iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Digital Tolkien Project @digitaltolkien.com · 29/09/2026

I haven't checked yet if there's CLDF data I can already use. I know @clyde.eurosky.social is playing around with Celtic in Asterisk.

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Reposted by James K. Tauber

Search HoMe now reports P-text search hits with page numbers. home.digitaltolkien.com/search/

home.digitaltolkien.com

Search HoMe

Look up the citation reference for a passage or see the distribution of terms and phrases

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A workbench for comparative philology.

ICYMI, Asterisk recently gained: - CLDF import / export (suggested by @philaut.bsky.social) - explicit dark/light mode toggling (suggested by @lodomerian.com) - a symbol palette for hard-to-type characters (suggested by @clyde.eurosky.social) asterisk.jtauber.com

asterisk.jtauber.com

Asterisk

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Reposted by James K. Tauber

Tolkienista @tolkienista.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This e-book brings together ten articles by researchers and scholars of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, written in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings, a milestone commemorated in 2024 and 2025.

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Reposted by James K. Tauber

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

cls-lab.com

CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder

The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.

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it still baffles me that people are confident enough to say "will never"

Okay, an explicit theme switcher is now there! As to where it goes next, let me know what you'd like to see!

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light mode is supported but it's automatic based on your browser/OS preference and can't be explicitly yet so let me add that.

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Some descriptive grammars will distinguish the "generic" they: "they say it's bad luck..." from the "corporate" or "institutional" they: "they are closing the road next week" (where the referent is likely known but just not stated). Are you just asking about the first use?

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As I said, I don't expect the average person to know how reliable Falcon 9 has been. And I think it's largely the media's fault that an experimental rocket failure is reported as if it were an actual mission. But I would expect people posting about NASA to know about Challenger and Columbia.

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Thinking that NASA solved rocket safety fifty years ago is pretty ignorant, in my opinion.

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Being ignorant of Falcon 9’s success is one thing, as is not realizing starship is still experimental. But thinking NASA hasn’t had any accidents?

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After a starship explosion once, a very popular post here suggested “didn’t NASA solve this 50 years ago?” and I still can’t fathom how ignorant of the history of spaceflight you’d have to be to say something like that.

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Obsidian for notes. Zotero just for the referencing. ZotLit integrating the two.

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livrosabertos.abcd.usp.br

This wonderful book of Tolkien scholarship (available for free as PDF) is now available. I was honoured to be invited to write the foreword. www.livrosabertos.abcd.usp.br/portaldelivr...

Down from the door where it began: 70 years of the Lord of the Rings | Portal de Livros Abertos da USP

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I hope it will prove useful for trained scholars but I can't really be a good judge of that :-) I would gladly accept any Celtic data you put together. Note that Asterisk can now import CLDF directly from GitHub.

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Yes, I've thought about conlang use cases (although there are more existing tools for conlangers than comparative philologists I think)

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I will definitely work on improving that! Definitely keep giving me feedback on what would make your work easier!

CLDF import/export is now supported in Asterisk

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You should also subscribe to the Text and Language Lab channel too :-)

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Will Sherwood @willsherwood.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Congratulations my friend!

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Reposted by James K. Tauber

I'm thrilled and proud to announce that I completed and submitted my PhD thesis on #Tolkien and British #Romanticism this morning. What an incredible start to a sunny week! Now, does anyone have any jobs for someone with extensive teaching experience?! Time to put this knowledge to good use!

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ICYMI, a short video about my doctoral research...

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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Just for the cognate lists, of course. They don't have a sound change format, right?

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Reposted by James K. Tauber

Want to play with corpora of the French 3rd Republic ? Want to join a nice team ? Want to do something else than LLM and have fun with smaller models as well ? Want to work with people in the humanities and the digital humanities ? Well, this might be for you 😄: jobs.inria.fr/public/class...

jobs.inria.fr

NLP Post-doc / Engineer for Information Mining in Historical Data (French 3rd Republic)

Offre d'emploi Inria

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Etymograph actually reminded me a bit of eldamo :-)

Text and Language Lab @textandlanguagelab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Reposted by James K. Tauber

Our new research paper by Katrin Rohrbacher @katrohrbacher.bsky.social, Björn Nieth, Emmanuelle Salin , Bjoern Eskofier, and Michaela Mahlberg @michamahlberg.bsky.social, in a nutshell, accepted at #EMNLP2026 Read the full paper here: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.02482

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Yes, and if people would find it interesting, I’ll support it.

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Initial extraction was automated but as my ultimate goal is pedagogical, I plan to review them manually. I also want to better support competing proposals. The current Germanic rules are from Fulk but I want to add Ringe too. I’d love to have a shared format!

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Plus machine-actionable description of Tolkien’s invented languages has been a goal of @digitaltolkien.com from the beginning!

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I would love to talk more about this given we’re both dual-classing being software developers and linguistic researchers 😀

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I’m decoupling the data and tutorials so they can be developed further independent of the app itself.

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The coding itself is all agentic but a lot more hand-holding by me than would be normal for “vibe-coding”.

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It’s just VanillaJS hosted on GitHub. I’m trying to make it as data-driven as possible so new language families can be added, new tutorials written and localized.

one of my classes is undergraduate only; the other is both. It'll be my first time teaching undergrad in 28 years :-)

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In fact, the "getting in" part always stood out for me about the US. In Australia and the UK, it never occurred to me I wouldn't get in to the programme I was applying for.

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I will have a lot less contact each week with my students and I get the impression they are expected to be more independent. Some videos I've watched suggest that, while it's much easier to get into a university in Germany (compared in particular with the US), it's harder to pass.

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And now that I'm about to *teach* in Germany, I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos telling foreign students what's different about Germany so I can play along.

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adding some Romance data but I will definitely want someone to check it :-)

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So far I've studied in Australia, UK, US, and now in Germany and I've had to reset my mental model of higher education every time.

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Let me know if you have any feedback. And I absolutely will add Celtic! I'm making it easier for people to contribute data too, which is important as my training (such as it is) has really only been Ancient Greek and Germanic.

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Love that you have Quenya and Sindarin too. That is, of course, something I'm wanting to include in Asterisk :-)

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