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  Thanks to the #DH2026 organisers and local Hyrox-run group for the most organised DH fun run ever!

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  The poster session at #DH2026 was full of delicious snacks *and* hope for the future of digital humanities. Yay! A random selection of the last four poster photos I took

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  Are any vegetarians / vegans at #DH2026 who aren't going to the banquet interested in finding a properly veg*n-friendly dinner?

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  'What changed from the abstract, and why' is the most Digital Humanities slide ever. So many presentations sharing honestly what didn't work as expected or yield useful results. This one is by Jiwoo Choi (I think) https://dh-daejeon.vercel.app/abs/65?q=Newspaper (Here, 'bag of words'-style access to a text corpus was no good. Is it too snarky to ask, is it ever any help?) #DH2026 Edited to add light sarcasm and hashtag

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  One for archaeology folk from #DH2026 'a newly developed controlled vocabulary for human bones, tailored specifically for osteoarchaeological and bioanthropological contexts' integrated into https://thanados.net/ and https://openatlas.eu/

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  I'm posting my #DH2026 talk abstract here, as they can be slightly hard to find in the huge official book of abstracts: A never-ending story: supporting access to museum and library collections (in the UK) https://www.miaridge.com/dh20206-presentation-a-never-ending-story-supporting-access-to-museum-and-library-collections-in-the-uk/

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  It's a really hot day for all the furries at ComicCon. I admire their commitment to the bit but I also hope the internet doesn't need any emergency fixing today!

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  Audrey Tang @au on 'Software Freedom as Civic Care' and so much more - 'care ethics, democracy, local stewardship and self-governance' https://civic.ai/software-freedom-as-civic-care/ (Edited to add username)

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  Incredible: https://bsky.app/profile/theladyred.bsky.social/post/3mmmitj3omc2u If you're looking for the original study: 'Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence', Cheng et. al., 2026 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352 ArXiv version: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13995 Thanks to the unpaywall plugin for the open access link https://unpaywall.org

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  In awe of @WScholger mobilising previous @adho conference organisers to help a previous reviewer get information she needed for officialdom. Thanks Walter! [Edit: you'd think I'd be able to get the @adho handle right! But no]

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  Some quite personal news for long-time followers and personal connections - 9 years after my initial cancer diagnosis, and six years after treatment for a recurrence, the oncology team have officially discharged me. Which is kinda NHS-speak for: I'm in remission! Yay!!

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  At last! The archived British Library blogs are viewable online. Check the index of blogs at https://blogs-archive.bl.uk/ and the hundreds of posts on the Digital Scholarship blog going back to 2013 https://blogs-archive.bl.uk/#digital-scholarship

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  Does your Friday need a burst of inspiration? Try @arnicas.bsky.social's 'Image Prompt Inspiration: 3 random nouns and CC images from Flickr (British Library scans as default)' (yay for open access images!) https://ghostweather.com/apps/flickr-inspo/

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  I was part of an OCLC RLP working group on 'artificial intelligence to support metadata workflows'. Four posts summarise this work, looking at primary cataloguing, archives and special collections, institutional repositories, and overall pros and cons https://hangingtogether.org/tag/aiandmetadataworkflows/

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  2023 in #AI4LAM terms feels a very long time ago! It's not easy to find the videos from Fantastic Futures 2023 so for findability... https://archive.org/details/fantastic-futures-annual-international-conference-2023-ai-for-libraries-archives-and-museums-02 - AI in libraries, archives and museums as of 2023

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  I read: 'Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field? Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930' https://resobscura.substack.com/p/are-vintage-llms-the-start-of-a-new (Probably not, but it does remind me of work in Living with Machines about the wider impact of language about accidents in newspapers)

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  Your semi-regular reminder that the British Library's Research Repository has stacks of open datasets from collections, and research by Library staff e.g. https://bl.iro.bl.uk/catalog?f[human_readable_type_sim][]=Collection&locale=en&page=1&per_page=100&sort=year_published_isi%20asc #OpenAccess #OpenGLAM

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  I love this, from @ryancordell : 'In their discussions of hacking, building, and making, we see that DH scholars do not generally seek to convey simple technological skills, but instead to cultivate technological imagination. Specific platforms, applications, and even coding languages come and go, but a technological imagination is able to abstract a problem—whether intellectual, professional, or personal—and formulate a plan for how a tool or suite of tools might help answer it'...

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  Keep this link handy for the next time you hear about someone relying on ChatGPT https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina - read it to the end!

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  Susan Brown is the opening keynote for #DH2024 - and winner of the Busa prize https://adho.org/2024/02/21/susan-brown-awarded-roberto-busa-prize/ I'm enjoying her journey through the early days of DH, her many collaborations, particularly around structuring data - which adds weight to her critiques of 'AI' and LLMs vs knowledge graphs / linked data Her slides are at https://tinyurl.com/Brown-MeaningfulConnections

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  The Digital Humanities 2024 conference is kicking off now, so if that's not your thing, mute #DH2024 The organisers thank the many many proposal reviewers https://dh2024.adho.org/about/other-volunteers/ that make the massive task of reviewing possible (I'm in an overflow room from the main keynote room so I can have a snack while I watch - what a great idea!)

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  To balance Ted Chiang's essay on AI and art,* there's this from @TedUnderwood - 'In many ways, generative AI is just an extension of a project that the internet started thirty years ago: a project to reorganize knowledge interactively. ... Once we get past the silly-ad phase of adjusting to language models, the effect of this technology may actually be to encourage people to try doing more things for themselves. The risk is not necessarily that AI will make people passive...

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  Looking for a unique job that needs imagination and technical expertise; linking the worlds of ancient manuscripts and algorithms, historical newspapers and large language models? Make a difference at one of the world's biggest libraries BL Labs Technical Lead, £51k, closes Dec 20 <- not Dec 22! https://www.vercida.com/uk/jobs/bl-labs-technical-lead-british-library-st-pancras More on this job, also Product Owner, Research Software Engineer and Test Engineer posts in the @BL_Dig...

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  Today I learned that Dee Dee Ramone was really into ABBA https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/ramones-debut-album-50-years-punk-hey-ho-lets-go/106585300

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  'I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped' https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter 'When an AI records everything rather than what we chose to record... The note stops being a reflection of clinical reasoning and becomes a verbatim archive. And as a PMC piece on note bloat explicitly warns, this risks obscuring the most medically important information under a volume of equally-weighted detail.'

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  @overholt ooh, this is very relevant to a conversation at work yesterday!

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  A lovely post from Jeanette Croen, a PhD placement student, on her work at the British Library doing computational analysis on early printed book descriptions https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/computational-analysis-of-book-descriptions-a-placement-project

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  @clemens I've been using it on Firefox for ages, it's very satisfying!

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  Big news! I'm incredibly privileged to take on leadership of the Museum Data Service while continuing half-time in my role at the British Library. The MDS is already a success story, and I'm so excited about taking it further! https://artuk.org/discover/stories/museum-data-service-appoints-mia-ridge-as-head-of-service

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  There are some really good points in this: NHS patients should be able to write up their own medical records – Will Parman https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/16/nhs-patients-write-medical-records-healthcare-workers