iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Here I am on the banks of Lake Geneva, where I’ve traced a family with a fascinating story of anti-Nazi resistance. I also discovered an unlikely thread linking Hotel Lux to my new project. Some deep cut trivia for any Lux heads out there.

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If Lenin and Martov had the chance to chat things out while sharing one of these I guarantee you history would look much different

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Last night I had gelato so authentic that an Italian customer openly mocked my pronunciation of Stracciatella

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Thank you! It’s on 91 Rue de Carouge maps.app.goo.gl/DTv5sAedg6Md...

maps.app.goo.gl

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 31/08/2026

I’m in Geneva for research. Beautiful city. The address that housed the printing press of the Bolsheviks in Exile now does an excellent almond croissant. Layers of history, layers of pastry.

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For my Comintern history module next semester each student will be assigned an activist whose career they follow throughout the course. To liven up tutorials I've decided the Comintern activists will exist as trading cards.

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Gender & History Journal @genderandhistory.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Recovering a forgotten voice in the history of lesbian visibility and activism in Ireland, this new OA article by Maurice J. Casey explores the writings of Lorna Gulston and her place in the ‘homophile’ generation of activists. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #SkyHistorians #IrishHistory

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 24/08/2026

Just finished a week of research in Berlin on anti-Nazi resistance networks. Many discoveries but easily the most moving was this: A small paper flower a resistance organiser crafted in Luckau prison and included in a letter to his daughter – 1936

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 17/08/2026

My latest article — kindly shared and described here by Tom — exams a hitherto obscure bridging figure between the early 20th century Sapphic world and post 1968 queer activism in Ireland

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Tom Hulme @tomhulme.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A fun and provocative investigation by @mauricejcasey.com of the spread of international sexological ideas in Ireland through personal connections - dead and alive (!) - rather than institutions of the medical profession or state. Draws on archives across the world. academic.oup.com/hwj/article/...

academic.oup.com

‘I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America’: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, 1890s–1920s

Abstract. This article traces a transnational current of thinking on sexuality that flowed through Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 17/08/2026

My latest article — kindly shared and described here by Tom — exams a hitherto obscure bridging figure between the early 20th century Sapphic world and post 1968 queer activism in Ireland

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Peter Mandler @petermandler.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Going through some of my father's papers I came across - what in my professional life I'd tout as a great archival discovery - a letter from the (unrelated, and I think not Jewish) Mandlers who sponsored my father's and his family's visas to the US in 1939, out of the goodness of their hearts. (1/3)

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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

This is such a good piece by @jaseokundaye.bsky.social. Excuse the long extract in the screenshot, but these points are really important.

But what happens when an academic’s story is sold through him being the “youngest black ever” (sitting alongside familiar monikers such as “the first black” or “black excellence”) and asterisked by a tale of hardship? You are not encouraged or invited to engage with the substance of their scholarship; instead, you are invited to clap. Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”

What this means is that Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race: too few black students (in my cohort at Cambridge matriculating in 2015 there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students); single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. Independent of the merits or pitfalls of his own scholarship, what success looked like for Arday in this role was limited; what accountability could look like if misconduct occurred was constrained by him being a vehicle for Cambridge to signal its institutional progress.

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Certainly. It's complex enough that it definitely requires a paid contractor: a nice well-scoped gig for a Digital Humanities specialist.

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The key thing is that the research must enhance the "understanding of systemic risks in the European Union". I think this is relatively straightforward here: the research aims to prove there is a dispersal of humanities expertise outside of realms where it is most needed.

You're right! I didn't know about that pipeline. On first glance it seems to provide access to the right data. Yes, in theory this would work if someone had the time on their hands to propose a research project with the data and get it approved by LinkedIn.

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In short: creating the database of past departments (via automated search through the Wayback machine) is relatively easy. But the LinkedIn side is the bottleneck because that site has strong guards against automated behaviour.

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Nerd here! Not sure this is possible. A scraper would be blocked by LinkedIn and the API seems to be limited for this kind of data. You can search on LinkedIn by past company + current title but this would be laborious and requires knowledge of where people ended up. Could be wrong though!

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It reminds me of the great epiphany of my undergrad career when I first spent time in an archive. I was confronted with the dark alchemy of much academic writing: a world alive and rich is rendered spectacularly dull by culling all the fascinating details.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 03/08/2026

This piece by @joemoransblog.bsky.social is essential. Perfect reading ahead of an upcoming archival trip, where I will enjoy spending time immersed in a world 'almost incomprehensibly full of people and incident.'

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It’s a classic case of “it’s a shame they can’t both lose” (AI industry and predatory academic publishing) My hope would be out of this mess we could re imagine academic publishing entirely. Open Access does the term Open injustice. It’s a ransom scheme - pay us money and we will release it.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 03/08/2026

My fear is that the academic publishing industry will just mobilise our resistance to cut even more lucrative deals with AI companies to grant access to paywalled work. The beneficiaries of more stringent copyright on academic work are the publishers who already profit from publicly funded work.

Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 30/07/2026

Don't know why I find it cute that the Wiki icon for "Individualism" is just this one dude

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 30/07/2026

Such a project must begin with the masters of the form

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 29/07/2026

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason. Originally printed in the US in 1976, but this page is from the preface of the updated 1984 edition that came out with Penguin in the UK.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 28/07/2026

“The architect of the German V-2 rockets, Werner von Braun, entitled his autobiography ‘I Aim for the Stars’. Londoners, however, will remember that he usually hit London” Easily the most stone-cold zinger I’ve encountered all year.

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I spent last Friday absorbed by Weizenbaum’s 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason. Much of it is prescient: “Decisions made by the general public about emergent technologies depend much more on what the public attributes to such technologies than what they actually are or can and cannot do”

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Weizenbaum also warned (in the 1970s!) that the metaphors computer scientists used to understand computation were escaping the lab and being misunderstood as actual intelligence. Today ‘deep learning’ is misconstrued as a synonym for profundity. But it means deeper layers of software architecture

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This follows precisely from what Weizenbaum noted when he created the first chat bot ELIZA in the mid 1960s: ‘extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people’

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Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic

This was excellent, I thought, and returns to an insight already hard won by the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s: anthropomorphising a computer is only ever self delusion or a cynical ploy www.ft.com/content/bdb3...

ft.com

The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions

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RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 26/07/2026

Mayo have ended a wait of 75 years to become All-Ireland football champions, beating Kerry 1-20 to 1-17 at Croke Park www.rte.ie/sport/footba...

rte.ie

All-Ireland SFC final: Kerry v Mayo updates

Follow how the 2026 final unfolds as Kerry, chasing a 40th title, take on a Mayo side who again will seek to end the county's long drought for Sam Maguire.

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Tom Hulme @tomhulme.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

love this review of Belfastmen! Happy Pride (tomorrow!) 🏳️‍🌈

A book review that reads:

Sapphos wrote:

Someone will remember us

I say

even in another time

This book does just that. The lives of gay men in Belfast were just as full of love, joy and tragedy as our own.

It was a privilege to spend a few hours with them and learn about their incredible lives.

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Royal Irish Academy @ria.ie · 24/07/2026

‘Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals’ by @mauricejcasey.com @wearefootnote.bsky.social is one of the shortlisted books for the 2026 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction.

Cover of "Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals" by Maurice J. Casey. The background is red with bold black text. A vintage photo shows people seated at tables in a sunlit room. The cover includes a quote by Hallie Rubenhold at the top.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 23/07/2026

This service cost 75 hard earned US dollars per month.

"Grammatik" includes a sexism option that will automatically replace "chairman" with "chairperson." Although few historians will admit that they need such a stylistic aid, it could do wonders for undergraduate papers.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 23/07/2026

But my heart breaks reading the tragically misplaced optimism of those who believed that one day printers would get better.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 23/07/2026

I'm reading debates between historians about whether the profession should use computers (from the early 1980s). So much of the writing, which must have seemed groundbreaking at the time, is now remarkably quaint.

Screenshot of PDF article with text: The exponential movement of postage rates will interest editors in the possible use of electronic mail delivery. This is now technically feasible. Nationwide common carrier services, such as CompuServe and The Source, can link together any two microcomputer users by telephone, regardless of the machine or operating system that they use. Not enough historians yet own microcomputers to make electronic mail feasible, but that may well change by the end of the decade as more and more homes are equipped with two-way video systems that can handle electronic mail.

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Royal Historical Society @royalhistsoc.org · 15/07/2026

The @britishacademy.bsky.social resource also shows significant and v. concerning trends in recruitment of academic historians. The period 2018/19 to 2024/25 has seen a 25% fall (435 FPE) of staff with the contract type 'early career'. This compares to a 4% rise for senior staff #Skystorians 3/3

Screen shot of British Academy mapping staff in SHAPE showing decline in History staff (contract type 'early career' for 2018-19 to 2024-25 in all institutions: 25% decline (435 FPE).

Screen shot of British Academy mapping staff in SHAPE showing rise in History staff (contract type 'Professors' and 'Senior Career' for 2018-19 to 2024-25 in all institutions: 4% increase (30 FPE).

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Of interest to UK university #Skystorians: Royal Historical Society open online meeting on 'The crisis in UK higher education: The future for History'. 4 August 2-4 pm.

eventbrite.co.uk

The Crisis in UK HE: the Future for History

An open meeting for historians in UK higher education on what is needed to best support and protect the profession and discipline.

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 07/07/2026

I think the digital ethicist Luciano Floridi is somewhat ahead of the game on this. Floridi argues the current debate "keeps asking whether a machine wrote this text, when in fact the real question, and the one publishing has always tracked, is who is answerable for what the text says"

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Maurice J. Casey @mauricejcasey.com · 07/07/2026

Yes, I found this Guardian piece really good on this. LLM linguistic tells are increasingly entering ordinary writing/speech www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

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Royal Irish Academy @ria.ie · 06/07/2026

📚 The Royal Irish Academy, in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs, has revealed the six shortlisted titles for the 2026 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction! www.ria.ie/2026/07/03/s...

ria.ie

Six books shortlisted for the €10,000 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction - Royal Irish Academy

The Royal Irish Academy in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs has today, 3 July, announced the six shortlisted titles for the 2026 Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction.

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An unsettling research first for me this week: cancelling a much anticipated archive trip due to extreme heat.

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Thank you, this is great. I'll add this example into my article.

Harnessing Local AI Models for Research at Dartmouth

Ah great. This is the approach I would advocate. I know of only one example of it currently in action. Dartmouth College offers all staff and students access to models hosted locally on the university wide network rc.dartmouth.edu/blog/harness...

rc.dartmouth.edu

An approachable guide for scholars who want powerful, secure, and free AI assistance. Why Local Models Matter for Researchers Your ideas stay on camp...

A discussion of 'digital sovereignty' is not underway in universities, to my knowledge. It should be. The French government, for example, has recently moved to cease the one way flow of finance and data from state institutions to US tech. www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/es...

numerique.gouv.fr

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The problem is how US tech giants now determine how AI tool are provided. Universities, competing with one another, are enticed into major deals with US corporations. But corporations determine the rules of that competition - and they are ultimately the only winners.

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Manchester Uni members get access to the full Copilot suite, including tools that were available to all subscribers *for free* months previously. You may think: so what? Particularly if you don't use Copilot. It all just seems very technical.