iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Say hello to BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art): basiraproject.org #medievalsky --------------- Video by Emily Brooks Music by J.D. Porter Narration by Iris Péron-Ames

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Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Canine conversations in a Ferial psalter (Ms. Codex 1057, fol. 16r) #medievalsky 🔗: bit.ly/4yp8hl7

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Laura Morreale @lauramorreale.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Excited to report on some work I did with @sims-mss.bsky.social & some tough-to-read but very rewarding historical sources. Come hear me talk about transcription tools now at our disposal, & what is required to use them (hint: it's not computer fairy dust...) www.library.upenn.edu/events/schoe...

library.upenn.edu

Using Handwritten Text Recognition for Rich and Abundant Historical Source Collections: The Case of Medieval Italian Financial Records

Laural Morreale (Independent Scholar) will describe how to train Handwritten Text Recognition models to read difficult sources like the Italian financial records and will outline the costs, potential ...

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bubbe yaga @ellearmageddon.bsky.social · 18h

a cool thing about being wrong and changing your mind is, once you do it you’re not wrong anymore

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Ray Newman @raynewman.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

That time someone dumped a toy house on the cemetery wall and, when I crouched a bit, some ✨ Hollywood Magic ✨ occurred.

A plastic dolls house sitting on a wall, taken from an angle which makes it look as if it might be one of the houses on the street.

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Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

"Whereas the AI users got answers wrong or gave up entirely when the AI assistance was withdrawn, the group without AI stuck with the task and were more successful at the end."

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Dorothy Berry @dorothyjberry.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

AI doesn't "bring the archive to life" or to even "show what this looked like in color." The medium is the message, in the sense that there is never life in a photo, there is a material object with artifacts that memorialized technology as much as any moment. It's all more imagination avoidance

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Lisounours @lise-l.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Ils étaient mi-cerf mi-escargot, et re mi-cerf derrière

Image de deux cerfs allongés devant des rouleaux de foin

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Prosanta Chakrabarty @prosanta.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Natural history museums are at an inflection point that started with the auctioning of dinosaurs. If Fort Hays State (Sternberg) or Drexel (Acad.Nat.Sci.) think they can monetize collections (i.e., sell natural history specimens); museums become safety deposit boxes instead of research institutes.

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Our NEH grant to continue development of VCeditor, which had been rescinded by DOGE, has been reinstated! So that's good. More information about that coming soon...

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Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Tomorrow at Noon EST, in her talk in the series From the Kislak Stacks curator @leoba.bsky.social will use two recent acquisitions to discuss critical making and how Kislak collections can inspire creativity. Register here: bit.ly/4yI5aVA #medievalsky #DHMakes

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Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

#MedievalSky This from the New York Times, minutes ago: "Has plague ever been used as a bioweapon? Maybe — but it’s been a while. In the 14th century, according to one account, a Mongol army catapulted plague-infested bodies into the Crimean city of Caffa." Please don't let this nonsense persist!

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 05/10/2026

Exactly this. And in fact, many models *have* been created this way, and decades of prior machine learning systems *were* created this way, consensually. These things are choices! People are STILL working this way! It’s not just that a better world is possible — it already EXISTS. We can nurture it.

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blair @blairaf.com · 04/10/2026

Some marginalia from my full reading of the Pope's Encyclical on AI this morning: - AI does not love - AI does not intrinsically value truth or justice - AI does not experience hunger - AI does not experience communion with the natural world or any sort of higher power

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'd just yell at them about medieval manuscripts and how amazing they are

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Things I said while watching this included "where is this woman's advisor," "I'm pretty sure labs at Stanford have sinks," and "how does she not know he is the [spoiler]???" (also THAT'S NOT HOW CONFERENCES WORK) BUT it's fantasy, it was cute, and I'm not gonna complain tooooooooo much.

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Dorothy Berry @dorothyjberry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I'll never understand how "a lot of mostly/potentially/probably incorrect metadata is better for digital discovery than accurate but sparse metadata" became a popular idea than "we will put things online more slowly, but we will do it with accuracy"

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

An interesting report of a project at the Hertziana includes this note. I would argue that access to historical archives is actually hindered when you throw chat at something to transcribe handwritten metadata, which produces errors. But let's say you're willing to make this compromise. +

The second axiom of Nygren / Drimmer 2023 has been considered carefully, and although the folder transcriptions are sometimes erroneous, they still support the access to images better than the previously available, unreadable OCR data. The known issues in those transcription are then taken care of continuously.

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Leonie V. Hicks @lvhicks.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

You might have heard me mention that 2027 is the European year of the Normans and @britishlibrary.bsky.social is now advertising its major exhibition for that. Think of it as the sequel to the excellent Anglo-Saxon ehibition several years ago. events.bl.uk/exhibitions/... #medievalsky 1/

events.bl.uk

Conquest: The Making of Norman England | British Library

Beyond the battlefield lies a story of ambition, upheaval and reinvention. Spanning the generations before and after 1066, this exhibition traces the impac

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

now THAT is worth moving to Cleveland for 😍

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads:

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

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Christopher Hale @christopherjhale.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

“Human beings are called to be co-workers in the work of creation, not merely passive consumers of content generated by artificial technology.” — Pope Leo XIV

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I don't remember this but I am not surprised at all, at all (and I see you posted the study so I'm going to download it now!)

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Dr Hannah M. Rowland @hannahmrowland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago

I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &everything.

Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861

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Erin L. Thompson @artcrimeprof.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I HAVE A COVER! And a pub date - July 6, 2027! If you want six true stories of antiquities fraud, from a California college convinced that Hong Kong tourist trinkets were worth millions, to an entire fake museum, to the titular mummy carved from styrofoam, preorder at www.amazon.com/Styrofoam-Mu...

Cover of the book The Styrofoam Mummy https://www.amazon.com/Styrofoam-Mummy-Tales-Antiquities-Market/dp/1324035870

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Good read by @leifw.bsky.social on the problems of anthropomorphizing AI and obscuring human agency: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...

The reason this matters is that such anthropomorphic terms give us no ability to predict how the models will behave. Saying that models are “cheating” when they provide answers in the “wrong” way implies they are operating — or can operate — beyond the limits of human control. This, in turn, allows everyone to write off the accountability that clearly lies with the humans in charge of the process. In other industries, we might say that the companies in question committed a crime. The unusual thing here is that the companies are drawing a lot of attention to this fact.

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

you will encounter more opportunities in life to change the batteries on a smoke alarm than you will to run into a burning building and no one gives a shit you changed those batteries but it is still very important and why are you waiting on a burning building, know what i’m saying, it’s a metaphor

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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I'm gonna need a dozen guys and some motorbikes.

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 25/09/2026

My colleague Carson Koepke has been laser-cutting different woods for printing the full deck of this late-medieval tarot set @skeuomorphpress.org Today we tested a small plate for an upcoming event @illinoisrbml.bsky.social, printing on our Book Beetle—from @josefbeery.bsky.social—it looks great!

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I’ve been writing and speaking on this topic for years, and I’m glad that news media are finally drawing attention to it. www.salon.com/2026/07/28/t...

It may be tempting to see value in projects such as the Schmidt Foundation — that’s Eric Schmidt of Google — funding a fellowship in AI at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Musk Foundation’s support of the Scroll Prize to use AI in reconstructing ancient texts in the burnt scrolls of Herculaneum. But these projects are simply two among countless others that have been seeding AI into museums and historical research for well over a decade. Even more egregious is the case of AI companies buying and destroying rare books en masse in the process of scanning them for data. In the context of the dire austerity we are witnessing, the juggernaut of tech money seems impossible to resist.

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Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

On Monday we held our second History of Text Technologies workshop - writing with quills! We looked at manuscripts, mostly in Carolingian script, and talked about paleography, ink, and scribal practice. Then we tried it on our own! Find out more about the HTT series here: bit.ly/4rglCcE

Photo of two students writing with quills!

Photo of a sheet of paper with fancy writing on it. The first few lines have a few random words and letters written on them. Next is written "The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog" and the next four lines read "Andrew Duncan Donuts" "Jeff Joehnk" "Rosie Kins" and "Bonnie Kins"

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Lisa Fagin Davis @lisafdavis.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is a great opportunity to apply for funding to attend @rarebookschool.bsky.social! You might even apply for a scholarship to attend my Fragmentology class next summer...

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The Price Lab @pricelab.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Next Monday at our Digital Humanities Seminar series: @leoba.bsky.social will speak about how #DHMakes has inspired the work she's doing with @sims-mss.bsky.social in the Vitale II Lab for Book History and Digital Humanities. Lunch will be served!

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Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

If you are in or around Philly, come hear me talk about the work I'm doing at @sims-mss.bsky.social , inspired by #DHMakes! Free lunch! Don't miss it - next week at @pricelab.bsky.social on Tuesday, 12pm-1:30pm. pricelab.sas.upenn.edu/events/dot-p...

pricelab.sas.upenn.edu

Price Lab for Digital Humanities

The Price Lab is the University of Pennsylvania's center for innovative uses of technology in the study and teaching of history, art, and culture.

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Lisa Fagin Davis @lisafdavis.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Are you #TeamScroll or #TeamCodex when it comes to texts with genealogical diagrams? Join me and @leoba.bsky.social on Thursday as we resolve this burning question once and for all! (hint: read my recent article if you want to know which team I'm on! muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...)

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If you're a Dem who thinks you'll gain something by going anti-trans, look at Gallup's "most important problem" and Fox News' "most important issue" polling and see where trans issues rank. Whoever told you going anti-trans is a savvy or necessary move spends too much time on X and should be fired.

Gallup polling. "LGBTQ rights" moves between 0 and 1%.

Fox news polling. Wokeness/transgender issues at 0%.

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Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies @sims-mss.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, September 19, 1984, Former U. S. President Gerald Ford was stuck in an elevator in the Van Pelt Library at UPenn. Was there a medieval manuscript stuck in the elevator with him? Probably not, but we can dream. #medievalsky

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Ennius @enniusredloeb.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yom Kippur in 2026 begins at sunset on 20th September. Here is Jonah being swallowed by the fish, at the text of Jonah, the haftarah for the afternoon service of Yom Kippur. Bodleian Library, MS Kennicott 1; 'The Kennicott Bible'; 1476 CE; La Coruña, Spain; f.305r @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

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