Matthew Symonds

if they have gussied up the myrka I riot

(Actually given the gauntlet detailing on the sleeves, it maybe is a smoking jacke.)

That’s such an amazing find! Looks like a Norfolk jacket to me, but I’d be tempted to wear it to dinner as a smoking jacket, belted up with buttons undone.

A screenshot from our Zooniverse website, with a banner that shows that the project data has now been completed. The webpage contains black, green, and gold banners spanning across the top of the page, and the title of the Zooniverse project 'The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790'. On the left half of the screen is a close up of an early modern manuscript, and on the right half, a textual description of the zooniverse project, featuring grey text on a white background.

📢 NEW 'Project Progress Update' Blog Post! 📢

We've recently reached a very significant project milestone, and thought this would be the perfect moment to provide a research update: sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

Featuring @zooniverse.bsky.social news, and a sneak peek at our database! 📜✍️💻

Very sad news. Plenty of times in the early 90s he was the one batter England could rely on

Starting a campaign to bring back the On The Record crocodile

There's the most amazing project going on right now to digitise all the paperwork privateering produced:

www.prizepapers.de/the-project/...

A Provincial Market in Second-Hand Books: Book Sales in Devon, 1688–1725 Abstract. Comparatively little is known about England’s early book-auction trade outside of London and the university towns, with few catalogues surviving

*small embarrassed voice*
A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s.
doi.org/10.1093/libr...

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...

Donna Noble and the Doctor ask one another “Oh my God. Have you got any money?” “Er no. Haven’t you?”

Budget day at last.

(I know he caveats it a sentence later, but it's such a basic point to grasp.)

What big bond investors want from the UK Budget Gilt market players call on government to cut spending and steer clear of inflationary tax rises

The guy here who starts by saying “a budget that’s good for the gilt market isn’t necessarily one that’s good for the UK economy” should be marched into the BBC newsroom and asked to repeat himself every time a political correspondent says “yield”.

on.ft.com/4irx6Ww

can testify that working with nature generally means getting up quite a bit before 7am

we're all going to be reading a lot of very tedious triple-decker novels fairly soon

one aspect of the "Great Wealth Transfer" is that a lot of what passes for the middle classes' financial planning is an ever-expanding terra incognita marked "here be inheritance" and that's where the real bubble is

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

Christian religious education taught in schools in Northern Ireland unlawful, says UK Supreme Court It had been argued that the right to withdraw from religious education prevented any breach to religious freedom protections under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UK's Supreme Court has ruled that the Christian religious education taught in schools in the North is unlawful.

It added that to teach pupils to 'accept a set of beliefs without critical analysis amounts to evangelism, proselytising, and indoctrination'.
jrnl.ie/6879415

YouTube video by rocketgirlrecords Spacemen 3 - 'Revolution'

Happy 60th birthday to Peter Kember and Jason Pierce who were both born in the same hospital on this day in 1965. Here they are together in Spacemen 3 performing Revolution
youtu.be/qdQn7c62zHM

Hope the "thank goodness the Premier League is back!!" takes are kept to a minimum this week – the past few days has been football at its best & purest.

all those brave thought leaders saying that monopoly was actually a good and natural market condition, rewarding all the Good Boy Tech Bros for their entrepreneurial spirits, rather than something we figured out was bad in the seventeenth cenury

love to turn a distributed network into an oligopoly

is uh cloudflare all right

Here is a very cool object: a volume with stacked paper boards that have come apart, revealing a manuscript fragment between the print waste! (Rare Books PA2317 .E7 1546). The manuscript leaf is from a psalter 🌟

#midwestmss #medievalsky #medievalmss #manuscripts

One way to take some of the heat out of politics, which is within the BBC's control, is to drop phone-ins and vox pops.

The suggestion that full-text search of every book was a solved problem in 2001 is the sort of hyper-hyperbole I can only admire through clenched teeth and endless weeping

At the risk of talking shop: there are just under 50 Government Bills before Parliament (including Employment Rights, English Devolution, Great British Energy) which aren’t getting the media attention that Coalition Bills at a similar point did. We’re missing proper scrutiny outside of Parliament.

honestly every time i read this i break again

Of course I don’t post selfies. Like normal people my age I grew up hating the way I looked

A photograph of the front cover of The Heist of Hollow London, the new novel by Eddie Robson.

awww yeah

bless