For the Monday crowd: please circulate this widely.

It may be hard to find the perfect candidate (an experienced data engineer/architect generalist with an interest in cultural heritage willing to take a state salary), but it's a great group/mission/city and we know the right person is out there.

Huge congratulations @miaout.bsky.social!

Radical Histories - Manchester University Press The Radical Histories series encourages innovative and field-defining research in the history of individuals, groups, movements and ideas which challenged the political, social and cultural status quo...

I'm pleased to announce I'm a founding co-editor of the new @manchesterup.bsky.social book series, Radical Histories.

Do let me know if you have a proposal for a book that fits our inclusive remit on radical histories.

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/radic...

Now Hiring: Machine Learning Engineer - CDH Cambridge Digital Humanities seeks to appoint a Machine Learning Engineer on a fixed term basis to support an applied computer vision and machine learning project with CAMPOP (Cambridge Group for the ...

JOB: Machine Learning Engineer at Cambridge Digital Humanities for interesting (fixed term) project with CAMPOP www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/n...

Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research Many of the tools digital humanists use have come from a variety of disciplines outside of history. As a consequence, many digital-history methods sections focus on how a tool developed by non-historians might support, or need to be adapted for, particular historical questions. Few digital tools have been developed by and for historians with a specific eye to the methodological and theoretical explorations of design principles that are necessary to anchor digital-history-specific tool development in historiographic practices. This article introduces Design-Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an educational-research approach to studying learning theory that supports theory building by integrating theory into the design of new tools and environments, in a manner that allows the designers to rigorously study the theory, and the relationship between the theory and the tools that embody it (Puntambekar, 2018; Sandoval, 2013). In practice, this means that DBR focused on software design incorporates theoretically motivated decisions about user interface features, user activities, and data-structure choices into an initial tool/software-package design and then studies the design package in use as a way of iteratively refining the theoretical principles in each of the tool's design phases. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach, with a theoretical approach grounded in the unique needs of historians and historiographic practices. We aim to illustrate DBHR by describing the design and use of Net.Create, a user-focused network-analysis tool that prioritizes historiographic practices (evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and historiographic debate) in its feature development and user-interface choices (Craig & Danish, 2018). We document how the needs of digital historians shaped the current design of Net.Create, explore the connections between specific tool features and their operation, and delineate how those tool features support the digital-history needs we identified. As part of this iterative-design process, we will also address some of the human-computer-interaction observations, user-entered network data, and qualitative-network-analysis approaches that shaped each stage of our feature development around digital history practices. Our DBHR process ultimately led us to prioritize the development of three features that support and encourage sustained historiographic debate at each phase of a network-analysis digital-history project: simultaneous entry and visualization of capta, data that is gathered and contested rather than downloaded or received, in order to support and encourage historiographic debate during the data-gathering phase and prior to a formal analysis phase easy-to-use revision of network taxonomy and network data, to support interpretation, reinterpretation and re-input of evidence and data by many collaborators simultaneously, synchronously or asynchronously, during the initial analysis phase data provenance features that expose the researchers' positionality and preserve the original citations for each network datapoint, to support the integration of close-reading analytical practices both by the research team and by other historians after the communication of results to a public audience By documenting the historiographic roots of each of these features, we hope to offer a systematic articulation of digital history tool design not simply as software development but as a pathway to the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.

So excited that eight years of research are now public in the Journal of Digital History: @jdanish and @kalanicraig present a Design‑Based History Research framework and Net.Create, a network analysis tool for digital history.

If you’re in the WIASN group on Facebook, there’s a WIASN-on-the-move subgroup that frequently posts short stays and pet sitting. If you’re not in the group I can recommend!

Less than a handful of days left to encourage people to vote for your favoured resource...

Cameron and I worked on an interactive map of his postal data when we were both at Stanford. I can only imagine what we could've done then with the tools we have now.

The SRS invites applications for its Postdoctoral Fellowships, ŵ a stipend worth £15,000. SRS Fellows can hold jobs alongside their fellowship provided they do not take up more than the equivalent of 3 days a week over the course of the academic year. Apply by 30 April

rensoc.org.uk/apply/postdo...

This PhD post looks amazing and the kind of thing I'd love to do if I didn't already have a PhD. So much British and Irish medieval history is conditioned by the decisions made then and the early PRO publications.

Fully-funded #PhD opportunity on the early history of the Public Records Office starting this October phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/2475... with @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy @universityofleeds.bsky.social Available full or part-time. #archives #skystorians

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

Secret tricks to get much better results out of the very dreadful 'Google search' these days, plus other search engines for specific things. Statospherically useful for researchers. open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...

And it works the same way for authors’ descendants until copyright expires, so make sure the copyright & ALCS access is covered in your will!

(which also means, if your grandparents wrote books, ALCS might have money for you too)

Once again reminding all academics in the UK that they really, really, really, really should sign up to @alcs.co.uk
Lifetime membership is £36 and they take it out of the money they collect for you so it really is "free money". I'm getting a little over £100 *every year*. Do it!

Great job opportunity working with my better half @sebastianahnert.bsky.social on an exciting new #digitalhumanities project in Cambridge, funded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social and working with fantastic people at CESTA Stanford and DensityDesign Lab Italy. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

IHR Ian Roy Mid-Career IHR Library Bursary The Ian Roy Mid-Career IHR Library Bursary is offered with the generous support of the estate of Ian Roy.

The bursary of £1,700 will be awarded to a mid-career historian working on 17th-century British history who wishes to make use of the IHR’s library collections. #Skystorians

The University of Virginia Archival AI Protocol governs "how artificial intelligence systems may access + use arch collections."

Core rules:
- item-level provenance + attribution
- institutional control
- donor + community responsibilities

#ai #archives

libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...

Lyndal Roper: ‘Drastic’ cuts to UK humanities risk brain drain Newly crowned winner of Holberg Prize raises alarm over job losses and shuttering of courses across UK

"I’m very worried about what is being destroyed. We’re all extremely worried, because what we’re seeing is the ad hoc closure and drastic cutting of many, many departments across the country."

Historian Lyndal Roper in today's THE: bit.ly/4sqsfJ2 #Skystorians 1/2

Appel à candidature pour les contrats doctoraux 2026 L’École nationale des chartes - PSL ouvre un appel à candidature pour financer des contrats doctoraux pour deux à trois doctorants. Dépôt des candidatures à la direction des études avant le 22 mai 202...

#jobklaxon
Do you want to do a PhD in #history and/or #philology and #digitalhumanities? Come to work with us in Paris at @ecoledeschartes.bsky.social @psl-univ.bsky.social

3 funded posts:
www.chartes.psl.eu/gazette-char...

Perhaps of interest to the @digitalmedievalist.bsky.social community.

Excited that Nilo officially started on our Text Machine project today! Lucky to have his skills and expertise on the team.

'Intellectual sovereignty and freedom of expression can be compromised by institutional dependence on biased commercial large language models (for example, the Elon Musk-owned Grok AI chatbot talking about “white genocide” in South Africa).' 1/2

‘The law changed around me’: top Sudanese students blocked from UK universities by visa ban [FREE TO READ] High-achieving applicants’ educational plans derailed by ‘emergency visa brake’

I'm trying to think who this idiocy is for, who would say: I wasn't going to vote Labour but now they've blocked a clearly exceptionally bright Sudanese woman from doing a postgraduate course in computational biology at Cambridge, I'm all in?

www.ft.com/content/4493...

Student visa ban will shut the door on talent | Letters Letters: Prof Ngaire Woods and Aziz Magid respond to the government’s decision to halt study visas from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan

I hate the #Starmer govt for its pointless, arbitrary cruelty.

Stifling the ambitions of bright & diligent students not only kills their dreams but it destroys Britain’s soft power AND harms the universities that need international students & staff. Lose-lose.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

I run a university - we're so much more than 'degree factories', here's what we do Access to higher education, made possible through student loans, is the difference between opportunity and exclusion

A university Vice Chancellor able and willing to articulate a significant part of what universities do and who/what they are for. If we want to address the university crisis, we need much more like this. 1/2

Dear everyone,

As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included.

A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

Academia finds a whole new low into which to sink

It’s the result of massive bot activity, downloading data at a scale which our infrastructure has found challenging. We have been finding this across all our metadata resources in recent months.

$50m in battery storage lost here bc we mentioned resilience for disadvantaged communities 👊🏼

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

the most annoying shift in my academic career