James Cummings

Job! Postdoc in Digital Cultural Heritage: Data Ethics & Software Ecosystems, on new EU funded grant. 3.5 years, @designinf.bsky.social, Edinburgh. Design ethical processes, & evaluate open source tools for Digital Cultural Heritage Objects, with me! elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Screen capture of PDF slides not being full screen from a zoom meeting.

Watching online the intros to the Edward Boyle Memorial Lecture, as collaboration between ULeeds/RENKEI/RSA is taking place in Osaka, I'm reminded that when using PDF slides - make them full screen. Partly now as PDF readers _insist_ on having an AI pop up for their embedded AI services.

Yeah, and you never know if it is accidental or if they thought "I'll just take this after claiming I've delivered it to this random house no one is at"

Surely Medieval....

One of those days: I'm teaching seminars on Ancrene Wisse and Sawle's Warde (13thC), lecturing on Chaucer's Man of Law (14thC), and more seminars on the Digby Conversion of Saint Paul (late 15thC + 16thC devils scene interpolated).

Some colleagues don't like teaching 50 years outside their period.

Badenoch: Curb students taking "rip-off" degrees such as English. The performing arts, sociology and anthropology are among the subjects the Conservatives would like to cut

This makes me so angry. These people view all life as training for lifelong servitude/work. There's no room for interest, enjoyment, and culture in their bleak vision of education. At least she'll never be in power to see it through. Though Reform are probably worse.

The creative industries in 2023 produced about 124 BILLION for the UK economy. Beaten only by the energy sector. So even on a purely financial stance the right wing anti-arts&Humanities is economically stupid. It has nothing to do with 'value', but their ideology of controlling the poor.

Expensive to go in there these days.

Ah, that makes more sense, just me misreading the spreadsheet. I should have asked it to gloss it. 🤣

AI telling you that you are so bad at getting enough sleep that you need to go to bed before supper. 🤣

Interesting study! Did it include so many works by you because you've written (& been quoted) on the topic so much, or because you are the user? If prompt was changed specifically to attempt to get more international balance would that be different or not? (Wondering how it decides what to include.)

The problem with the redefinition of woke is that the concept of facts are now 'woke'. When the truth is woke and you are politically anti-woke then any repository of actual knowledge, like Wikipedia, is the enemy.

It is the same hatred they have of universities and libraries.

And yet people seem to think that introducing digital IDs and age verification with photos of your documents or face given to third-party games companies will somehow keep us all safe.

They are wrong.

I think if I commuted by train rather than metro I would use it more. Maybe even become a member to use the WiFi. 😉 It is just in the wrong direction for me.

And yes, lovely and properly bonkers is an apposite description.

The @litandphil.bsky.social is a lovely place. I should make more excuses just to go and do work in there.

Some funny stuff here, always good when you feel the world is going to shit.

I remember once using a meeting timer/stopwatch app where you put in the approx salaries of everyone there and instead of counting time it counts up in money. Focuses the mind.

Music lecture theatre renamed in honour of inspirational retired lecturer and ‘Bagpuss’ songwriter Newcastle University recently welcomed retired academic Sandra Kerr back to campus to celebrate the opening of a lecture theatre and performance space named in her honour.

We had the pleasure of attending an event celebrating the talented Sandra Kerr and to hear some fantastic performances from our Music students 🎼

Read about Sandra and the history of our music studies at Newcastle University in this article from the alumni team
>> bit.ly/42IA4iP

And sadly here also extra scared.

WTF?! Who thinks AIs are virgins? Has the fetishization of chastity returned to such a degree that we've forgotten what virginity is?

And also, ewwww. Whoever wrote that blurb (AI or human) needs their psyche cleansed.

Did you know our collections of poetry books and archives span nearly 400 years, from the 17thC to the present day?

Here are two pages from a 1656 poetry collection by William Drummond.

Find the whole book on CollectionsCaptured: collectionscaptured.ncl.ac.uk/digital/coll...

#NationalPoetryDay

When police reports talk about terrorists it inflames things more when they specify ethnic background. To say that the terrorist is a "British citizen of Syrian descent" is an attempt to shift blame by othering him. He was a British citizen, full-stop. This provokes more RW extremist 'retribution'.

I'm trying to keep away from students, but they will keep wanting to talk to me...

Je ne l'ai lu qu'en anglais. Ce serait une bonne pratique pour moi de le lire en français, mais j'ai tendance à privilégier la version originale pour les œuvres lorsque c'est possible (par exemple, les films en version originale avec sous-titres).

I doubt my trivial academic articles will result in any useful claim even though some of them are in the dataset.

I'm taking a break from my latest "impossible" jigsaw to read the stories again in print.

Thanks again to @therelphian.bsky.social for working so hard to get this fantastic anthology out!

Get yours at: mybook.to/WhatComesToL...

#shortfiction

Soon: how can we ever be sure...

(Imagines handwritten commonplace journals where the content is dictated to a student by the AI on their phone...)

Merci pour l'explication – je relirai également la série (en Anglia 😉)!

Is that cuz they have a LLM assisting them?

Est-il vraiment masculin? Je l'ai toujours perçu comme de genre non-binaire. Je vais devoir lire le livre!