iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 27/09/2026

I did wonder what he'd make of these pages in particular 😎

Two pages of a complex five-page stemma codicum

Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 27/09/2026

Lovely few days in Dublin for the launch of the new "Navigatio Sancti Brendani" at @dias.ie A great range of papers (in English & Irish). And exciting to see the conference get a write-up in the @irishtimes.com after the President gave Trump a copy of the book! www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026...

Reconstructed currach outside the DIAS building

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 19/09/2026

Or go and see the replica in Reading 😀

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Trevor Wiley @mearcsteppende.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Want to learn how early medieval people living on the coast in Scotland hunted seals and seabirds? Or how collecting sea snails on the beach was part of new Christian practice? You should check out my new article in Water History! link.springer.com/article/10.1... #medievalsky

link.springer.com

Wild animals, small practices, and the formation of an early medieval coastal landscape on the Firth of Forth - Water History

The large-scale landscape changes that occurred in northern Britain from roughly 400–800 C.E. were built on a vast array of smaller shifting practices which reflected the realities of local environmen...

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 25/08/2026

Looking forward to taking part in this symposium at @dias.ie in a few weeks. Open to all (but spaces limited) – so register now! (I'll be speaking about medieval navigation, of course ⛵ ) www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-voyage...

eventbrite.ie

The Voyage of St Brendan, A European Odyssey

A day of events to celebrate the launch of a modern edition and English translation of the text

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 25/08/2026

eventbrite.ie

The Voyage of St Brendan, A European Odyssey

A day of events to celebrate the launch of a modern edition and English translation of the text

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

I almost used this photo instead of the other one – might have suited you better 💮

Another photo of the same train station as before, with a white rose motif in the iron arches

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Funnily enough I too just received an email from someone promising to - Create AI avatars that can conduct semi-structured voice interviews with students, public-history audiences, or navigation practitioners, probe beyond an interview guide, and respond to participants’ facial expressions 😬

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Yeah. I agree with him that they were way too defensive well before the substitutions; he put on subs that matched the way they were already playing. But as you say, he might have nipped it in the bud by bringing on some fresh legs who could keep possession & maintain pressure

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Bonus: a brief stop in my favourite station

Beautiful columns, arches and curved platforms of (can you guess?)

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Shannon K. Supple @mazarine.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Always blown away by conference presenters who present in languages other than their primary one. And answer audience questions, sometimes spoken at lightning speed. Bravo! #eshs-hss

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Thank you! Sometime in the early 2030s, I hope...

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Since I completely forgot to post about my own presentation beforehand, here's the abstract. Thanks to everyone who came and/or chatted about the project with me afterwards. It was really useful to air some new ideas to a friendly crowd! Even more excited to get writing the book now!

Back to the Future of Wayfinding: Pre-modern astro-navigation in the GPS age

New technologies in the 20th century challenged the need for navigators to look to the stars. The rapid development of radio direction-finding, beam and hyperbolic systems, and finally satellite navigation, promised to make old methods redundant. An unfathomable global system of transmitters and receivers would replace skills in taking sightings and computing with brass and paper tools; the signals from atomic clocks would eclipse the long-fixed shapes of the constellations.

Yet from the beginning this march of new technology was contested. In the first place, while black-box systems promised to make knowledge of location and direction universally accessible, the cost of equipment raised new barriers. As prices plummeted and precision soared, concerns grew that sailors and pilots might lack the understanding necessary to interpret navigational data, leading to increased risk. It has even been suggested that reliance on technology rewires our brains, making us
stupider.

Meanwhile, as ‘traditional’ techniques became outmoded, interest surged in
reconstructing the seemingly miraculous methods of the past. Respect for the
astrolabe-toting heroes of the European ‘Age of Exploration’ was complicated by a
growing pluralistic awareness that their achievements had been preceded by a suite of skills and senses practised in the Pacific. In the Anthropocene, an instinctive feel for one’s environment seems ever more precious when alone atop a vast ocean.

Most recently, fears about the vulnerability of GPS systems to jamming or even spoofing have become stronger – and more realistic. Put together, these pressures have caused hydrographic offices and training schools to pull back from abandoning old materials and methods. This paper will survey the arguments of manufacturers and mapmakers, technologists and traditionalists – from the backstaff to the blue dot – to show why, in the age of Google, navigation is so contested.

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Likewise! Hope you had a good time

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

On my way home from a magnificent #eshs-hss conference. Edinburgh hosted us brilliantly (including the conference ceilidh!) & it was wonderful to catch up with old friends & colleagues, and make meet many new ones. Newly inspired by #HistSTM!

Ceilidh lines in the National Museum of Scotland

Edinburgh castle in the sunshine, with blue sky behind

View down over Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags, with the castle visible in the background

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 03/07/2026

Lovely part of the country

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 24/06/2026

Aw thanks for remembering. He deserved so many parties (pic actually from a 2-yo's birthday party, not his own)

Beautiful dog Ridley (Lab/German Shepherd/Rottweiler cross) wearing a party hat

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Suzanne Paul @suzpaul.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Fabulous medieval postdoc opportunity on a brilliant project…

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 04/06/2026

Completely with you here. Our 8-yo is totally badger-obsessed and the whole family have caught the bug. We're going to look for them (again) tomorrow night – hopefully we'll have more luck than on previous outings... 🤞🦡

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 29/05/2026

My review of Katherine Harvey, "The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living" & Peter Jones, "Self-Help from the Middle Ages", is out in the new issue of @thetls.bsky.social www.the-tls.com/history/medi...

the-tls.com

Mind, body and medieval spirit

Should the Middle Ages be a model for modern life? The period hardly seems promising, with its religious violence, pandemics and penchant for fart jokes.

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Borthwick Institute for Archives @uoyborthwick.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Sweltering in the UK heatwave?? Why not visit your Local Archival Repository! Low temperatures and humidity GUARANTEED* And we throw in the history for free😍 *by regulatory standard BS4971:2017 Archives - Where the records are cool and so are you.

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 26/05/2026

Job opportunity for an early-career scholar in politics/international relations of the Middle East / North Africa / South Asia. 3 years from 1 September. Apply by 4 June. Come and work with me at wonderful @girtoncollege.bsky.social! Full details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/55579/

Girton College in the morning sun, with slanting light through the trees, a slight mist, and the tower in the background

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Graham Taylor @pottedhistory.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

The replica Anglo-Saxon urn🏺⚱️I've been working on, based on one found in the grounds of @girtoncollege.bsky.social is now approaching completion #Archaeology One of my prime concerns when replicating archaeological artefacts, is to retain the spirit of the original and avoid over finishing it.

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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

The Enlightenment is a C20 construct. Discuss.

Google ngram graph showing that 'The Enlightenment' appeared as a phrase in the printed corpus in the 1940s.

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Stephen Johnston @stephenaj.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Remarkable drawing by Frances Yates from 1952, as she was studying Giordano Bruno's art of memory. This is the lead image for Relics, a new student-curated exhibition at the @warburginstitute.bsky.social. Much looking forward to seeing this up close.... mailchi.mp/sas/news-fro....

Circular diagram on paper with fold marks. The outer rings of the circle are lettered in black ink and the inner in red.

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Stephen Gadd @docuracy.co.uk · 01/05/2026

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

A dark-themed interactive map of the medieval western Mediterranean showing 14th-century merchant letter routes as curved arcs coloured from cyan (fast, 0–5 days) through yellow to red (30+ days). Short land routes between Tuscan cities glow cyan; longer sea routes to Barcelona and Majorca burn orange and red, revealing the unpredictability of medieval maritime travel.
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Long (accessible description for screen readers / figure caption):
Screenshot of the Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer in Travel Time mode. A dark basemap of the western Mediterranean is overlaid with curved arc lines connecting pairs of cities in the Datini merchant network. Arc colour encodes average letter delivery time on a gradient from cyan (near-instant, 0–5 days) through green and yellow (one to two weeks) to orange and deep red-magenta (more than 30 days). Dense clusters of fast cyan arcs radiate from Florence and Pisa across Tuscany, reflecting the reliable day-or-two land post. Arcs reaching westward to Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Majorca shift to orange and red, capturing the slower and far more variable sea routes that could take anywhere from a week to several months. City nodes are shown as circles: pink for the main Datini fondacos (Pisa, Florence, Barcelona, Genoa, Valencia, Majorca) and blue for correspondent cities. A sidebar on the left shows the Travel Time mode is selected, with a cyan-to-red colour legend and a filter slider for minimum letters per route.

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 02/05/2026

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, a History examiners' report I read exhorted future examiners to use "the full range of marks from 15-85". (The problem in that case was that they'd see a first-class essay but barely move above 70.)

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Dan Armstrong @historydan1066.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I’m pleased to share that 'Borders and the Norman World', which I co-edited with Áron Kecskés, @rozierhistorian.bsky.social, and @lvhicks.bsky.social , is now being released in paperback. It will be available in June and is currently open for pre-order: boydellandbrewer.com/book/borders...

Book cover for Borders and the Norman World, featuring title, editors, and an image of two knights on horseback carved into stone

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 09/04/2026

I have a first-gen one from about 2009/10 and it still does what it always did. I don't use it much but it can be a godsend while travelling. A shame they're going to make it all but useless in a month's time... I won't be replacing it

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 08/04/2026

I have at least 11 of those too! 🤩 Have never gotten around to alphabetising mine though

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 06/04/2026

This is obviously best for UK readers

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Dr Mark Purcell @camlibresearch.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Venetian hedgehog

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Sadiah Qureshi 🦈 @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Oh my word. I made Quote of the Day in Nature a couple of weeks back and had no idea. www.nature.com/articles/d41... Taken from this piece on de-extinction in Aeon: aeon.co/essays/de-ex... Back to my break.

Quote of the day:

"De-extinction will never be purely, or even primarily, the revival of lost species, but the bioengineering of new life forms that we choose to name after lost ways of being"

Historian of science Sadiah Qureshi argues that efforts to 'de-extinct' species, using frozen biological material or living relatives, risks "reducing species to little more than genetic information, rather than appreciating them as living ways of being alive". (Aeon | 19 min read)

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Chris Kendall @ottocr.at · 05/04/2026

Easter Sunday at Fountains Abbey

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Karl Galle @karlgalle.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

From the same publisher, a new open-access edited volume on Proclus for historians of medieval mathematics & theology: www.mirabileweb.it/edgalluzzo/m... #HistSTM #MedievalSky

Cover image for the book, "Proclus and the Science: Approaches to Understanding the Divine," edited by Anna Motta and Daniela Taormina.

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Laura Keating @lorekeating.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

I keep seeing "all authors use AI, the real issue is they're being forced to be sneaky about it" headlines. Full stop No. This is a lie peddled for normalization. It's schoolyard-level pressure tactics "C'mon, all the cool kids are already doing it. We won't tell. It's fine. We're on your side."

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Krisztina Ilko @drkrisztinailko.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

It's great to see this article in The Conversation up now! Link in the first comment.

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American Astronomical Society (AAS) @aas.org · 17/02/2026

Call for HAD Osterbrock Book Prize Nominations AAS Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) invites nominations for 2027 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical #Astronomy. Deadline: 1 March aas.org/posts/news/2... 📷 Seb Falk, 2025 Osterbrock Award winner at the 246th AAS meeting (Anchorage) 🔭

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 25/03/2026

Ah, Martellus, thank you! (Here's another copy at the British Library, if you're interested: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:In... ). Lots to admire – and lots to wonder bemusedly at...

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 25/03/2026

Very interesting! Do you know the reference for this map (what manuscript it comes from)? It has some fascinating features

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Katherine CM Cross @kcross.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Hi guys. Please find attached my book. Some people say it will shape the idea of the English people. Don’t miss the section on the Synod of Whitby. My information is a little patchy, and I’m no fan of the Brits. Maybe you should supplement my work with archaeology? All the best, the Venerable Bede

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Dan Conway @magisterconway.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 21/03/2026

Authentic medieval "photograph" here 📸 accompanying this interesting @theguardian.com piece on some new (unpublished) research on the Battle of Hastings www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

Artist's portrait of King Harold II, from a Wills cigarette card, c1898. With blond beard, red cloak and fairytale crown. Used on a Guardian web story with caption "Photograph: incamerastock/Alamy"

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monkeynutcoat.bsky.social @monkeynutcoat.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

@girtoncollege.bsky.social 'The Eagle' in Cambridge has Watson & Crick, but delighted 'The Golden Beam' Headingley, Leeds now has Girton alumnus & physicist Florence Bell on their wall who, whilst working in Dept. of Textiles here in 1938, first showed X-rays could be used to reveal DNA structure!

Print portrait of scientist Florence Bell who, working in the lab of William Astbury at Leeds in 1938, first showed that X-rays could be used to reveal the regular, ordered structure of DNA. The print is a mosaic made up of tiny images from scientific papers and was made by artist and staff member Kristina Keller at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA where the original (based on a photo kindly provided by Mr Chris Sawyer) hangs outside the cafe on the Janelia campus.

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 20/03/2026

Timely: here's Baron Smith, rocking not one but two hats at his installation as Chancellor of Cambridge University (@cam.ac.uk) earlier this week For full 🎥 bsky.app/profile/cam....

Lord Smith in Cambridge PhD gown with scarlet facings and doctoral bonnet, parading outside the Cambridge Senate-House

Lord Smith in black hat and gown with lots of gold braid, giving an address in the Senate-House

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Dr Johnson's House @drjohnsonshouse.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

We’re looking for freelance illustrators and designers! Join us in creating Dr Johnson’s Alphabet, a vibrant visual project introducing early years children to unusual and exciting words. Help us make language playful, engaging, and fun. www.drjohnsonshouse.org/jobs

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 02/03/2026

We all need editors like that 😂 (I sent my full draft of my book to my older sister for the same reason) Thanks for the word Stilblüten though: I reckon that'll come in very useful!

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