@melissaterras.bsky.social
Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Computers versus the past. Digital Humanities and somesuch, including Transkribus. MBE FREng.
Important reflections on the relationship between archives, buildings, heritage designation and state power on the destruction of the Golestan Palace in Tehran. A blog by exiled Iranian archaeologist Leila Papoli-Yazdi blogg.lnu.se/unesco/?p=45...
This was right next to your post in my feed! 😊 bsky.app/profile/lynn...
There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.
It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.
Or getting yourself on the boards and in advisory positions where you can lobby for change, too… I do a lot of this work and it is very rewarding, I learn a lot - but it’s also extra labour. Needed tho!
Yes I’d say that’s true - living descendants who knew the people etc etc - but I think sectoral understanding has changed over the past decade that there are more complex issues at play?
All this to say: museum-bashing is one approach (that I never particularly agree with) and I understand the data needs to be gathered, but without clear policy changes AND resources to enact changes there’s probably little institutions can do. I hope this evidence changes policy, guidance & funds.
Fascinating and timely!
Let’s bear in mind the % of reduction in museum jobs since Covid, the mass closure of libraries in the UK during Conservative austerity, etc. Most institutions don’t even have a full catalogue of holdings, due to lack of resource. 👏Fund us to do the work that needs doing and we will happily do it👏
It’s true we are living with a (previously well resourced) colonial legacy that has been rather dumped on us today. People in the cultural sector generally care and would love to make radical changes. But that can only happen with concerted effort and labour, which takes resource.
But we can’t just say “these collections and displays are inappropriate for the times” without providing more policy infrastructure and resource to help change that. I don’t know one organisation that doesn’t want to update its policies or take this issue seriously: but resourcing always stops them.
What is needed here is sectoral policy guidance (from DCMS) on expectations and requirements which will allow institutional boards to demand change, AND funding for staffing and building repatriation community links (again, the govt should fund museums better! They are starving after austerity).
I’ve been thinking about this. My own attitude to encountering human remains in institutions has changed massively over the past 20 years: sector norms are changing. Most institutions would welcome the resource to enact changes. But where are the resources coming from to move with greater empathy?
As someone who watched the careful stewardship of grants over many years, the lack of care and the dismissal of the hard work of scholars and NEH program staff described here is devastating and shameful.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
‘May we wake one by one.’ This is how we sometimes say 'good night' in Nigeria. It is a greeting and a prayer against a sudden disaster that wakes us all at once. ‘May we wake one by one.’
folukeafrica.com/may-we-wake-...
(They put it in their eyes to make them beautiful but it caused blindness) but aye, Asbestos is a good corollary here - new wonder thing that isn’t…!
It’ll be like lead in paint in the 1970s. We’ll get rid eventually but there will be a legacy of madness… GenAI is our belladonna. Or something.
Thank you, I know, I use it a lot for research. Word count here meant I couldn’t specify commercial use/exception but I hoped that was implicit given context 😊
But the UK will be in the right, and that’s all that matters! Erm… yeah… shuffles papers… my hope is some massive recalibration of the market which makes all “this” less pervasive, but we’ll see…
Well yeah. Folks who don’t care are gonna crack on until class actions take them out. But I hope our legislative does the right thing…
This gives me hope that even if all those MPs - with dollars in their eyes from what they can personally gain from US Big Tech’s ravaging of human creativity - vote for a data mining exception to copyright, the Lords ain’t having it - and the boom will be over by the time any dust settles?
Congratulations to the wonderful @newsprof1.bsky.social (& @martinscott2010.bsky.social & @melbunce.bsky.social) for winning ISA Award for Best Book. A fascinating use of FOI requests & records to demonstrate democratic backsliding in public media in the USA. www.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/...
It's now an annual ritual for me. Waiting for the ALCS statement to see what I've earned in secondary and residual royalties from photocopies, libraries, etc.
Lowest amount: £18. Largest amount: £1900.
If you've got stuff published in the UK and aren't a member of ALCS, you're a chump.
We’re looking for a Research Data Engineer (m/f/x) (3,5 years). If you have a #DigitalHumanities profile with experience in #TEI encoding, #OCR / #HTR, and #IIIF (or any of those and are willing to learn the rest), get in touch! The full time position can be split, so if (for whatever reason) […]
Most anticipated new museums… given access to the world is shrinking, I may make it to Brussels out of these, if I’m lucky. And I’m not sure if I’m ready for entirely AI based collections, or talking about that as if it’s normal. www.bbc.co.uk/travel/artic...
I loved it. Currently I am enjoying Industry (bbc) and the pottery throw down (c4).
The original French version of Call My Agent was so good I had to ration it one episode a week - a total highlight for me. Gave me something smart and funny and light hearted to look forward to for months…
I am so proud to be part of this team, and this full-stack cooperative. And proud that the library, archive, & historical community are showing how you can build useful, ethical AI that responds to the needs of a community: together. Half a million users, baby! 🤩
Three weeks ago I spent a few days in one of our global dark sky sanctuaries in Rakiura Stewart Island New Zealand. Never has deep time felt so real or so close.
But every now and then one of Elon's dumbfuck satellites would interrupt the eternal rhythms of the stars. Let's not let it get worse.
