Jos Damen

The Promise of American Higher Education No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue

Yes. @harvard.edu has brains - and guts www.harvard.edu/president/ne...

Brewster Kahle: "Thank You, Leiden - You Were Amazing!" Thank you Brewster, you were wonderful. It was nice having you here, speaking in the Leiden Academy Building last week. @unileiden.bsky.social www.internetarchive.eu/thank-you-le... Key takeaways from the talk:

Lecture Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive & Copyright | LinkedIn Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, will give a lecture in Leiden. Kahle will give this lecture (Copyright in the 21st century, the case of the Internet Archive) in the Telders Auditorium...

Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) will give a lecture in Leiden about "Copyright in the 21st century, the case of the Internet Archive". Place: Telderszaal, Academy Building, Rapenburg 73, Leiden. Tuesday 18 March, 16:00 hr. Free entrance, reservation advised www.linkedin.com/events/lectu...

World map, pacific-centered (so Africa is left and South America at the extreme right), showing 19 language names representing grammatical descriptions picked by students that they will be working on as pairs over the next 10 weeks or so. Languages by Macro-area: Mankanya, Darfur Arabic, Tigrinya, Fwe (Africa) South Saami, Hungarian, Latvian, Armenian (Europe) Japanese (Asia) Wooi, Malay, Ughele, Ulwa (Papunesia) Yupik, Inuktitut, Cayuga (North America) Kakua, Yauyos Quechua (South America) Generated in R using coordinates from Glottolog.org

this year's crop of languages picked by students in my 1st year morphosyntactic typology class. Over the next 12 weeks they'll sketch the fundamentals of word classes, predication, possession & more based on #OpenAccess grammars they've found on Grammar Watch linguistic-typology.org/grammarwatch/

Lady Meux (former barmaid and banjo player, one of the richest women in England) left all the [Ethiopian] manuscripts to Emperor Menelik in her will. But that was ignored after her death and the manuscripts were sold on. Read The Prince and the Plunder: www.theprinceandtheplunder.com/category/the...

Beautiful donation of c. 650 Amharic books to African Studies Centre Leiden, from the estate of Prof. A.J. Drewes (1927-2007) @unileiden.bsky.social @ASCLeiden First novels in Amharic, rare leaflets and more. Treasure trove for students and researchers. Drewes called the books "Amharic incunabula".

Compositie-schilderij van 30 onderdelen Afrika, gemaakt door medewerkers van @ASCLeiden @unileiden.bsky.social . "Het geheel is meer dan de som van de delen" - samenwerking heeft meerwaarde, juist in deze tijden.

The lived consequences of conflict The security situation in eastern Congo is once again rapidly deteriorating and even attracting western media attention. This blog sheds light on the lived consequences of three decades of conflict.

Lots to be said about the conflict in Congo. It's important not to lose sight of the impact the conflict has on people who experience it firsthand. I wrote about it for the Leiden Law Blog: www.leidenlawblog.nl/articles/the... @leidenlaw.bsky.social

Topography of North Africa overlain with reconstruction of proposed megalakes, other large paleolakes, rivers, fluvial fans, and megalake catchments: 1. Ahnet-Moudir 2. Chotts 3. Fezzan 4. Timbuktu 5. Chad 6. Darfur 7. Tushka 8. White Nile. Tushka megalake was proposed but a reanalysis shows there is little evidence for it (Source: The World Atlas of Deserts and Drylands, (David Thomas ed.) Princeton Univeristy Press, 2024)

Looking @ topography of North Africa's megalakes (postulated to have existed, details in ALT txt), it is not hard to imagine how Crocodylus succus (desert croc), Egyptians' sacred croc spread across NA: fossil records attest same species in Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali, Tchad...

Oude witte mannen & Leiden: Coen van Deventer www.mareonline.nl/opinie/weer-...

Paddington sent to Rwanda. (Mural in Edinburgh, 2022). Paddington Bear is originally from "darkest Peru" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padding...

Copyright’s Big Win in the First Decided US Artificial Intelligence Case - The Scholarly Kitchen The first AI training case has been decided in the US in favor of the copyright holder.

Copyright’s Big Win in the First Decided US Artificial Intelligence Case (Thomson Reuters vs Ross Intelligence). "A block of raw marble [...] is not copyrightable. Yet a sculptor creates a sculpture by choosing what to cut away and what to leave in place." scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/02/20/c...

Four new #openaccess publications in the AEGIS Brill series (a.o Oil-age Africa) aegis-eu.org/aegis-brill-...