There are currently 6 permanent full time history jobs in the whole UK. 500+ PhDs being produced a year - not all of whom will want to pursue an academic year but likely most, and of course years will stack up onto each other. What a sector.
It’s about K-12 education, but it holds up pretty well for higher ed. We need to engage our students, but that cannot mean gamification or “fun.” Learning is hard work because thinking is hard work.
🚨Announcing the 2026 Contest for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize🚨We invite submissions from scholars who defended in 2025 and work on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean; time frame of study is open.
Another really good piece, asking the hard questions right now, exactly because he acknowledges the usefulness of these tools. By @lucaspoy.bsky.social
Quite dystopian that people are using LLMs to publish ripoffs of scholarly books on Amazon - but I wonder if the threat is as existential as the author of the piece claims. I’m not sure the audience for these “books” and for scholarly works overlap that much.
Worth reading in tandem with this blogpost by Mark Humphries. I really think people who aren’t using Codex/Cowork/Antigravity don’t really have a grasp of how much more capable these agents became in the past five months.
Yeah, I’m thinking of how to operationalize it for the tens of thousands of pages of transcriptions I have, plus spreadsheets, etc.
Very interesting piece! I still rely on spreadsheets because I’m a very non-visual person, but I should try it…
OneDrive is the worst cloud service.
OK, fellow early modernists, this I'm teaching the grad seminar on early modern Europe for the first time in 5 years. What monographs in English, preferably in paperbook/ebook formats, can you recommend that work well in seminar instruction? And thanks! #earlymodern 🗃️
No idea, sorry!
“When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore. That’s a much more dangerous and slippery problem than students submitting AI-generated work”
Important piece by @marcwatkins.bsky.social.
I think this was always the proper version of the bubble argument. The idea of a computing glut always seemed wishful thinking to me, and I don’t remember any knowledgeable person holding it.
Came here to say that.
Is this normal dating post Charles I's death? "vpon an Informacion exhibited in the Court of Exchequer the thirteenth day of May in the fower and twentith yeare of the raigne of the late kinge Charles ... taken before ... the Court of the Publique Exchequer the last day of November Anno Domini 1649.
I’ve been teaching for 17 years and boy, I always love to hear from former students - not enough to use LinkedIn, though.
“To unlock your creativity and value-add in a world with ubiquitous high-powered AI tools, you will need enough hands-on experience to have good domain judgment and confidence to assess results, plus enough metacognitive awareness of how to talk about it to guide others.“
applying judgment in messy, evolving contexts; connecting disparate ideas into a coherent plan; and persuading, negotiating and leading when the ground is shifting underfoot.”
“The more AI commodifies what used to be considered “non-routine” cognitive tasks, like crunching numbers and generating text, the more the human value proposition will necessarily shift toward capabilities that no machine can (yet) reliably replicate…
Oh, the excitement to know that the job is actually running, after a few tries...
I found this comment disproportionately funny, and I’m worried about what it says about me.
“He’s unconstrained by truth. He has two traits ... The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone”
So… Altman is like ChatGPT?
WTF! It’s usually one email for me. But well, I’m not running anything on my work computer. I’m running it remotely at Wayne’s HPC.
Just submitted my first job at Wayne State's High Performance Cluster, waiting for H200 to be available to run Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and identify all references to Brazilian tobacco in a volume of the outgoing correspondence of the Hudson Bay Company. I feel like Neo.
What is true? How do we piece together fragments of evidence to try and get close to the truth? Historians have centuries of experience puzzling over this question. AI researchers need these humanities methods to solve fundamental problems with the current LLM approach.
“Vision Language Models don’t just make transcription faster or cheaper - they will (hopefully) expand the kinds of sources we can access and work with”
Very good post by @cblevins.bsky.social that perfectly captures my own experience.
Colleagues in French history: I’ll be working at Pierrefitte for the first time this summer. Commuting from Marais. Any tips—about the commute, archives, anything—are very welcome!! (Feel free to email.) Please and thank you 🙏
Almost a year later, my review of @maryhicks.bsky.social's great book was finally published!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
