Jasper Segerink

What is the difference between a historian and a sociologist? A long time scale and bad data.

Perhaps a bit reductive but on point what the data concerns 🤣 Sam Bass Warner being interviewed by Bruce Stave in the first issue of Journal of Urban History in 1974

From the editor's desk...

... if anyone is thinking about writing an article on Arnold Schwarzenegger, we would love to see it.

Ik voel me bijzonder vereerd seg. Dankje! 😁

How we shape research projects, and how they shape us - A lodging house guy’s reflection by Jasper Segerink - Social History Blog Urban and social history projects on infrastructures, migrants, lodging houses in 19th-century Belgium.

🖋️ For the Social History Blog, I wrote a piece on the often banal reasons that research (and especially PhD)-projects pivot, and the implications this has for our craft. Hopefully this can also offer some reassurance for new PhD-students..
A lodging house guy's reflection 👇

Serieuzer nu: het zou wel fijn zijn als onze journalistiek iets kritischer zou omspringen met de verkoopspraatjes van techbros

Uhu Ok 👍

:.,!?; De Wereld van Sofie · Episode

De puntkomma is aan het verdwijnen! Toch worden er in De Wereld van Sofie enkele mooie argumenten aangehaald voor het behoud ervan.
Ik maak me ook wel es schuldig aan overvloedige ;'s...

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, ...

Source: arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935

New Microsoft study estimates that historians are the *2nd* occupation whose tasks AI can mostly cover, based on a large database of its Copilot users & their reported satisfaction.
That AI makes a poor historian is imo not a debate, but the fact that so many turn to LLMs for history is concerning.

One like, one history of poverty opinion

Reading that even Mozart found it difficult to find time to write gives me hope in difficult times 🥲

Seen at the Mozart Geburtshaus in Salzburg.

Hi Chloë, sounds intriguing! Indeed Hilde, Anne and Kristof Loockx have written extensively on migration, sex work and life in Antwerp's sailortown. It also features in my dissertation as one of the neighbourhoods of interest. If you want, I can mail you a fuller reading list later!

🗣️ Public lecture
On the 2nd of July Prof. em. Carl Nightingale will give a public lecture titled ‘Urban History and Earth Time: Five Big Stories About Cities and Their Planet’.
The lecture will be followed by a reception. Register before Friday 30 June via this link: lnkd.in/e67JhpDd

📢Vacature: PhD-student gezocht
Geïnteresseerd in geschiedenis, migratie, pendel en/of transport?
Het @urbanhistoryua.bsky.social zoekt een voltijdse (100% - 4 jaar) doctoraatsstudent voor het BOF-Impuls-project "verstedelijking voorbij gravitatiemodellen".
Solliciteren kan nog tot 30 juni!

Sorting, reporting and ways to use registration: Habsburg Austria from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Habsburg Austria, regulations permitted residents free movement, while at the same time the government strived for ubiquitous monitoring and surveill...

New Open Access Article written by Sigrid Wadauer on 'Sorting, reporting and ways to use registration: Habsburg Austria from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century'
Check it out via the link below!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our lodging house in the middle of the street: a socio-spatial analysis of three cohorts of lodging housekeepers, Antwerp 1850–1880 Lodging housekeepers occupy a dual role in social history. They are firmly established as protagonists in some of social history’s key debates on migration, (female) labour and housing for their ro...

In conclusion, housekeepers were a heterogeneous group, and increasingly so as migration and urban space expanded and diversified. Taking their point of view opens the door (badum-tss) to unexplored perspectives on past migrant-urban encounters.

Want to read more?: doi.org/10.1080/0307...

Result 5: This heightened volatility is undoubtedly a consequence of Antwerp's violent port-modernisation, which created a largely low-skilled and seasonally-bound labour market. Yet, housekeepers dealt w these challenges in their own ways: advertising, expanding, relocating, were all strategies.

How did housekeepers run a business in such a volatile world? Migrants housekeepers capitalised best on urban changes, being entrepreneurially oriented. Foreign migrants capitalised on transit neighbourhoods (railway & harbour) while local housekeepers operated in some of the worst slums (Result 4).

Result 3: The demand of migrant accommodation increased consistently throughout the century yet, interestingly, this did not create a more 'stable' lodging house sector. Instead housekeepers diversified their incomes, and kept businesses running for shorter times.

Result 2 The police inspection reports indicate that around 80% of establishments was run by men. This is an overrepresentation. Like the Gazzanos also show, women often actually ran the business, in name of their partner. This actually gave them a lot of independence compared to other working women

Result 1: like Gazzano, many households were headed by migrants. Although quite surprisingly, many locals too. Housekeepers did not mirror Antwerp's migrant population. Instead it represented those groups most in need of shelter, which for example included many local dockers and workers.

Although omnipresent and vital for cities, little is known about lodging housekeepers. In my recent article in Social History, I sought to understand this group: who were they, and how did they organise their daily lives?
As a case I used the drastically expanding city of Antwerp (1850-1880).

The lodging house and its keeper were a staple of past urban societies. By adopting strangers (for shorter or longer terms) they gave cities a necessary flexibility in housing migrant workers. In the Gazzano case, this was mostly Italian sailors, which gave Maria an income when Luca was at sea.

Source, Felixarchief Antwerpen, Foreigner File Luca Gazzano, nr 69.243.

Accommodating strangers as lodgers into the household has historically been a widespread phenomenon, with estimations of up to 1/4 of all urban households. Some families turned this into their profession: the lodging housekeeper, like Luca Gazzano and Maria Beckers in late 19th C Antwerp.

Lodging housekeepers occupy a dual role in history: they are well established in key debates on housing, work, and migration, yet they are rarely the main subject of historical analysis.

A small 🧵 on what studying this group teaches about this subject based on my new article in #SocialHistory

Een herfederalisering is zeker een democratisch schandaal voor een stad die haar eigen vertegenwoordigers kiest Anton Jäger is historicus van het politieke denken en doceert aan de universiteit van Oxford. Zijn column verschijnt tweewekelijks.

"Talrijke problemen die de hoofdstad vandaag geselen (vluchtelingenopvang, bendegeweld, verpaupering, de zwaar verloederde stationsbuurten) worden maar al te graag als exclusief Brussels voorgesteld. Dat zijn ze allerminst". Historicus Anton Jäger scherp in De Morgen.
www.demorgen.be/meningen/een...

Laat nog maar eens zien hoe belangrijk de strijd om concepten is in het publieke debat rond migratie. Deze strijd wordt voorlopig nogal eenzijdig gevoerd.

Doen alsof België geconfronteerd wordt met een ontzettend hoog aantal asielaanvragen uit Moldavië en dat 'asieltoerisme' bestempelen is toch wel écht van een mug een olifant maken.

Toch straf dat bijna niemand zich daar kritische vragen bij lijkt te stellen.

This is the paper I gave to historians about “AI” last week. I was at Queen Mary University in London last week at a charming conference that turned out to be mainly about modern British history. I…

So last week in a conference paper I (rather arrogantly) came up with a definition for "historical bullshit", building on Frankfurt and good work on LLMs so far. I explained why I think that's all an AI piece of "history content" can ever be {bullshit}.

Here you can find the full text of my talk: