iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Perseus Digital Library has been hard at work on Minimum Viable Perseus (Perseus MVP). Designed as a static site and heavily inspired by the beloved but faltering P4 (and its awesome users), please check out our efforts here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates) and try it out: beta.perseus.tufts.edu

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Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

So it's been an eventful summer for the Perseus Digital Library! Please check out our latest blog post (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...) for some new information on ongoing P4 outages as well as two exciting new projects: MVP (Minimum Viable Perseus) and the Perseus Multitext Viewer!

sites.tufts.edu

Ongoing Perseus disruptions and future plans » Perseus Digital Library Updates

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 23/06/2026

I hope it's okay that I pulled this library in — it's much easier on the eyes than my off-the-cuff spectrum (live version: pletcher.github.io/ccc-2026-web...)

Screenshot of a heatmapped version of Sophocles' Electra, the Tutor's speech (ll. 680 ff.). The heatmap shows the averaged log likelihood of lemmata in epic (shades of red) vs. tragedy (shades of blue)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 20/06/2026

For an upcoming conference presentation: a heatmapped version of Greek tragedy to show how "epic" or "tragic" each line is (by averaging log likelihoods of lemmata appearing in each genre)—the Tutor's speech in S. Electra is particularly exciting to see in context pletcher.github.io/ccc-2026-web...

A by-line heatmap of "epic"-tinged words (shades of red) versus "tragedy"-tinged words (shades of blue). The text is the Tutor's speech in Sophocles' Electra.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 15/06/2026

Work in progress: quantifying work/register distinctiveness of lemmata in Homer. One interesting result: "god" [θεός] and "human" [ἄνθρωπος] are much more likely to appear in speech than in narrative. HT www.dices.uni-rostock.de (for speech references) and github.com/francescomam... (for treebanks)

Chart showing log-likelihood (x-axis) and relative frequency (y-axis) of differentiating lemmata in the Iliad and the Odyssey. While most lemmata cluster towards the center—indicating low affinity for either epic—key words like "Odysseus" and "Hektor" are both frequent and have a strong affinity for the Odyssey or the Iliad (respectively). Other strongly Odyssean words include "suitor," "guest/stranger," "great hall," "home," and "swineherd"; strongly Iliadic, "Achilles," "horse," "war," "battle (verb)," and "battle (noun)." (Calculations were performed on Greek lemmata, but I translate them here for readability.)

A chart showing the log-likelihood of speech versus narrative (x-axis) and relative frequency (y-axis) of lemmata in the Homeric epics. Words with strong narrative affinity (blue) include "proclaim," "speak," "go," "exchange," and "wingèd"; strong speech affinity, "evil," "guest/stranger," "know," "god," "human," and "home."

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Tom Coates @tomcoates.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

It’s weird that Helen of Troy being played by a black actress is a problem, but most of the rest of the Mediterranean, Greek and Turkish characters being played by incredibly fair and blond haired people of British, Irish and Scandinavian descent isn’t. And by weird, I mean entirely predictable.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 09/05/2026

I asked students to choose two Programming Historian (programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/) lessons beyond those assigned in class. So many lessons broken by Python and/or dependency updates—maybe we should prioritize platform stability? (I *love* PH; I do not love how frequently Python libs break)

programminghistorian.org

Lesson Directory | Programming Historian

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Hallie Rubenhold @hallierubenhold.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Scientists believe they have found previously unknown sketch of Anne Boleyn

A computer science team believes they have discovered a previously unknown sketch of King Henry VIII's second wife - but not everyone is convinced.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 06/04/2026

Related to my last post: has anyone taught a digital humanities class that banned student laptops? #digitalhumanities (is that hashtag the right bat signal?)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 06/04/2026

Revisited repl.it to evaluate using it to teach an Intro DH class. It’s nuts how AI enshittification (which is just three MBAs in a trench coat, i.e. standard mismanagement) has ruined a once-useful product. You can’t even start a REPL without being bombarded by prompts to use their chat agent 🫠

repl.it

Replit – Build apps and sites with AI

Build and deploy software collaboratively with the power of AI without spending a second on setup.

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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I mean, he's right that American defense strategy going forward is going to consist of subordinating ourselves to our traditional enemies in order to secure the subsidies to win internecine and domestic struggles.

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Also, the entire vocational case for <not> majoring in the humanities/liberal arts rests on approximately no data at all:

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Patrick J. Burns @diyclassics.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Announcing—LatinCy Readers v.1.0.2, i.e. LatinCy-powered corpus readers for Latin text collections. Quickly get sentences, lines, words annotated for lemma, POS, morphology, NER, etc. Supporting .txt, .xml, .tess, .conllu, and more. github.com/diyclassics/... #digiclass #nlproc

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Jeff Melnick @melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

The dj on the MIT station just went on a gorgeous tangent about how this semester he’s taking all liberal arts classes, and instead of asking him to reproduce established knowledge (as in most MIT courses) they push him to think about how he thinks. My Super Bowl MVP.

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Novelty Cistern @noveltycistern.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 16/12/2025

Excited to release the new minimal-computing Pausanias Reader in Progress: pausanias.opencommentaries.org/about (If you find an empty comment, that's the "in Progress" part) Enormous thanks to @eltonteb.bsky.social and the rest of Digital Periegesis team for their help with named entity linking!

pausanias.opencommentaries.org

A Pausanias Reader in Progress

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Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

I'm thrilled to report that the Perseus Digital Library has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Read more about our plans here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...). .

sites.tufts.edu

Perseus Digital Library Updates » News and announcements from the Perseus Digital Library

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Giulia Taurino @giuliataurino.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

I'm honored to be part of the team alongside @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social, @pnadelofficial.bsky.social, @charlespletcher.org, Lisa Cerrato, Gregory Nagy, Riccardo Strobino, Clifford Wulfman and Ph.D. candidates Sarah Abowitz and Si Wu.

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Giulia Taurino @giuliataurino.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 25/11/2025

Who “writes” an LLM-translated work of literature? Even if it isn’t a 1:1 copy, is an AI translation at scale just pure plagiarism? Any middle ground between stealing and creating new resources? (maybe relevant article: www.theguardian.com/books/2024/m... — Venuti probably relevant here too)

theguardian.com

AI translation: how to train ‘the horses of enlightenment’

Translation algorithms have greatly improved in recent years, but can they work on literature? Human practitioners of the art are not convinced

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 21/11/2025

This is how news/media got around for most of human history. Sophocles' _Women of Trachis_ provides something of a thought experiment in what happens when the traditional avenue for news delivery becomes unreliable (hint: it ain't good)

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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

From today's Chronicle of Higher Ed briefing. I am *never* an advocate of cutting programs. But I am curious to see if there will be the same type of "students aren't majoring in this, so let's cut the program" discourse around computer science as there always is for the arts and humanities.

But computer science is cratering. Four-year undergraduate enrollment in computer and information sciences plunged by 7.7 percent this fall — and it decreased almost twice as fast at the graduate level. The Clearinghouse data doesn’t say why, but it’s hard to ignore recent gluts of tech-company layoffs and questions about artificial intelligence taking coders’ jobs in a discipline that’s proven subject to ebbs and flows.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 05/11/2025

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom Zohran completely blew away: His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. You don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! Part of re-establishing norms is speaking like an adult.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 04/11/2025

The <?xml-model?> processing instruction found in many TEI documents—which never advanced past Working Group Note www.w3.org/TR/2012/NOTE... —breaks some XML parsers (Non-standard processing instructions cannot include the string "xml": www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-pi) So why are we still using it?

w3.org

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

the power of uh, reading books

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 01/11/2025

Cleaned up the previous sentence embeddings comparisons—cleaner calculation of similarity for tragedies, and now both charts use the same scale (in autumn hues 🍂) It makes sense that tragedies overall are v. similar, but their similarities alone don't explain the lower-right messenger cluster

A heatmap showing tragedies' semantic similarity (cosine similarity of sentence embeddings) over time. Is there some kind of Euripides effect in the lower-center-right?

A heatmap showing messenger speeches' semantic similarity (cosine similarity of sentence embeddings) over time.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 01/11/2025

I might need to update the original plot, but so far it's interesting to note that the messenger similarities don't seem to be a result of consolidation across tragedies, which remain quite distinct (at least from the perspective of sentence embeddings) #dh #ancmedsky

Heatmap showing each Attic tragedy's similarity to the others. There is a distinct dark diagonal of perfect similarity -- self-comparison -- but not much other highlighting, suggesting surprisingly differentiated semantics (on average)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 31/10/2025

So sentence embeddings of messenger speeches in Attic tragedy show a modest but notable bump in semantic similarity toward the end of the 5th century (see attached image) — generic consolidation, maybe, but why? #ancmedsky #dh

Heatmap showing similarities between sentence embeddings in Attic tragedy. The diagonal is self-comparison

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Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

sites.tufts.edu

Announcing a new release of the Perseus Art & Archaeology Artifact (A&A) Browser » Perseus Digital Library Updates

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 09/10/2025

Could I repurpose this for an upcoming Greek midterm? Give students a ChatGPT- or Claude-translated passage (that we have translated in class) and ask them the same question(s)

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM. Hope this helps

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

i agree. there's something very dostoyevskian about how the modern sources of terror don't seem to be formally ideological but just seem to be purely postmodern terror, causing terror for the sake of terror

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Chris Rufo being an idiot about Leo Strauss:

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Connor Ewing @cmewing.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

10/10. Chef's kiss. No notes. 💯

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James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

*reading the great books* Yeah, you can see it right here in Sophocles. The point of Antigone was that Creon was too even-keeled. We should get a guy that is only id.

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

There’s an essay to be written about how the “conservative” movement that’s spent the past 90 years trying to undo the New Deal has embraced the New Deal’a aesthetic as its propaganda genre of choice for promoting its regressive, anti-worker policies.

U.S. Department of La... & • Follow 14h • G
Skilled Workforce, STRONG AMERICA!
APPRENTICESHIP.GOV
SKILLED WORKFORCE, STRONG AMERICA!

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Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Sovereign is he who decides the state of exception

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 15/08/2025

“Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball” 🏀

A small white dog sitting in the grass in front of a basketball court

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Greg Given @greggiven.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Any diagnosis of the problem that doesn’t clearly see the “lecturers” doing the grunt work as the *colleagues* whose research careers are already being sacrificed on the altar of Capital isn’t going to identify a path forward for the future of the academic humanities /5

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 14/08/2025

As preparation for the upcoming @dracor.org summit, I've been experimenting with how to visualize a dramatic network over time. Early results from a test case with Euripides' Andromache here: observablehq.com/@pletcher/ne...

observablehq.com

Networks in Euripides' Andromache

Visualizing interactions by line and type

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 01/08/2025

Private equity vultures have been circling Philz for a while, I guess, but it doesn't make this news any easier to read. (I have no nice things to say about PE, but I also don't have anything pithy-spicy to add.) missionlocal.org/2025/07/phil...

missionlocal.org

Philz Coffee close to closing deal to sell to private equity firm for $145 million

Employee stocks will be canceled as part of the deal; former employees point to culture change across Philz Coffee.

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

You kan not run educacioun lyke a businesse. A businesse ys ther to make a profit. Educacioun ys ther to make the future.

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