iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 16/01/2026

Priory of the Orange Tree is all predicated on some... "Well meaning" interpretations of Evil Western Dragons vs Noble Eastern Dragons

021

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/01/2026

My press is wonderful in all ways... Except that they only publish in Canadian English, which is apparently a bastard hybrid of both US and UK that only follows half the rules of each. Did my head in trying to add Z's while keeping "ous"...

040

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 09/01/2026

Are the peacock feathers on either side of the central Buddha a little larger in one than the other?

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 27/12/2025

100%. If an author has either not read or not understood a source they've cited, then that would be grounds for a desk reject. A "blessing" of AI hallucinations is that this kind of author is suddenly a lot easier to spot...

020

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 18/12/2025

I can't comment on python, but I wouldn't trust an LLM to check the spelling of an author's name in my field, let alone that specific page numbers match the content. Perhaps this is different in a more tech-forward field (which doesn't still publish frequently in print-only books...)?

000

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 18/12/2025

My scientist partner's labmates couldn't believe that I was "writing a book" for my PhD thesis instead of just stitching together existing publications and slapping on some kind of thematic intro!

000

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 18/12/2025

I suspect (hope?) that this is actually an article (which in the sciences would normally have the advisor, along with any collaborators, listed as corresponding author) which was then *included in* the PhD thesis of the primary author... And this was just poorly understood and reported by the paper

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 18/12/2025

Whenever our students open a PDF over two pages—in other words, every reading we assign them—Adobe tells them "this document looks long, let me summarise this for you." What message does this send to MA students about the value of actually reading the sources themselves?!

072

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 12/12/2025

What a delightful exemplar to come across, in the week my students have a book review due...

030

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 11/12/2025

Ah, yes, my beloved archipelago in the South Pacific, that natural bastion of "the West"

010

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 09/12/2025

Language requirements are good for students in ways they might not understand or appreciate at the time. Wide distribution requirements—from thinking philosophically to writing poetically—are good for the same reasons!

010

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 09/12/2025

Ten years and going back to grad school later, turns out I'm actually good at languages when I have the discipline to see them through. Most 18 years don't have that discipline, or the foresight to see that it's worth struggling through to master one of the most valuable skills in the world

100

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 09/12/2025

Tangentially related: I cannot understand why BA students in NZ aren't *required* to study a language—especially students like me who majored in international relations. I took one semester of Japanese, it was hard and my grades sucked, of course 20yr old me didn't think it was worth continuing!

120

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 06/12/2025

By that logic, isn't the whole world a relic of use...? This seems like something @aohsusometimesy.bsky.social would get behind

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 05/12/2025

...and in which male monarchs are pretty relentless about emphasizing their own masculinity, insisting that the island itself is their wife. So while I didn't expect it to, the book concludes that (in SL, and maybe more widely...) we simply *can't* study gender, politics, and religion in isolation.

150

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 05/12/2025

And then of course I ended up working on period in which two women sat on the throne, one of them thrice; which has a higher percentage of inscriptions by women than in any other period of SL history; in which the only Pali-language inscriptions are by women...

140

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 05/12/2025

Oh great question! Here's the thing: I never expected it to be "about" gender. I started grad school thinking that I was just going to research a straightforward history of Buddhist "kingship"--without really reflecting on the fact that "kingship" itself is a gendered title.

120

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 03/12/2025

As much as I'd love to claim some expertise in Hildegard studies, I'm sure that they'll update the link once the book is officially published in Feb... Fingers crossed anyway!

020

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 03/12/2025

I wrote a book, it now has a cover, it's all feeling very real! Coming out (open access) in February, for all those with an interest in, well, religion, gender, and/or politics in Sri Lankan history. www.arc-humanities.org/978180270309...

arc-humanities.org

Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka - Arc Humanities Press

The early second millennium was a pivotal moment in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Religious reforms carried out at Poḷonnaruva, then-capital of Sri L...

2165

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Dr. Redfern "Red" Barrett @redfernbarrett.com · 26/11/2025

People vastly underestimate how important trans* rights are in the contemporary fight for freedom. If you cannot make your own choices for your body, the name you go by, or even the very clothes that you wear, then you are not, in any sense, meaningfully free.

19541

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 19/11/2025

It's very "university IT department" to make it mandatory for us to use the VPN to check our emails... The same day that the VPN crashes. I'm sure that they've sent a very helpful email by now with a workaround! If only...

010

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Luc Rocher @rocher.lc · 15/11/2025

📸 New research just out revealing disturbing problems with AI image captioning. AI models can now analyse both texts and images, and are trained on vast collections of human-created content spanning centuries. Some claims these models could soon help human historians interpret and explain the past.

2126

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 11/11/2025

I shall henceforth always refer to GenAI as "the gibbering mouth froth of rabid autocomplete." (also this book and interview are both generally excellent)

0123

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the mandolin, let me see you move like you come from Benin"

010

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the maracas, let me see you move like you come from the city of Caracas"

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the concertina, let me see you move like you come from Argentina"

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the tuba, let me see you oom-pah-pah like you come from Cuba"

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the Cor Anglais, let me see you move like you come from Chile" ("Calais" would work better but I think be too obvious)

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the bongo, let me see you move like you come from the DR Congo"

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

"Señorita, feel the vuvuzuela, let me see you move like you come from Venezuela"

110

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 10/11/2025

The line "Señorita, feel the conga, let me see you move LIKE you come from Colombia" has never made much sense to me since Shakira actually DOES come from Colombia. Please enjoy these alternatives, with which I have been torturing my Colombian partner all day.

120

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 04/11/2025

This could be my opportunity to stake out my own niche of academic Brunoism

000

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 04/11/2025

#WebinAAR | On Friday 7 Nov, at 12pm ET / 6pm CET, I’ll be speaking in an AAR webinar on Buddhist feminist historiography, in conversation with Steph Balkwill and other excellent folks. Q and A follows; register now and join the discussion: my.aarweb.org/event-inform...

A poster for the webinar mentioned in this post.

020

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Dr Selena Wisnom @lswisnom.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

5245181434

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 24/10/2025

This is, with the benefit of Atlantic distance, hilarious. It is also deeply, deeply disturbing.

020

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 15/10/2025

Well this made my morning to read!!

020

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 29/09/2025

Good copyedits need a good kittyeditor

A cat sits on my lap, looking at the camera, while I mark up a manuscript in red ink.

010

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 08/08/2025

I have lived in Germany for two years now and still whenever I hear small children chatting away in public my first thought is "wow their German is so good, they must study very hard"

040

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Royal Studies @royalstudies.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

New #cfp from the Journal of Transcultural Studies for a special issue on “Transcultural Histories of Monarchy” - abstracts to be sent to jts-editors@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de by 1st Sept! The essays will explore the ways in which monarchies incorporate “the foreign” into the familiar.

086

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 05/07/2025

Stephanie Balkwill's The Women Who Ruled China is an incredible book, with methodological takeaways for historians of gender and power in every context. Read my review for @royalstudies.bsky.social here: rsj.winchester.ac.uk/articles/10....

rsj.winchester.ac.uk

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. By Stephanie Balkwill. University of California Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-0520401815. 272 pp | Royal Studies Jo...

020

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 07/03/2025

I'll be joining the Journal as managing editor for Volume 16 onwards. If you're working on processes of transculturation—in any global or historical context, and from any disciplinary standpoint—then we'd be delighted to hear from you. heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/tra...

heiup.uni-heidelberg.de

About the Journal | The Journal of Transcultural Studies

000

Bruno M. Shirley @brunomshirley.com · 07/03/2025

A new issue of the Journal of Transcultural Studies is now available open-access! It features articles by @jaydprosser.bsky.social (Leeds), Alexander Vesey (Tokyo), Ori Sela (Tel Aviv) and Dhruv Raina (New Delhi/Pune). Great reads all; check them out here: heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/tra...

heiup.uni-heidelberg.de

Vol. 15 No. 1-2 (2024) | The Journal of Transcultural Studies

111

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Dr Dave Hitchcock @davehitchcock.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

This is interesting. "Leading AI Models are now very good historians". It's a total clickbait title as I will expand on below. But several of the challenges put to the models, particularly palaeographical transcription and translation, it seems to perform well. Wills @ Exeter is using it for this.1

resobscura.substack.com

The leading AI models are now very good historians

Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean

44511

Reposted by Bruno M. Shirley

Hannah Kim @thisishannahkim.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

If you need a distraction today-- check out my new piece for Aeon! I say there's no universal definition of fiction b/c how "fiction" is understood depends on a culture's metaphysics. Philosophy of fiction has been taking Greek metaphysics for granted. I say we branch out. aeon.co/essays/befor...

613633