Peter Tarras

Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

*upcoming events*

Datenkompetenz für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften:

Der Workshop setzt grundlegende Kenntnisse in Linked Open Data voraus und bietet eine vertiefende Behandlung spezieller Themen und Anwendungsfälle in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften.

hermes-hub.de/aktuelles/ev...

7Q5 and Appeals to Authority, Part 2: Herbert Hunger I have written before about 7Q5, a small fragment of papyrus found in Cave 7Q at Qumran. It contains an unidentified text in Greek. It became (in)famous in the early 1970s when José O’Callaghan (19…

New blog by Brent Nongbri, which excellently demonstrates why the field of palaeography is so tricky and why even extensive expertise does not protect one from mistreating traces of writing as projection surfaces.

Warsaw Late Antique Seminar on Thursday 9 October (4.45 p.m.): Simcha Gross @simchagross.bsky.social (University of Pennsylvania), "Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors: Communities and Empire on the Roman-Sasanian Frontier". In person and online, as usual.

This whole thread. 🧵👇

From the Archives of Prof. Harry Austryn Wolfson: Jewish/Christian Relations in an Age of Judeo-Christian Rhetoric In an earlier post, I engaged some of the archival materials at Harvard pertaining to Prof.

For more on Harry Austryn Wolfson’s research on Christianity & his resistence of the reduction of Judaism to the Judeo- or Judeo-Christian open.substack.com/pub/humanhis...

Patristics: Jewish Scholarship on Church Fathers and Other Untold Stories Reflecting on fifty years of the CSPS/ACÉP - Part 4

By a coincidence, I just wrote a Substack on such erasures open.substack.com/pub/humanhis...

Empire and Epistemicide Precisely at the times when Jews and Christians were most experiencing the violence of the Roman Empire, some of Rome’s rulers were most vociferously claiming to bring and keep peace. By Annette Yoshi...

Here’s a link to the piece—it traces how Roman rhetoric of “peace” become adapted by late antique Christians to erase Jews bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/empire-and-e... +

Mielich's copy of the Six Kings painting from Qusayr Amra. Six figures standing next to each other, against a light blue background, wearing colourful Byzantine garb. Four of the six faces are still partly visible. The copy already records a damaged state.

More recent photograph of the Six Kings painting. None of the figures' faces is recognisable anymore.

Copy of an Umayyad wall painting (early 8th c.) from Qusayr Amra, depicting six kings with bilingual Greek and Arabic inscriptions. The copy was made by the Austrian painter Leopold Mielich who was also responsible for the massivly damaged state it's now in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintin...

Jena, sometimes Munich too (within the theology department).

Da für viele das Pendeln wieder beginnt möchte ich nochmal darauf hinweisen dass man Sitzplätze in innerdeutschen ICEs auch über die ÖBB reservieren kann - und zwar für 3 Euro und nicht für 5,50 Euro wie bei der DB direkt. Man kann diese sogar für 1,50 Euro Einbehalt bis am Tag vorher stornieren.

Bodleian Library MS. Laud Gr. 35, fol. 153v

Bodleian Library MS. Laud Gr. 35, fol. 153v, detail annotated with blue arrows pointing at Dionysius's name.

This is the feast of Dionysius the Areopagite. 🕯️ Not Mr. Pseudo, but the one in Acts! Here he is in Latin and in Greek in the Laudian Acts, Bodleian Library MS. Laud Gr. 35.

@matthewholford.bsky.social has a great blog post and video about this manuscript at hab.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/en/blog/blog...

paintings of warrior saints from the church of Faras, Lower Nubia

11th-13th century.
-Sudan National Museum (previously)
#randomxt

journal cover

New issue of Scrinium Vol. 21, No. 1 (2025) brill.com/view/journal... @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

Volume 55 Issue 3 | Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies | Duke University Press

In sincerity I did log on for a reason. A new issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is out, edited by colleague/friend Marcel Elias. It's about how to do postcolonial medieval studies bigger and better. You'll like it. (I'm in there). Go read.
read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/issue/...

RICHIESTA: conosco qualcuna/o che ha accesso al PDF di Carla Cucina, _Libri runici del computo. Il calendario di Bologna e i suoi analoghi europei_ ? non riesco a trovare nessun esemplario nelle biblioteche di Vienna...

Next Thursday 9 October, Eleanor Baker (@eleanormaybaker.bsky.social) will explore the world of Middle English book curses. All welcome!

To avoid any curses, attending is recommended.

Every discussion about AI in academia should start with ethics and academic honesty and almost none of them do. Those are really high bars to clear to get to using LLMs, which I suspect is a big reason why advocates skip over those conversations.

If the current 'AI' hype seems ideologically motivated to you, it's because there's a whole bundle of ideologies operating in the background. Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social and Émile Torres @xriskology.bsky.social call it the 'TESCREAL bundle'. You can read their fundamental paper here:

STRANIERI Questo volume osserva l’università come punto di incontro tra uomini di età diverse e di origini geografiche molteplici. Ciò vale in particolar modo per l’Ateneo patavino, che deve le sue origini prop...

The book "Stranieri. Itinerari di vita studentesca tra XIII e XVIII secolo", which I edited for the anniversary of the establishment of the University of #Padova, is finally available in #openaccess.

you can find it here:
www.padovauniversitypress.it/it/publicati... #HistoryOfUniversities #HighEd

Love it.

That is fascinating! #Qalamos, with its entries on text fragments from the #Turfan collection, is undoubtedly also an online resource for anyone interested in writing cultures along the Silk Road. The basic metadata can already be viewed, a starting point for those interested in #silkroad cultures.

if you like analogies, see this one too bsky.app/profile/oliv...

When I’m accused of “technopessimism“ I counter that I’m not “pessimistic about technology“; I am opposed to the economic, political, and social project of upward wealth transfer that “AI” is being leveraged to bring about. If that phrasing is useful to others, then go ahead and use it.