Director of Garden and Landscape Studies

Job opportunity: @dumbartonoaks.bsky.social is hiring a director of Garden and Landscape Studies. This is a five-year term position. Requirements include a PhD and a minimum of ten years’ experience in an academic setting, including administrative duties.
www.doaks.org/about/employ...

Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism? Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not pro...

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +

New preprint finding that eliminating US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause:
- 15.2m deaths from AIDS
- 2.2m deaths from TB
- 7.9 additional child deaths

GitHub - ARBML/Calliar: A dataset for online Arabic calligraphy. A collection of 2500 annotated calligraphic styles. A dataset for online Arabic calligraphy. A collection of 2500 annotated calligraphic styles. - GitHub - ARBML/Calliar: A dataset for online Arabic calligraphy. A collection of 2500 annotated calli...

This dataset of annotated Arabic calligraphic inscriptions seems like it could be useful for digital art historians at some point down the road: github.com/ARBML/Calliar

‘We are crying’: heritage authorities express sorrow after Sudan National Museum looted and ransacked The museum, which houses artefacts dating back millennia, has been caught in the crossfire of the civil war raging in the North African country

The looting of the National Museum of Sudan is catastrophic for cultural heritage there and around the world. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/04/01/h...

Safflower - CAMEO

I'm dredging up forgotten lessons from my organic chemistry days as I dig into the solubility of carthamin in preparation for my new seminar on the Art of Science in the Islamic World next semester. Meet the material that literally give us "red tape": cameo.mfa.org/wiki/Safflower

And it’s OPEN ACCESS! Thanks to @nancyum.bsky.social @devinfitz.bsky.social @yaelrice.bsky.social and all our 47 contributors!