Gordon McKelvie

At @ihr.bsky.social we can now offer PhD by Publication in History! For those with a substantial body of existing published research (within past 10 years), but without a PhD, should be of particular interest to #heritage professionals and independent scholars!

Hollow laughter

*I’m not at risk of redundancy and we don’t have that going on at the moment.

You know you’ve been a UCU rep a while when you get a long service award and one of the first things you do is work out what that would mean for any statutory redundancy payout

The UAE is an authoritarian autocracy, a petro-state with no income tax for citizens, to bribe them for the lack of democratic voice or free speech

It is 85% migrant, a segregated society with a ban on integration in principle and practice, few rights, equal opportunities, nor voice for incomers

I mean, if I were being generous, I’d say that someone of them might be a bunch of morons who shat themselves when they realised what being elected actually entailed in terms of work (see several other councillors who resigned pretty quickly elsewhere too)

I always thought the swanky looking stuff ended up at the BL

No, it never existed, and then the imaginary target was scrapped by the Conservatives years ago anyway.

The rise in numbers going to uni was entirely down to higher demand from students.

Nope. This is in no way a good thing. Not even remotely

Journalism is a tough gig in 2025. News desks are pared to the bone, specialists are all but gone, nobody wants to pay to consume and advertising is in a death spiral.

So let's be honest about why Farage and co get so much coverage: they provide endless, cheap, easy stories and promote rage clicks.

Anyone shocked that Reform plan to deport immigrants with Indefinite Leave to Remain hasn’t been paying attention.

Next it will be stripping citizenship from dual citizens, then deporting them.

Who do you think Reform are?

This.

This is who they are.

Hence it never gets the coverage that people not doing STEM gets.

Modern language education is probably the best educational crisis in Britain but gets very little coverage because we assume the rest of the world just speaks English as a second language

Asst'd reasons, incl that in laboratory sci subjects 1. You need buildings w labs (£££); 2. having undergrad lab classes to staff limits how bad you can make your staff-student ratios; 3. demand for sci PhDs means Unis can't staff lecture courses w casualized staff like they often do in arts/hums.

Quarter of UK university physics departments at risk of closing, survey finds Four out of five making staff cuts as physicists say findings are ‘great concern’ for UK’s leadership in important areas

As we keep saying: when the humanities are in trouble, the sciences are, too; generally, at UK universities, the sciences are cross-subsidised by the arts and humanities.

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

The worst kind of policy moaner is a middle aged arts or humanities graduate grumbling that not enough young people study STEM subjects.

The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration It’s not hard to see how so many came to worry about the issue. But the data isn’t there

The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration on.ft.com/46p3BPl

The best advice to students beginning university can be summed up as: if in doubt, ask your teachers (or librarians, or student support staff, etc. as relevant) and not the plagiarism robot. The Guardian can send my fee to my PO Box.

I am wondering if the death of Alexander III in 1286 could be the basis of a Carry On Film?

PS: the ‘branch office’ brigade can bugger right off

It would be good at some point to see and MP for a Scottish constituency have a role in cabinet that isn’t Secretary of State for Scotland

Green and red poster with the History Workshop logo and a title which reads ‘Can you help us?’ Underneath the title some text reads: This year our partner History Workshop Journal is celebrating the publication of its 100th issue. If you have ever used any HWJ articles in your teaching practice we would love to hear from you! Please let us know by emailing hwoeditors@historyworkshop.org

📣 Call for participants 📣

Have you ever used any History Workshop Journal articles in your teaching practice? If so, we would love to hear from you!

Please let us know by sending an email or feel free to DM.

Other historians have already pointed out why the article in question has flawed methods and data, so I won't discuss. The underlying issues are power, publication venues, & collaboration. 1) Nature articles on history are almost always framed as "scientists figured out what historians couldn't." 1/

I suspect that the many who say that the humanities are not ‘career-related’ or to be blunt, those who dislike people studying the humanities, actually don’t want to hear evidence to the contrary

Call for Papers for the International Medieval Congress 2026 6th–9th July 2026, University of Leeds, UK Sponsor: ‘Enabling digital research on manuscript catalogue data,’ a project at the Bodleian Libraries, funded by Digital Scholarship @ Oxford, which seeks to facilitate quantitative analysis of the Bodleian’s western medieval manuscript catalogues. Organisers: Dr Matthew Holford and Dr Sebastian Dows-Miller (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) Computational research into the contents, codicology and history of medieval manuscripts is wellestablished. “Quantitative codicology” has since the 1960s used statistical analysis to explore topics from the dimensions of the manuscript page to overall patterns of book production, but many research questions remain open. This session seeks to bring together scholars from across medieval studies who are engaged in the examination of medieval manuscripts through the lens of ‘Big Data’, to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchange within the still underdeveloped fields of quantitative palaeography and codicology. We welcome proposals from all areas of manuscript studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to: • Networks of texts and people associated with manuscripts. • Quantitative approaches to the palaeographic analysis of scripts and hands. • The application of AI and ML to large corpora of manuscript data. • Issues of data quality and provenance in quantitative manuscript studies. • The use of ‘Big Data’ as a tool for teaching manuscript studies. Potential contributors interested in using the tabular outputs of the sponsoring project can find them at the project’s GitHub repository Please send abstracts of maximum 150 words, along with 5 subject keywords and your contact details, to matthew.holford@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of these details is 23:59 BST on 29th August 2025. If you would like to apply to the IMC separately for financial assistance, see the their advice here.

Call for papers, Leeds IMC 2026 - Big data and medieval manuscripts. Please consider submitting a proposal!

It’s here

it's "cool" that every conservative pundit in the UK basically seems to want to turn the country into Norsefire

Headline from Mashable: I'm a college writing professor. How think students should use Al this falI The photo is of a young woman looking at a laptop while a humanoid robot sits beside her and strokes its chin

Educators encouraging students to use AI is like medical doctors encouraging people to stop exercising and washing their hands.

It reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the entire point of their field.