Konrad M. Lawson

Fixed a few bugs on this 2010 website I made for my mother's translations of over 200 Norwegian letters from 1911-1956 (including between US and Norway) https://huginn.net/shoebox/letters/ Some really wonderful content to browse there. #norway

History PhD students at Scottish universities may be interested in this upcoming SGSAH Discipline+ Catalyst in person training workshop in St Andrews: Coding Literacy for Historians in the Age of AI - 17-18 Oct, 2025 https://spatialhistory.net/info/coding.html Limited places; registration by 15 […]

Today enjoyed browsing the UBC collection of Japanese maps of the Tokugawa era: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/tokugawa #japan #maps

2/2 Continued:
スタンダード和英辞典 1946 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1126792
和英対照明解新辞典 1946 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1126444
世界新語辞典 1949 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1126445
和英英和時事要語辞典 1953 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2465788
模範漢和新辞典 1954 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2439778
現代中国人名辞典 (with nice Wade-Giles lookup too!) 1957 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3020572

Some (out of copyright?) downloadable Japanese dictionaries of (very) different sorts from postwar at NDL:
最新時事新語辞典 1949 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1126434/...
最新国際問題辞典 1948 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1444664
ポケットスケッチ事典 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1338675
図解新事典 1949 dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1169556 […]

[Original post on social.coop]

@tillgrallert Thanks! I found Aliz and Jeffrey (I apparently already was following Aliz here on Mastodon). Couldnt' find Hilde. Do you mean the wonderful Hilde De Weerdt at KU Leuven?

Was listening to political commentary about the imminent Norwegian election on NRK radio and they used an expression I like, used by one commentator cautioning against speculation:

“ta seg en bolle” (lit. have a [bread/pastry/sweet] bun) = to chill out, relax […]

[Original post on social.coop]

I did a test with a set of (hastily taken, in poor light) photographs of a few Japanese book pages, then ran them on both the ndlkotenocr-lite (which, to be fair, is designed for much older Japanese texts and likely the old form kanji) vs Google Document AI […]

[Original post on social.coop]

@tillgrallert Thanks so much for getting back. I appreciate it. Any of those people you recommend work with Japanese texts? I am just looking for some ideas from people who have experience with OCR with vertical Japanese texts and are happy with the results (of the shelf existing solutions, I'm […]

Anyone working with Japanese texts: interested in your OCR experiences. I find usual suspects (tesseract, ABBYY, direct use of LLMs) do rubbish job with 縦書き Japanese text scans (manga-ocr works only on short text). Google Document AI works fantastic but $$. What works well for you? I remember […]

There is a short Kon Wajirō (今和次郎) lecture clip from NHK 放送大学on 個人と集団 (mention of his challenges with 考現学approach) YouTube filmed 1972, just a year before he passed. https://youtu.be/Xg2qvdcWOP0?si=_TTbqd2PHD_kXwvB

Sunday afternoon walk in Chatelherault Country Park. #scotland

Just noticed that Nichibunken's open access collection has a full text OA copy of book "Gender and Modernity: Rereading Japanese Women's Magazines" (1998, 152MB) nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/6419 - individual chapters can also be downloaded. Guess I don't need to wait for that inter-library loan.

Great title: "A Dinner Party Is Not a Revolution: Space, Gender, and Hierarchy in Meiji Japan" www.jstor.org/stable/42772... (still doesn't beat my current all time favorite: Fascism’s Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Purity of Blood in 1930s Japan www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...)

There are now three modes to timeline review tool (mostly for students new to modern China/Japan history): Flashcards (flip through until all correct); Test mode (asks 10 questions, but also records time taken); Sort game, sort the order of events and time recorded […]

I'll add Korea decks in due course.

Also added support for the test mode to accept certain alternate date ranges (different versions of the dates for the land reform period, for example). I would be grateful if you find any inaccuracies in the timelines (or proposed alternatives to accept) or events you think should be added.

I have made some updates to these interactive modern timeline flashcards+testing at Frog in a Well: 1) corrections/additions to some China timelines 2) tweaked the test feature for better mobile experience 3) added a "sort the dates" game 4) added some modern Japan decks […]

Sunday afternoon walk around Doune via the castle, Kilmadock burial ground, and Moray Estates. #scotland

Saturday afternoon walk from Dale til Hommersåk via Lihalsen. #norway

@villainousfriend indeed! It feels refreshing. There is still json file underneath with structured data that creates the html files that can be input into some fancy database but in meantime, feels fresh to be back in static files country. Also working to make sure old urls redirect

Part of the The Sino-Japanese Studies journal archive was inaccessible due to server configuration issues. We have moved to good old fashioned static html pages now so it is more future resilient. All articles open access and easy to download: https://chinajapan.org/archive.html #china #japan

“25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998.” Article from 2021 […]

Updating my China's Revolutions module handbook for the fall and thought I would share these again:

Interactive Map to Prepare for a formative map quiz:
https://froginawell.net/games/china-map/

Some flashcards to prepare for formative timeline quiz:
https://froginawell.net/games/flash/

For […]

Sunday afternoon walk along Hafrsfjord from Kråkebakkana in Joa to Løneset in Grannes with a swim along the way. #norway

Afternoon walk on Kvitsøy. #norway

I should note that this quickly hacked together tool is by no means the most powerful CLI out there for Zotero - but I wanted something with very limited *read-only* features. See the powerful pyzotero-cli by @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social‬ for something more full featured […]

I (or rather Claude Code) created command line interface for read-only search, exploration, and pdf extraction from local Zotero installation: https://github.com/kmlawson/zurch (also on PyPI) - I'll be experimenting with its use in research workflows with claude code and gemini cli.

Sunday afternoon coastal walk from Sandnes to Gausel and then rental scooter back to Stavanger.

For anyone running local LLMs on their computer installed via LM Studio, and want to prompt them from the command line without fiddling with its local API, I made (or rather Claude Code made) this CLI wrapper for it: lmsp https://pypi.org/project/lmsp/