M. Willis Monroe

The soundtrack is so good...

Incrementalists take it on the chin again. This is why they hate Mamdani. He's giving up the game that people in power HAVE POWER and don't solely exist to beg you for $5 every day. He's ruining the Democratic Party by showing voters that they have the power to do stuff instead of crouching in fear

Same! I'm excited.

We've just released version 3 of our publicly available dataset: zenodo.org/records/1839...

This represents an additional years worth of collected data as well as a long-standing project to start normalizing some of the user-entered tags used to describe religious groups.

Let's do the same in Canada!

A poster featuring an image of Dr. Jones and his book, Cervantine Blackness, and giving the details of the talk and event. Thursday, February 5th, 5:30 PM at the Fredericton Public Library, in Chickadee Hall. Nicholas R. Jones is a Tenured professor at Yale University. His latest book is Cervantine Blackness. This lecture takes its audience on a journey that explores Miguel de Cervantes' portrayal of black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa, challenged entrenched paradigms and inviting a reevaluation of the complexities surrounding racialized blackness and black social life in Cervantes' literary corpus.

We're excited to share the details of our Department's upcoming 10th Annual Black History Month lecture.

Our featured speaker will be Dr. Nicholas R. Jones (Yale), lecturing on "Cervantine Blackness as an Ethics of Care."

The US made a big deal sanctioning Russian business execs who supported Putin in his illegal invasion of Ukraine. Now's the time to do the same for the US. The list of donors to Trump's inauguration is here: www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-i...

These are businesses/people we need to be sanctioning.

That's the perfect meme encapsulation of the Lord of Aratta's expression!

The field of Assyriology has been moving toward automatic translation of Akkadian for over a decade because, when it does happen, it will be a game changer.

Historians are now putting money on the line to test current capabilities of machine learning. Can automatic translation finally be possible?

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

Ooh which one, we got a Jøtul installed last winter it's been a game changer. We love the local NB hardwood sawdust bricks, so cheap and we're burning a byproduct of a local industry (plus no bugs in the house!).

INDEFATIGABLE

An image from the end of the article showing the team involved.

I want to highlight the team members: Dr. Kelly is a world expert on the Proto-Elamite world, archaeology and language. Dr. Born is a wizard with Python and all things linguistic. Dr. Sarkar understands the interaction of language and data and an insatiable curiosity for the ancient world.

We've derived some novel insight on Proto-Elamite itself (hence the article) but also generated new methods in the field of computational-linguistics. There's a real give and take relationship here that has been fostered over many years of collaboration.

In this article we summarize some of the work we've done (along with others) over the last five years towards understanding Proto-Elamite. This is highly interdisciplinary work involving specialists in Proto-Elamite, archaeology, the cuneiform world, and importantly computational-linguistics.

A screenshot of the front page of an article on Proto-Elamite

Breaking news for you Proto-Elamite fans: our team just had a new article come out in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology (88.4) on our recent progress towards deciphering "one of the few remaining undeciphered scripts from the ancient world".

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Would 100% be sharing my Oracc Wrapped.

As in, in our discussion and working out alternate arrangements indicated to her that renewed effort would pay off, and it did!

Yeah, I've wondered about this. Anecdotally, I had a student bomb a test earlier this semester. For the next one I had her take it in a separate room supervised by the TA w/ extra time (we discussed this strategy together), and she did much better. Maybe it's just the attention that matters?

A white board with lines drawn across it. Each of the lines represents a division of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Students drew the lines and were asked to divide the epic into three parts.

I asked my students in my Gilgamesh class to divide the epic into three parts on their summary test. Afterwards, in class we all drew them on the board. We talked about how the second division has more salience than the first (i.e. more people agreed on where the second division should go).

They could still tag and take notes in the web interface I think. But they wouldn't be able to highlight with the built-in pdf reader.

We re-watched after finishing Andor, and I'd agree. It didn't hold up, but I'm glad it existed.

Fascinating use of "insain" here, must be meaning 4 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/insane

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method https://theonion.com/rogue-scientist-has-own-scientific-method-1819568501/

This is a fun exercise to do with the students, it's mostly student led, I inject a little guiding oversight here and there. But at the end I point out that given a couple hours in the library they could assemble this data themselves and make a concrete historical point about ancient Egypt!

It is true the tombs get a bit larger over the course of the New Kingdom, and kings have larger tombs than queens and princes. It's also clear that there's a typological progressions between bent-axis (earlier) and straight-axis (later) tombs.

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the number of rooms. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it's a king, queen, or prince.

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the total volume of the tomb. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it has a bent or straight axis.

Then we graphed the results on the whiteboard (apologies for the glare) and lo and behold our hypotheses were born out by the data:

Two hypotheses about the valley of the kings, tombs get bigger over time and kings have bigger tombs than others.

With this information available we thought about what sort of hypotheses we could test with the data. The students came up with some simple but important ideas: 1) Tombs get bigger over time and 2) Kings have larger tombs than queens and princes. The students divided up and each looked at a tomb

Students pointed out that there was numerical information like the dimensions, including total volume (which we agreed was important). Then we thought about how we could date them (the year the occupant died?). What sort of status they had (most are kings, some are princes and/or queens).