iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 11h

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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Exeter Cathedral @exetercathedral.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Announcement: A selection of The Exeter Book’s famous riddles are now on display for the first time since the opening of the Treasures Exhibition in 2025. The Exeter Book is a treasured item listed on the UK UNESCO Memory of the World Register, preserving nearly all surviving Anglo-Saxon riddles.

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Accessibility Awareness @a11yawareness.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

When creating PDFs, avoid using "Print to PDF." A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of PDFs created this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost. Using "Save As" or "Export" can preserve these tags.

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Steffen Hope @hopesteffen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

An entity without an embodied sense of time will never be able to analyse historical events. Generative AI cannot do history in any way, shape, form or fashion.

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Woke up and realised that even before the final sacking next week that my university now employs more people with English Literature PhDs in administration than in the English department. Tells you something about the state of HE.

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John Levin @anterotesis.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

An "update" to JSTOR’s free reading program: they're downgrading access from 100 free articles/month to just 10. Access to academic writing is being whittled down, bit by bit. about.jstor.org/blog/an-upda...

about.jstor.org

An update to JSTOR’s free reading program

Beginning September 1, 2026, JSTOR’s free reading program will provide registered readers with access to 10 articles every 30 days.

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Leonie V. Hicks @lvhicks.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

*Cough* Bayeux Tapestry exhibition *cough*. Obviously only one example to highlight the total idiocy of this comment among the huge contribution that Arts, Hums and Soc Sci graduates make to the economy and knowledge base of this country. Go away and read your brief, Minister.

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edeath @edithcharles.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Anthropic just solved the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything but if you didn’t read the plans in your local Alpha Centauri branch it’s about to be demolished along with the earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass because you’ve got to build bypasses

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Rachel Moss @menysnoweballes.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

great, an acknowledgment that arts & hums are crucial while promising absolutely zero support for them

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Rachel Moss @menysnoweballes.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

this is INFURATING

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Trevor A. Branch @trevorabranch.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Millennium math problem solved by OpenAI may have "regurgitated" competitors unpublished work... also they spent more than $22 million in computing power in one week to scoop them. techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/o...

techcrunch.com

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician | TechCrunch

There is a $1 million bounty for the first person providing a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

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The Parker Library @parkerlibcccc.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

VIRUS ALERT! Sheeppox virus found in our parchment! Luckily, it is the ancient kind, so no extra precautions needed 😅 What a multidisciplinary effort - congrats to everyone involved! (Incidentally, the culprit MS is currently on display in our exhibition) www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Ancient sheep virus found hiding in medieval parchment

Newly recovered sheeppox sequences reveal when and how the virus emerged

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 03/09/2026

At a certain point I have to ask myself if I got all this pedigree and spent decades doing research and building things to then spend the rest of my life attempting to come up with good arguments as to why the Cookie Monster isn't real.

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Abbey @abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is what living next door to a 30 megawatt data center sounds like.

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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.

Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.

The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.

Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”

Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.

He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.

In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.

“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”

In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.

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Ruth Pearce @notrightruth.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

This is the most fucked up and immediately harmful policy decision I think I've ever seen in adult trans healthcare in the UK, and that's saying something. The Welsh Gender Service is one of the best in the country. It is widely praised by the patients it helps. That is why it is being targeted.

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Mo Ryan @moryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

every billionaire & tech mogul, they all want to be adored & celebrated without doing the things Dolly did with a fraction of the power & money. What she had, she gave away. I'm sure she was comfortable (& that's good!). But she just relentlessly helped. It's not that difficult. Love. Care. Help. 💚🌸

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KJ Shepherd @kjshepherd.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

there will be many ways to celebrate dolly parton and the one I want to point out is that she was a friend of Miss Piggy

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Micah @rincewind.run · 25/08/2026

dolly parton taught millions of children to read dolly parton raised millions of dollars for cancer research and disaster relief dolly parton stood by the lgbtq community her entire life dolly parton personally helped fund the moderna vaccine if there was a right side of something she was on it

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Dr. Cara Berg Powers @clbergpowers.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Things you could do this week to honor the impact Dolly has had: *Donate to the Imagination Library or a local kids reading initiative *Read with a kid you care about *Support and protect LGBTQIA kids *Support a Black owned business *Schedule your vaccine appointments *Show up authentically as you

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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

obviously Kathleen Stock is making an odious argument here but it’s also very funny to call to the eradication of autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia from Academia, the Neurodivergence Factory

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Jørgen Heszlein @heszlein.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

New estimate of Elon Musk’s death toll just dropped www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Great ADHD Myth? Is being broadcast tonight - I sat down with @drdeanburnett.bsky.social @ginarippon.bsky.social and Sarah Turner to discuss the way it has been framed #adhd #channel4 #neurodiversity

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Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

FFS, @Guardian. Max Pemberton is NOT an expert in #ADHD, he's a psychiatrist specialiseing in older patients, with a bizarre agenda against #Neurodivergence, a regular column in the Daily Mail, and a dangerous TV show to promote Remember when you had actual experts regularly writing for you?

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 17/08/2026

rare books are destroyed in the process but at least we have a technology that instructs teens how to commit suicide

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Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Medievalists/Europeanists: if these two historic years of flooding are not already on your teaching timelines, they need to be. New narratives of the climatic & epidemiological histories of the late Middle Ages are forming, & this kind of evidence will be central. #MedievalSky #ClimateHistory 🧪🗃️

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 14/08/2026

Meta is so unbelievably evil. They make a technology primarily designed to enable abuse, harassment and privacy violations, but also embed real disability aids. The tactic now is to use an entire community as human shields to defend against criticisms www.engadget.com/2236054/meta...

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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Heartened to see that my university is ending its contract with Turnitin before the next academic year, because Turnitin is going to use student submissions to train AI models. Institutions can and should resist this stuff!

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Academic Audio Transcription Ltd @aat-transcribes.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Sick of AI being touted as the 'solution' to all stages of your research process? We get it. We don't use AI at any stage in our processes, promising 100% human-done transcription support. Visit academicaudiotranscription.com for more information, or to tell us about your project.

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James Woodfield @jameswoodfield.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

According to the parliamentary annual report & accounts for the 2025/26 financial year, the cost of subsidising the bars in the House of Commons alone was around £5.8 million. Meanwhile, to save £3 million less than that, Jodrell Bank is being defunded and shut down. share.google/MRHIvCsCsKoc...

share.google

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 31/07/2026

In fifteen years, the UK has deleted coal power from their power system, halved fossil gas use, replaced most of that with wind and solar, and the country has not suffered the hellish blackout apocalypse conservatives and media outlets promised would happen. ember-energy.org/data/electri...

Stacked area chart showing UK electricity generation (terawatt‑hours) from 2000–2025, highlighting a steep fall in coal, declining gas and nuclear, and steady growth in wind, solar and other renewables over time.

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Ben Gross @bhgross144.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

For those seeking another reason to oppose #Anthropic (or #AI more broadly): "Anthropic described the project as 'our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books' in an internal memo, which noted 'we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project'." #booksky #speccolls 🗃️📜📚

news.com.au

AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 26/07/2026

Now is a good reminder that machine learning is a rebranding of statistical learning. Reinforcement learning is something I first came across in control theory. Many ML formulations are from information theory, a much more theoretically grounded discipline that's been around for decades.

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Kim Sokol (Open for Commissions/Freelance!) @kimsokol.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I come back to this tumblr post again and again

Tumblr post by sunderwight: The current AI situation is like if the people who were pushing NFTs had successfully gotten everyone to start referring to any and all digital transactions as an NFT, thus allowing them to pretend that things like online shopping, downloadable video games, bank transfers, etc were closely related to convincing middle-aged would-be techies to invest serious money in ugly digital paintings, and hold the former examples up in defense of the latter any time someone pointed out that the whole NFT thing was a racket. What do you mean NFTs are bad, don't you want disabled people to be able to use their phones to have medication delivered to their doorstep? Wow. Horrible of you, really.

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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

they welcomed it in as a curiosity and it destroyed them

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Dr Laura Humphreys @bogarty.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

The wider issue is the peanuts UKRI is operating with. Under £10bn for the engine of the UK's research in ALL subjects should be a national disgrace. Jodrell Bank is a helpful example but we are losing so much across *every* research field. This underfunding will damage the UK for decades to come.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Muppets Canterbury Tales when?

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Josh Coulthard @joshcoulthard.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Excited to open the call for papers for this strand and roundtable on the history of emotions for next year’s International Medieval Congress in Leeds @imc-leeds.bsky.social sponsored by @northwestmedieval.bsky.social #medievalsky #skystorians #imc2027

2027 marks the 25th anniversary of Barbara Rosenwein’s seminal article, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’ (2002), in which she first put forward the concept of ‘emotional communities’. This framework has revolutionised our understanding of medieval emotions and, crucially, redefined the methodological possibilities available to researchers looking at past societies and structures. As we celebrate this milestone, this strand invites contributions from scholars at any career stage to address the question: What comes next?

In particular, we seek to explore the role of ‘non-productive’ emotions in historical research. Emotions and affects such as anxiety, discomfort, nostalgia, paranoia, melancholy, apathy, shame, and guilt have often been overlooked in medieval historiography because they frequently lack the dramatic traces left by more expressive emotions like anger, love, and joy. Yet, these states remain some of the most profound aspects of the human emotional experience, frequently underpinning the internal dynamics of governance, negotiation, and community cohesion.

Papers may address themes such as:
The methodological challenges of mapping ‘quiet’ or elusive affective states within medieval archives.
Case studies focusing on the role of apathy, anxiety, or paranoia during periods of transition, conflict, or institutional change.
How non-productive emotions shape relationships of power, diplomacy, authority, and dissent.
The interactions of materiality and material culture with non-productive emotions.
Temporalities and shifting landscapes of non-productive emotional histories.

Call for Roundtable Participants
In addition to research papers, we are organising a roundtable on this theme. To be considered for the roundtable, please send a short response (maximum 200 words) to the organisers addressing the question: ‘What can the study of non-productive emotions add to our histories?’

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Emma Jacobs @emmavj.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Forget pervert glasses - what about smart plugs? Me on domestic abusers taking over home devices as.ft.com/r/8f4ab2f1-4... How smart tech is being weaponised in the home

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

MARKERS AGAINST AI. Whenevir you are temptid to create a holidaye carde, invitacioun, etc wyth Gen AI: do not. Ynstead, use a trusty bolde marker on playne papir. Make it as simple as possible. Stick! figures! Everyone will knowe you made it. Everyone will knowe it ys yours. We win wyth markers.

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

In case you missed it, here's Count Binface's appearance on the BBC this morning.

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Vicki Blud @vickiblud.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Every year #IMC2026 manages to remind me why I became a medievalist. Barely 10 minutes into day 2 and the speaker is inviting everyone to join a metal band called The Rats of Heresy.

Manuscript illustration showing a grey cat sitting in an ornamental flourish, surrounded by black rats. The cat is staring out of the picture looking pretty fed up. Taken from BnF Latin 22 f. 317v.

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Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

1000 evaluators given identical resumes & told candidate used AI. Only difference on resumes was candidate’s name: Emily vs James. Study found women using AI are evaluated as less competent than men who use AI...To evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative

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Science Museum @sciencemuseum.org.uk · 04/07/2026

Ahead of our upcoming exhibition Becoming America: how science shaped a nation, supported by Griffin Catalyst, our latest blog post explores the scientific thinking that underpinned the Declaration of Independence: bit.ly/4eKhgGk

US Declaration of Independence, 1776. Credit The National Archives

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Liesbeth Corens @onslies.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This petition needs as many signatories as the Exeter one. Please sign and share — don’t let Hertfordshire managers get away with this just because a Russell Group one took the spotlight. #UKHE

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Jonathan Foyle @jonathanfoyle.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

This is from an AI-generated film of London in 1348. The eagle-eyed among you might spot a problem…

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Ben Phillips @benphillips1989.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

A statement from Exeter UCU branch @ucu.org.uk - please share far and wide.

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