iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

@ox.ac.uk This is disgusting. I’m ashamed to be an alumna.

Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Christine Kooi @christinekooi.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"...calling a text extruded from an LLM a ‘history’ is, quite literally, a category error. There are far too many deliberations, choices, and cares in the production of a history for it to be something statistically generated, a mere algorithmic derivative." #NoAIintheclassroom #skystorians

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Just a normal day with normal infrastructure…

Paper taped chaotically to an elevator that reads “If door doesn’t open at destination, press ‘door open’” Door open is crossed out in pen and replaced with “pray”

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Archaeological Institute of America @archaeological.org · 14/09/2026

The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) is pleased to announce a $500,000 gift from Dr. Thomas H. Carpenter and Dr. Lynne C. Lancaster to establish the Thomas H. Carpenter and Lynne C. Lancaster Fellowships. Read the Press Release: buff.ly/ojZ28ge

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Had a long argument with a friend yesterday trying to explain all everything that this thread sums up nicely.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I’m going to spend the whole day writing my way out of this corner, all so I don’t have to cite Marcus Aurelius. Worth it.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

It was both wise and necessary to take a social media break this year, but I’m pleased to say that I got tenure, I’m working on my second book, and I’m furious about the state of the world and my country. 😊

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ᓚᘏᗢja @katjavannus.eurosky.social · 30/04/2026

“Examples include coins minted under Æthelred II (king of England from 978 to 1016), Cnut the Great (king of England, Denmark and Norway from about 1016 to 1035), and Otto III (the Holy Roman emperor from 996 to 1002).” Ik vind dat er dieren en kinderen vernoemd moeten worden. Æthelred, Cnut, Otto.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Teaching piracy is always a joy, but the class has taken to piratically signing off emails this year. Some gems: Being academically key-hauled, Mentally sinking my own ship, Wishing I was walking the plank, X did NOT mark the spot, Don't jump overboard, Passing out parrots and peg legs,

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I.T. Soon @isaactsoon.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I forgot to mention it’s free to access until December 9th! Download it now and read it later :)

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Oh, this is the *good* stuff! Especially when teaching World History, I find myself falling into this kind of trap all the time. This is such a good way to break down the way that even well intentioned summary can become oversimplification and end up feeding harmful systems beyond our classrooms.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Hey Homerists, What’s the convention with the suitors in the Odyssey? Are we capitalizing them? “The Suitors did X” or “The suitors did x”? I’ve now typed the word so many times it no longer looks like English. Help?

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Anise K. Strong @anisekstrong.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

I spend the whole dang first part of my career saying that comparisons between the modern United States and the late Roman Republic are often misleading and facile, and then...he just mints it right out...

Silver coin of Julius Caesar, which caused major controversy during his lifetime because only dead people were supposed to be on coins.

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Dr Crom @doccrom.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

#ReliefWednesday - In this relief, a decorative element from the funerary monument of an unknown cloth merchant, we see a Roman matron being shown a sample of fabric: ca. Mid 1st century AD. #Roman #Art 🏺 Image: Uffizi Gallery (Inv. 1914, No. 313). Link - uffizi.it/en/online-ex...

Roman relief of a shop scene: two shop assistants, observed by a supervisor, pull a fine fabric out of a container and show it to a couple seated on a bench to the right of the panel. Above them, cushions and fabrics hang from a pole set beneath the tiled roof of the shop.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I am SO out of here. I know these platforms always get greedy, but this is insane.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

This was a great conference and there is some really cool stuff in here, even for people who aren't numismatists, including important weights and measures work and graffiti on coins.

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 08/09/2025

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them: They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al.

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Pending last minute issues (always possible) the tenure portfolio is in and the waiting game begins. Such a weird feeling!

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Semesterly reminder that teaching is actually moderate aerobic exercise.

Screenshot of Fitbit app showing three “aerobic workouts” lasting between 18 and 42 minutes

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Candida Moss @candidamoss.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Excited to announce that after a lot of editorial work our volume "Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE - 300 CE" is out now. @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social @illdottore.bsky.social academic.oup.com/book/60683

Book cover. The background in sepia tones Showa man dictating to scribes. A cream box in the center has light brown writing that contains the title (Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean) and the words "Edited by Jeremiah Coogan, Candid R. Moss, and Jospeh A. Howley.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

#EpigraphyTuesday A nice, old law from the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

Broken and reconstructed stone stele, covered in a long Greek inscription

Museum description of previous photo. English portion reads: “Law of the Trojans against Tyranny. Marble. 3rd century BCE. Troy. Env. 3018 (T).
The presents which will be given to those who kill the tyrant and enemies of democracy were listed on the stele. He will immediately be given 1 silver talent, all kinds of his needs will be provided for a lifelong period by the government (pyrataneion), he will be appointed as the president of the games and paid 2 drachms every day as long as he lives.”

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

As an ancient historian, I struggle with the fact that most of the art I like is actually... my job? Tragic. Anyway, I'm trying to find some more-modern artists to appreciate. Bethany Peck (www.bethanypeckart.com) has been a favorite for a few years now, so I wanted to share her with you all.

bethanypeckart.com

Bethany Peck

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

There are so many parts of this I love: the mixture of agriculture and commerce(!), the ability to use social skills to influence your customers(!!!), integration of small scale exchanges with the macroeconomy (!!!!!). Ahhhhh!!!

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Gen AI lyke a stealthye vampyre doth hyde the corpses (texts) that it hath drained. Yn contrast, even the rankest act of publisshinge piracye at least doth move a booke ynto the handes of a reader. But Gen AI doth nevir cite sources or reveal the workes it hath plunderid. A solipsism moost vile.

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Joel @sentantiq.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

“Homer’s robots–like generative AI–don’t create anything new but, when pressed, can tell us a lot about what already is. Our adoption of technology from the industrial age through to the information age and the artificial intelligence age is following similar patterns.

joelchristensen.substack.com

Hephaestus' Golden Girls

What Can the Iliad Tell us About Artificial Intelligence?

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The Classics Library @theclassicslibrary.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Build your own Lego forum! #legolegislegit 🏺 #ClassicsBluesky #BlueskyClassics #AncientBluesky 🏛️ www.brickfanatics.com/lego-ideas-c...

A Lego version of part of a Roman forum.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Can I add a different kind of cock for #phallusthursday? We don’t have an animal day, do we? Anyway, have some cupids fighting roosters from the National Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. No animals were harmed in the taking of the photo… no promises about the ancient models, sadly ☹️

Marble statue of two cupids, each with a rooster, preparing to fight them.

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Dr Ella Hawkins @ellamchawk.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Things are about to get a bit ancient. I baked these biscuity sherds on a hemisphere cake tin in an attempt to recreate Ancient Greek pottery fragments in all three dimensions. The originals, dating from c.1600-435 BCE, can be found in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum.

A set of nine unevenly shaped biscuits arranged in a glass-lidded box. Each biscuit is curved and made to look like a fragent of ancient pottery. The base icing is in shades of orange, peach, and cream. Figures, swirls, repeating leaf patterns, and horses are painted onto the icing surface in black. The biscuits are aged with scratch marks and cracks.

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Alison Fisk @alisonfisk.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Happy #WorldBeeDay! 🐝 Silver tetradrachm coin minted in Ephesus, 390-380 BC. Photo Getty Museum #Archaeology

A silver tetradrachm (four-drachma coin) stamped in high relief on the obverse with a bee viewed from above, within a dotted border. Details include legs, wings, antennae, segmented abdomen and sting. The Greek letters, Ε (‘epsilon’) and Φ (‘phi’), an abbreviation of the name Ephesus, are placed either side of the bee. Diameter 7 mm.

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Reposted by Jane Sancinito

Isis Naucratis @isisnaucratis.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Paging archaeology + history peeps: "We are raising funds to support 12 History & Archaeology students at the Islamic University of Gaza so they can finish their degrees. Together, they owe approximately $12,790 USD in unpaid tuition. Without financial help, they will not be able to graduate"

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Dr Crom @doccrom.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Happy #BreadDay to all who celebrate! #OnThisDay - 19 April - someone in #Pompeii felt so excited that they just had to record that: "XIII K(alendas) Maias panem feci" (CIL IV 8972) 'On April 19, I made bread' Image: National Archaeological Museum, Naples (84596)

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Alison Fisk @alisonfisk.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

The first recorded strike in history took place almost 3,200 years ago! The ‘Strike Papyrus’ recounts that in year 29 of the reign of Ramesses III (c. 1157 BC) royal tomb workers at Deir el-Medina downed tools over pay and working conditions! Museo Egizio, Turin 📷 me #AncientBlueSky 🏺 #Archaeology

My photo shows the front side (recto) of an ancient Egyptian administrative document written by the scribe Amunnakht in hieratic script (cursive writing of hieroglyphics) using black ink on papyrus. The papyrus is now a mid-brown colour and is worn in places.

The document is known as the ‘Strike Papyrus’ and recounts that in November of Year 29 of the reign of Ramesses III, the royal tomb workers of Deir el-Medina stopped work for the first time and spent several days at the Theban necropolis in the temples of Tuthmosis III and Ramesses II. They demanded that the grain ratians for their work be distributed, and the authorities subsequently disbursed the grain rations. However, a few days later, the workers went on strike again, this time finding refuge in the temple of Seti I. Their refusal to retum to work stemmed fram the precarious working conditions, a situation they wanted to bring directly to the pharaoh. The last strike documented here was in January of the following year.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

#ancientbluesky and archaeology🏺folks, I'm trying to work with the mnrdigitale (mnrdigitale.cultura.gov.it) site and having no luck. Anyone else able to get it working? Am I using the wrong link or something?

mnrdigitale.cultura.gov.it

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

So I wrote a book. It wasn't the point I was making, but it could actually be used as a guide to be a less-terrible business person, if (for some STUPID reason) you feel you've GOT to emulate the Romans. Try it. Try being less terrible. Please. press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-...

press.umich.edu

The Reputation of the Roman Merchant

Roman merchants, artisans, and service providers faced substantial prejudice. Contemporary authors labeled them greedy, while the Roman on the street accused merchants of lying and cheating. Legally a...

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Steffan Ellis @gwentydd.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

A feature from a mid second century mosaic now in Rimini Museum. #mosaicmonday #rimini 📷 My photo

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

So many new photos from my recent trip to Italy, so I can participate in #mosaicmonday for a change! Here's a middling shot of the boar from House of Vesbinus (VIII. 2. 26).

Photo of mosaic floor. At center, a seated wild boar, surrounded by a geometric pattern.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Kind of obsessed with the Great Pottery Throw Down and delighted that they’ve done a take on Ancient Greek pottery. This one is charming. www.instagram.com/reel/DHOnsxX...

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Teaching on ancient glass today, so this was a timely find (thanks for sharing)! Gotta cover the adaptation of natural materials before we can get into all the later technological advances.

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Jane Sancinito @janesancinito.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Friendly reminder that Ramadan starts tonight and our Muslim students may need a little more support and grace as they observe their fast. Especially if you have afternoon or evening classes, please try to be aware and (ideally) flexible. Ramadan Mubarak!

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Yale University Press @yalepress.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire. Learn more at yalebooks.com.

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