Ruth Ahnert

Society launches call for new Applied History Fellowships, with the Institute of Historical Research and DC Thomson - RHS In November 2025, the Society joins with partners the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and publisher DC Thomson to launch a new Applied History Fellowship programme to support recent post-doctor...

Applications now invited for the Society's new Applied History Fellowships with @ihr.bsky.social and DC Thomson: bit.ly/4ijiuII

Fellowships support recent post-doc historians and demonstrate the appeal of historical skills for employers. £12,000 for 6 months. Closing date: 31 Jan 2026 #Skystorians

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Alan Turing Institute staff decry ‘unjustified’ cuts to research - Research Professional News Internal documents detail extent of changes to projects and personnel at national AI institute

Alan Turing Institute staff decry ‘unjustified’ cuts to research

Internal documents detail extent of changes to projects and personnel at national AI institute

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-c...

The other problem with this is that research is a type of spread bet/lottery. You do lots of it and hope some of it pans out. If we had a perfect way of selecting which small bits of science and scholarship we "need", we'd have solved the funding problem. But we don't know this.

Great thread of discussion here.

The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved

New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

This is an exciting project, led by @nebulousflynn.bsky.social, to safeguard access to the UK’s digital 3D heritage at risk through over-reliance on commercial and free-to-use platforms for storage and dissemination. I'm happy to be serving on the advisory board and looking forward to discussions.

I'm seeing a trend in our students at UBC as well. STEM students, but particularly CS students, looking to the humanities to provide more depth and meaning to their studies. Lean in and stay strong, humanities. Your time is here!

screenshot of announcement for Allmaps + IIIF Partnership reading "Open up your map collections: Announcing the Allmaps - IIIF Partnership", with mini, multicolored map outlines and the Allmaps and IIIF logos.

Congratulations to Allmaps (led by @bertspaan.nl & Jules Schoonman) + @iiif.bsky.social on the announcement of this partnership. It's a fantastic step towards a sustainable, open, digital maps infrastructure and data ecosystem.

Learn more at allmaps.org/iiif-partner... & iiif.io/news/2025/11...

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship - University of London Press Failure is ordinary. From technological failures and computational obsolescence to rejected applications and challenging collaborations, failure is an unavoidable part of any scholarly endeavour. This...

📣 Really proud to announce the publication of Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship, an #OpenAccess collection of essays co-edited with @amsichani.bsky.social and published by @uolpress.bsky.social that examines the role of failure in #DH and research more broadly

@sas-news.bsky.social

Looks like an interesting collection. With Close Reading with Computers I had quite a few "failures" and even documented one of them in quite some detail. But that's the thing: if you are doing real experiments, you will often get null results.

Up early to travel to Oxford for the Emerging Digital Methodologies conference. Although when I got the invitation to keynote at the ‘EDM conference’ I did briefly think I’d be off to an electronic dance music event. A crossover I might enjoy!

If you invented a robot that sometimes cleaned my house really well & quickly & saved me lots of work—but *often* just moved things around without really cleaning—& *sometimes* added germs *to* the surfaces—such that just to be safe, I always had to clean after it

I don’t think I’d buy that robot

Thanks to Erin for such a thorough and generous review. It’s lovely when someone really gets the spirit of what you were trying to create! Made my week!

Ah that would be lovely!! Thank you. X

Ooh I excited to hear what you think. Do you happen to have a copy not behind a paywall (eg a preprint deposited?). Lovely to know it’s being read!

This is a really important piece of scholarship - not only for people dealing with digitised collections data, but really for anyone who does stuff with data full stop!

COP websites emit 10 times more carbon than average webpages - Energy Live News COP conference websites emit more carbon per page view than typical webpages

We are featured in over 50 news outlets today: PhD student David Mahoney's research using web archives, @archive.org, to measure historic website emissions, offering a new method and open-source code for analysing & highlighting online environmental impact. www.energylivenews.com/2025/11/11/c...

Join us next week on Nov 12, 12pm UK time, online to hear from @ehameeteman.bsky.social on "Reimagining Desalination through Digital Archives" at the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental DH Seminar.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reimaginin...

#envhum #dh

It’s very much a prototype but I have to share a preview of the interface @djevans.bsky.social is working on for our Viral Texts data—it maps reprinting data back onto the newspaper page, allowing users to browse what reprints appeared together on each page—with links back to full reprint clusters

Job alert!

@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year

Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/

Job alert: the University of Illinois Library is hiring a Humanities Librarian to serve as liaison to African-American Studies and English Literatures. I’m sure someone here would be a great fit for this job—& we’ve got a pretty phenomenal community here

Please share!

This looks like a really cool new journal: an "online and open-access platform for speculating about possible futures [...] encourages creative and interdisciplinary collaboration and non-traditional forms of knowledge production" #OpenAccess and no publication fees 👍

Abandoned and failed projects, ca. 1998-2025: an incomplete, chronological list [This is an updated version of the original from 2021.]

adamsmyth.substack.com/p/abandoned-...

Coming up this Thursday, an excellent event about AI & cultural heritage research org by @amsichani.bsky.social & @braiduk.bsky.social. Reg still open! Featuring fab speakers incl @ruthahnert.bsky.social @noramcgregorbl.bsky.social @jnockels.bsky.social @danielvanstrien.bsky.social & more

Exactly this!

In some scientific fields it’s only single blind. Discussing this field difference, one scientist once asked me, if we don’t know the identity of the authors, how can we know if we trust the results when we can’t rerun the experiments? I didn’t much like the logic!