iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Charles Pletcher

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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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 28/09/2026

It's from Anubis: anubis.techaro.lol. The branding is obviously sub-optimal, but it was the most straightforward way to keep Scaife running in the face of floods of bot traffic. (We tried other options — the bots kept outpacing us.)

anubis.techaro.lol

Anubis: Web AI Firewall Utility | Anubis

Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests to protect your website!

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 21/09/2026

Another first-gen/son of a mechanic chiming in. It’s often surreal and lonely trying to figure out what people are talking about/the expectations of the professoriate while also acknowledging the privileges I’ve enjoyed. I haven’t figured it out yet

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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

(I'm debating adding a toggle to show the heatmap by token, but heatmap-by-line seems to be more interpretable—and it looks nicer.)

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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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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/06/2026

So they asked Claude to find “evidence,” and the LLM — trained to please — did what it was made to do. 🤦‍♂️ The admission of confirmation bias is so brazen it’s almost impressive

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on.

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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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Reposted by Charles Pletcher

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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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

Oh bummer — I’m not seeing them now either Basically 3.5 pages of names of manuscripts that the editors consulted when compiling this edition Although it doesn’t deal with recension specifically, James Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea” is a fun read that touches on tangentially related topics

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

Exactly — here’s the list of sources for the OCT Odyssey, which might itself be considered an edition of the original

First image of the OCT Odyssey recension

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

… and translators, especially ones as good as Wilson, and sometimes opt for variants that disagree with the critical text put forward by editors I can check the stemma in my OCT, but any original is still in flux even now — less so than in the Renaissance, sure, but still

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

Okay, cool — that is also a complicated question. I checked Wilson’s intro and translator’s note but don’t see a citation; I suspect, though, that the Oxford Classical Text and maybe Teubner supplied most of the “original” here. But even those originals have ample critical apparatuses …

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally transmitted orally 500 years or so before they were transcribed. “Original” is at best a helpful shorthand for the Homeric sources

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

To misquote Borges, “No hay tal [texto] de conjunto,” especially when it comes to Homer

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

This is a loaded question. The *written* versions we have are generally medieval or later, with some long-ish fragments in ancient papyri. Earlier written versions existed, though, probably as early as 700ish BCE

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/04/2026

They used it for a reading response where they had a particularly visceral reaction (it was tool criticism week — the readings resonated with a lot of students) I should clarify that by “not using AI much,” I only mean in this class — not sure how their use looks in other classes

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/04/2026

This is my first semester allowing it for Intro DH, but I require a citation and a full transcript of their AI use. So far one student has provided a citation + transcript on one assignment Not to be naive, but it seems like students are honest and just not using AI much

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/04/2026

I like this analogy. I guess the question is how expensive (across various metrics etc.) we want our rubber ducks to be — and I think it’s fair if we all answer that question individually

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 11/04/2026

Didn’t Socrates and Phaedrus have this discussion a long, long time ago? Not trying to be flippant, but I’m not yet convinced that LMs are anything other than the latest iteration of “scrolls up our sleeves” — ie, I’m not convinced they can say anything that hasn’t already been said

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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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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 02/04/2026

“Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80” — okay, we need to suspend business schools and nullify MBAs until we can figure out what’s going on

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 18/03/2026

Totally naive on my part, but could it be the multilingualism? I.e., as you point out, shock jocks and other media need to diversify linguistically, so Canada doesn’t get the same concentration of auth-pop juice that flows through, e.g., Murdoch outlets (or their equivalents outside the anglosphere)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 06/03/2026

I’ve often wondered how strongly the prevalence of this “common sense” correlates with the rise of business schools and business majors — to say nothing of the insidiousness of Chicago-school economics as a way of valuing any/everything

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Reposted by Charles Pletcher

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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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 26/01/2026

And the way that Morrison does this by explicitly linking the song to Homeric epic (her Classics background + importance of oral history in the novel) and “flight” to katabasis (Odyssey 11 and Aeneid 6, or R. F. Kuang more recently) is just perfect (I think about this maybe too much)

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

Can’t help but feel that @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social’s “Elite Capture” is relevant here, as a concept and as a text—esp. ch. 3 (not to put too fine a point on it) “Being in the Room”

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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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