iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

When I'm not in the Netherlands, I feel like this book must feel: I'm not preposterously large, everything else is unreasonably small!

000

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

How does wrestling with AI to write poetry teach us about AI in Education? Good question! I spent more time trying to figure that out this year than I should have. But I sure am happy with the results. (What do you think?) mindwise-groningen.nl/experimentin...

mindwise-groningen.nl

Experimenting with AI and poetry | Mindwise

021

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I just made a donation to the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. Will you join me in supporting one of the discipline's gems? #HistPsych www.uakron.edu/chp/support/

uakron.edu

Support the Center

030

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The 50th anniversary of Hofstadter's GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach) is coming up in 2029. Has anyone started planning any events, books, or special issues?

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Sometimes I disagree with my colleagues that our students need evermore training in quantitative methods. Because I think there are valuable insights to be had from basic exposure to history, theory, and qualitative methods too. But okay: everyone begins with "correlation does not imply causation."

230

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Archival research is such fun. And it's so valuable. But travelling to the archives themselves, and staying in a hotel, can be extremely expensive. As budgets are being cut, this becomes evermore difficult to manage. So I thought I would ask: which archives do you know provide digitization services?

120

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

I used the word "moreover" in my history of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology as seen from the perspective of his American patron: the Rockefeller Foundation. That was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. I also used it in my PhD, my MA, and my HonBSc theses research.rug.nl/en/publicati...

120

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Been chatting with colleagues about AI's use of water. It seems mainly to be a problem where water is scarce: if humans have to compete for drinking water, then contracts might conceivably cause serious problems. So where is water scarce? See this: "England 2055" www.surrey.ac.uk/sites/defaul...

surrey.ac.uk

020

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

"Drawing on a corpus of over 15,000 scholarly articles published between 1800 and 2024, we map the linguistic landscape of eugenics in scholarly discourse to reveal its institutional, scientific, and sociopolitical entrenchment" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

dl.acm.org

Echoes of Eugenics: Tracing the Ideological Persistence of Scientific Racism in Scholarly Discourse | Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimiza...

04316

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Important #archive news: "750,000 pages of transcripts, briefs and evidence exhibits from across the total of 13 cases, which between 1945 and 1949 were brought against Nazi military and political leaders held responsible for atrocities against humanity" #history www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

theguardian.com

Nuremberg trial records made available online after painstaking 25-year project

Launch of digitisation project marks 80th anniversary of start of legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

One of my students "mispronounced" the name of @anthropic.com's LLM today, and it sounded so right that I immediately wondered if it wasn't exactly what they intended all along. What do you think? "Cloud"

000

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

A prof I liked in another department once invited me to TA for their course on "the scientific revolution." Delighted, I laughed and said, "which one?" Their reply has haunted me for nearly twenty years: "That's cute. But it only goes to show that you don't know as much as I thought you did."

240

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

In last night's vivid dream, I was at SNL pitching a skit for Antony Starr: Homelander is interviewing Vought staff about their loyalty, and tells one of them to eat a basketball. I then demonstrate. First by deflating it. Then by nibbling at the seams. All the producers look horrified: "Yes!"

media.tenor.com

a man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched ..

Alt: A man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched, and flies over an adoring crowd

000

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist,
When and Where
Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm
Music Room (218)
Goldring Student Centre
150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom

27938

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

On Friday, I asked a question at LinkedIn about what everyone is doing with their writing assignments to respond to the crisis of AI in education. By yesterday afternoon, it was a fully worked-out invitation to share anchored in my own experiences. What say you? mindwise-groningen.nl/inviting-tho...

mindwise-groningen.nl

Inviting thoughts about AI in education | Mindwise

000

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Germany's far-right "remigration" movement is probably giving a preview of future Republican rhetoric in the US. For those with an interest in such things, this report is worth watching. It's from the German public state-owned international broadcaster: Deutsche Welle (DW). youtu.be/MOrTIB8JVe8?...

youtu.be

The dilemma that could test the AfD's rising popularity | DW News

YouTube video by DW News

020

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

11341482054

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

I am not ready for it to be September. I am, however, ready for it to be July. Who do I speak to about this inconsistency?

072

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

The Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University invites applications for a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of “Science, Technology, and Governance.” #HPS #STS #PhilJobs academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30301

academicjobsonline.org

Cornell University, Society for the Humanities

Job #AJO30301, WDR-00046364 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science and Technology Studies, AY 2026-2028, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US

06451

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

The archive where I'm working for the next two weeks has the largest single collection I've ever heard of: 15 shelf-kms! That's almost 50,000 linear feet!! (It's the complete property records going back to the 1820s for the entire province of Noord-Holland, which includes Amsterdam.)

A light skinned man with white hair and beard, and glasses, studies intently without realising that he has accidentally taken his own picture while putting down his phone

130

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

19451751429

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

The meaning of "presidential" has been so debased from what Jed Bartett preached that this now sounds like folksy charm

000

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

When I lived in the middle of nowhere, and the electricity would fail regularly and often (sometimes for many hours), I just went and got a back-up power supply. But how do you do the equivalent with these pseudo-cognitive tools that people are starting to rely on? www.forbes.com/sites/callum...

forbes.com

ChatGPT Went Down—And The Internet Freaked Out

ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, suffered an outage earlier today—and that sent social media into a whirlwind of worried action.

110

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Brepols @brepols.net · 30/06/2025

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝟭𝟬 (𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰) 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀, 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 More info: bit.ly/3Gcfe3b #History #Psychology #Science #Medicine #Historysky #Psychologsky

031

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

The first ever "Three Societies Meeting" has ended. It was wonderful to bring together so many scholars and friends to discuss the history of psychology, the history of the behavioral and social sciences, and the history of the human sciences. Let's not wait another sixty years to do it again!

In what felt like record-setting heat, The representatives from the Three Societies (ESHHS, Cheiron, and SHP) open the proceedings at the American Church in Paris

Thoughts, reminiscences, and thank yous at the dinner

Dr Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, president of the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association), speaks about AI and education—and his research in digital history that spans the gap between them

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Look, this is really getting serious: I need you all to stop publishing such interesting books. I simply can't afford to buy them all. And anyway, I've run out of shelf space. Both at home and at the office. So, please: stop being so clever! (Take a vacation without bringing your laptop!!)

040

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Lisa Haushofer @haushoferl.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

🚨Salaried PhD position in history of medicine at the University of Zurich with the wonderful @fcondrau.bsky.social 🚨 (ignore the 60%, this is just the Swiss system, and amounts to a very respectable pay) #histmed #histstm jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

jobs.uzh.ch

UZH: Assistant History of Medicine

The History of Medicine Group within the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Zurich, led by Professor Flurin Condrau, seek...

14328

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Can someone who knows Husserl please explain how this index entry refers to a page that isn't contained within the book? This is from the English translation of Husserl's (1948/1973) "Experience and Judgment." The book ends on page 443. What I want is on page 521. (How?)

An excerpt of the index from the English translation of Husserl's (1948/1973) "Experience and Judgment." The entry for genetic construction of logic is highlighted, and given on page 521. But the book ends on page 443.

121

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

The readings for my Monday lecture talk extensively about mirror neurons. But the book I'm using was written during the period of hype. Does anyone have a favorite "critical" text that could help me bring the students back to earth? (I want them to be excited, but not *too* excited.)

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Yes. Please do this. It improves a bad day, and can even make up for a frustrating week

050

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

The piece I linked to in the thread is the sequel, using archival history, to an earlier quantitative (digital) history. That's linked here. My broader idea is that there are invisible influences which inform our thinking: the water we swim in that we can't see. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

120

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

This is p. 111 of "Rewriting the soul." From chapter 7: "measure." Hacking, I. (1998). Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University Press. Hacking also wrote several important articles and books about statistics and probability directly.

120

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Why are there no Starter Packs for the History and Philosophy of Maths or Logic? That would make my life so much easier. (Does anyone study the Dutch intuitionists in Brouwer's tradition? Or that same school after Mannoury took over? Y'know: the originators of Synthese and the Synthese Library?)

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

"Norway... will axe a controversial law that requires PhD students... to undertake mandatory Norwegian language training. The move follows a backlash from scientists, who argued that the language stipulation... would create substantial barriers to recruiting... talent" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Norway set to scrap mandatory language training for foreign postdocs and PhD students

Researchers jubilant over swift ministerial response to rule they say would hamper international recruitment.

010

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

In case you were wondering, Twitter seems to be down more often than it's up these days

010

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Kristina Killgrove @killgrove.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

We updated our 2023 story given the announcement today of new evidence and new peer reviews regarding purposeful burial in H. naledi. 🧪🏺

livescience.com

A 'landmark finding': Homo naledi buried their dead 250,000 years ago, according to newly updated research

Controversial claim that Homo naledi buried its dead gets new proof from 2025 research study.

316146

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Kim TallBear @kimtallbear.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

A dear feminist science studies mentor passed on March 5. Have a good journey Sandra Harding. ❤️ Harding was UCLA Distinguished Professor Emerita of Education and Gender Studies, former Director of the Center for the Study of Women. Link is an oral history interview with Sandra on her career.

digital.sciencehistory.org

Oral history interview with Sandra Harding

Sandra Harding was born in San Francisco, California, the first of five children born to Lloyd and Constance Harding. Her father's struggle to find work during the Great Depression led the family to L...

21834209

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

If this is what the market will bear for PhD-level work, then we're all owed a raise

060

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Julia Gebke @juliagebke.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Fantastic news for all #earlymodern #skystorians: Next week, the Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures 2025 will take place in Vienna with Prof. Lorraine Daston, hosted by the CEU. The leitmotiv of the lecture series: Diversity. And the best: you can also attend online. www.ceu.edu/article/2025...

Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, Opificio delle Petre Dure, Florence. A wooden display cabinet stuffed with wonders and curiosities: corals, images, beetles, a skull etc.

07342

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

UK #PubDay for HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY @ucpress.bsky.social! In 6 #podcast episodes I talk about how monsters and monster-making shaped the origins of the modern world. H/t @sebfalk.bsky.social for photo! 1/🧵 💙📚 🧪🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury #politics #HAMH

Rows of books in a bookstore bookshelf, some with little cards containing handwritten reviews.

Bright red book cover showing: an oval, silver-coloured mirror with a black frame comprised of sci-fi and fantasy monsters, with yellow lettering for the title, “HUMANS”, around the top of the mirror, in a stylized font with details that resemble whale-tails and bats’ wings. Subtitle just inside the mirror: A Monstrous History. Inside the bottom curve of the mirror: Surekha Davies. Along the left-hand edge of the cover crawls a xenomorph: a humanoid creature with an insect-like head and a long, sinuous, menacing, pointy tail.

1369

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

English is the second language of Europe. But although fluency has increased since 2012 among 55+, it's spoken mainly—and increasingly—by young people (under 35). This enhances the EU's "freedom of movement" (Art 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU). www.brusselstimes.com/1464390/euro...

A graph of second languages spoken "well or very well" in Europe, comparing 2012 with 2024, for English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian

030

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

I would have spelled it with a K. But otherwise, no notes.

020

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

"Section 31" is the worst of Star Trek. The producers seem only to have watched "Wrath of Khan" and a couple of episodes of Discovery as prep. As a result, it felt disconnected from Canon. New aliens with levels of technology surpassing both the Borg and Species 8472? Before TNG! (Do some research!)

010

Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Tim Hitchcock @timhitchcock.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Really looking forward to giving a paper on 'Mapping criminal justice in 18th century London', tomorrow @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome either in person or online, but please register at www.history.ac.uk/events/mappi...

history.ac.uk

Mapping Criminal Justice at London's Old Bailey, 1720-1820: From the Night Watch to Proactive Policing

04518