of “just digitize everything, then;” not an answer. Making digital facsimiles accessible requires huge investment: staff, metadata, preservation. Orgs are currently not funded to meet these needs. While digital objects are great, they’ll never replace looking at originals.
Amalia S. Levi, PhD@amaliasl.bsky.social · 3mo ago📢 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.
OOOOO. Exeter's got Nous in as well... Of course... (@exeterucu.bsky.social, have you FOIed how much they're paid?) Can we PLEASE put an end to the involvement of these consultancies? They have done nothing but vandalism.
A best practice approach to academic restructure at Exeter
Explore Part 2 of Exeter Uni's major transformation case study. Learn how collaboration & strategic alignment drove restructure.
nousdatainsights.com
I feel bad for the gunners mate, but I really like the name of the sloop.
250 Years Ago News@250yearsagonews.bsky.social · 3mo agoJuly 13, 1776: From the log of the Massachusetts Sloop Tyrannicide: "Our Gunners mate blowd his right hand off Ocationed by the catching of a powder Orne [horn] in his hand." (National Park Service, 1976)
#TIH #OTD 14 July in #BookHistory: 1575: Death of Hans / Johann Jakob Fugger (b.1516), German banker & patron of the arts & sciences from the von der Lilie line of the Fugger banking family. He assembled a major library, commissioning agents to collect manuscripts & printed works in… [1/n]
#TIH #OTD 12 Jul in #BookHistory 📚 📜… 1580: Completion of the 1st printing of the Ostrog Bible, the 1st full printed edition of the Bible in Church Slavonic & the 1st in Cyrillic type. Published in Ostrog (Ostroh, Ukraine) in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by Ivan Fyodorov with …
VICE-CHANCELLOR ARRESTED. 🤩 Do we think *the regulator of the sector* is going to get some serious questioning why they didn't catch any of this? And why they allowed the name change -- which triggered alarm bells with journalists, but not with them? The uselessness of the OfS on full display.
The Mill@manchestermill.bsky.social · 3mo agoExclusive: Vice-chancellor George Holmes among those arrested on suspicion of fraud. It marks an unprecedented moment in British higher education - the first time a university vice-chancellor has ever been arrested in the UK as part of a criminal investigation. manchestermill.co.uk/exclusive-vi...
Here’s the thing: I could probably come up with lots of creative, AI-proof online approaches. But finding the time to reflect an innovate comes at a premium. I often revamp my courses, but this is an order of magnitude much higher in redesign. AI is not a pedagogical crisis, it’s a labor crisis.
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 3mo agoIt’s such a bummer. Online/asynchronous/virtual teaching can be incredibly valuable and with a little extra structure can be an amazing and scalable resource but now AI has rendered the whole enterprise impossible.
Find somebody who looks at you like vulpis looks at simius
How do we calculate loss of written works? A depressing but important new study notes that "the loss was far greater than scholars once thought. Researchers estimate that up to 60% of medieval literary works and more than 95% of the manuscripts that once carried them have disappeared over time." 📜🖋️
Up to 60% of medieval texts and 95% of manuscripts have vanished, study finds | Archaeology News Online Magazine
A new study estimates 60% of medieval texts and over 95% of manuscripts were lost through centuries of copying and destruction.
archaeologymag.com