iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 27/08/2026

Everyday when I get to work I put my lunch on this shelf... I like to think of it as a little kadrû offering, presenting food to the Neo-Assyrian spirit who resides in my office. Incidentally, the relief is from the Gipsformerei (www.gipsformerei-katalog.de/Sammlungsgeb...)

A photo of a bookshelf in an academic office, on the shelf is a large replica of a Neo-Assyrian protective spirit. On the same shelf in front of the replica is my lunch...

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 27/08/2026

This stands out as a really important thing that MIT is trying to do that so many universities are just not at all engaging with... As so many others have said, professors feel left adrift making/implementing/arbitrating policies with no support from administration.

A selected section of MIT's report on Generative AI: "MIT should provide a shared framework – including a common policy menu, disclosure expectations, and accountability standards – within which departments and instructors can make choices."

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 02/07/2026

Wish I could order my coffee by Munsell soil color... I like it right about at 10YR 5/3

A chart of Munsell soil colors for the 10YR range

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 25/06/2026

🦀 see a crab, post a crab 🦀 (Neo-Assyrian wall-relief found in Nineveh from the time of Assurbanipal, ~645 BCE, www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o...)

A crab in a riverine scene from a Neo-Assyrian wall-relief found at Nineveh.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 11/05/2026

Here's our wedding in the (Great) Friends Meeting House in Newport RI, we were married under the care of Providence MM.

Two people stand facing each other, other people are seated. This is a quaker wedding taking place in an old meeting house in Newport Rhode Island.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 08/05/2026

I wrote a short piece for the most recent issue of the New Farmer's Almanac (greenhorns.org/almanacs/). The theme was "premonition". I wrote on agriculture and divination in ancient Mesopotamia... it's a gorgeous (full-color) volume and full of fascinating short pieces of fiction and non-fiction...

The cover of an issue of the New Farmer's Alamanac on a white table with a cup of coffee. The cover image is a paper cut image of an agricultural scene. The title of issue at the top of the image is "premonition".

The magazine held open to an article on divination and agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia. The leading page of the article features a large photo of a proto-Cuneiform tablet.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 11/04/2026

Less than a month after getting our solar panels hooked up to the grid we had our first negative power day ever! It was a battle against the city's heritage protection bylaws to get the solar panels installed on our victorian house, but this makes it all worth it.

A line chart showing amount of power supplied by the grid in blue and the amount of power generated by our solar panels in red. The second to last day on the chart has the red line above the blue line meaning we generated more than we used. A pinkish-red exclamation point was drawn on top of the graph at that point adding emphasis.

An aerial view of our roof showing the solar array.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 17/03/2026

While building this app I went back through all the previous versions starting with a Mellon funded reading/writing group on inequality, we used a convoluted Google sheet writing tracker back then, but a lot of those ideas were fundamental to designing the current version of the website.

A screenshot of a Google sheet writing group tracker.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 16/03/2026

All the example screenshots are from a contrived group that I created using characters based on the Redwall series by Brian Jacques... but the functionality is all there. There's an ample free account and a simple paid subscription model that gets your access to extra features and cool avatars:

A selection of user avatars that can be used on Dogthr.com

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 13/03/2026

Why can't the title have been Metaphors in Greco-Roman antiquity or something to that effect, I probably still would've been interested in it, but the title as it stands neglects work on metaphor by many other scholars of the "ancient world". I know mostly of those in my field (cuneiform studies).

John Wee's edited volume "The Comparable Body: Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman Medicine"

The first half of the ToC of Wee's edited volume showing a diverse range of chapters across many cultures.

The rest of the ToC of Wee's edited volume showing more papers dealing with a range of ancient cultures.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 13/03/2026

I'm once again asking scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity not to use "Ancient World" for book titles when what they really mean is ancient Greece and Rome... Fabian Horn's recent book (reviewed on BMCR today) looks like a fascinating collection of chapters looking at Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but...

Meme based on an old Facebook UI the text reads "Marked Safe From" and then I've inserted custom content that reads "A book on the Ancient World having any chapters outside of Greece and Rome".

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 05/12/2025

I want to highlight the team members: Dr. Kelly is a world expert on the Proto-Elamite world, archaeology and language. Dr. Born is a wizard with Python and all things linguistic. Dr. Sarkar understands the interaction of language and data and an insatiable curiosity for the ancient world.

An image from the end of the article showing the team involved.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 05/12/2025

Breaking news for you Proto-Elamite fans: our team just had a new article come out in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology (88.4) on our recent progress towards deciphering "one of the few remaining undeciphered scripts from the ancient world". www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A screenshot of the front page of an article on Proto-Elamite

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 28/11/2025

I asked my students in my Gilgamesh class to divide the epic into three parts on their summary test. Afterwards, in class we all drew them on the board. We talked about how the second division has more salience than the first (i.e. more people agreed on where the second division should go).

A white board with lines drawn across it. Each of the lines represents a division of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Students drew the lines and were asked to divide the epic into three parts.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 19/11/2025

Then we graphed the results on the whiteboard (apologies for the glare) and lo and behold our hypotheses were born out by the data:

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the number of rooms. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it's a king, queen, or prince.

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the total volume of the tomb. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it has a bent or straight axis.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 19/11/2025

With this information available we thought about what sort of hypotheses we could test with the data. The students came up with some simple but important ideas: 1) Tombs get bigger over time and 2) Kings have larger tombs than queens and princes. The students divided up and each looked at a tomb

Two hypotheses about the valley of the kings, tombs get bigger over time and kings have bigger tombs than others.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 19/11/2025

On my way to Boston for ASOR and AAR/SBL... Had my students this morning do a really fun exercise in class. We started off by looking at the Theban Mapping Project (thebanmappingproject.com) an amazing website hosted by ARCE. We thought about what sorts of data was available for each of the tombs.

Screenshot of the Theban Mapping Project website

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 07/11/2025

This week were were thinking about how the combination of good archaeology and well provenanced texts can tell richer stories. Ea-naṣir's house and letters provide an excellent case-study, a 4,000 year old micro-history of one merchants life and work in the ancient city of Ur.

I social network of the Old-Babylonian copper merchant Ea-naṣir drawn by students from his dossier.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 16/04/2025

As further evidence of future crisis check out this graph (also from the whitepaper), the discipline where direct output creation was most common: "Education". What will that do to our education system in 3-4 years when these graduates are teachers?!

A graph showing what types of tasks were asked by each discipline, Education tops the charts with 40.6% of questions being used for direct output creation.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 16/04/2025

There's a lot in there, but this figure is the standout. Students use AI to create work, not to understand tricky problems or figure out how to apply concepts. They're just using AI as a shortcut not a tool. Quoting the authors of the white paper: "An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over."

"An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over." Questions asked of Claude when assigned to Bloom's taxonomy, students are using AI to create answers and submit work rather than understand hard problems. 39.8% of all questions were used for "Creating" the highest level, the taxonomy is supposed to show a pyramid structure standing firm, this is the opposite.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 16/04/2025

Caveat this is all anonymized data which they tried to assign to various disciplines in higher-ed, but it probably tracks pretty well... they start off looking at the proportion of subjects using AI compared to percentage of undergrads enrolled in those degrees: not surprisingly CS stands out

Breakdown of questions asked of Claude and their assigned "subjects" compared to percentages of undergrad majors. CS really stands out here.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 10/03/2025

Last week to submit an abstract for our workshop at ASOR this year: The Robot at the Back of the Classroom: Student Engagement and Assessment under the Shadow of Generative AI... We're interested in talking about what we're all talking about, how do we teach/inspire/assess in our classrooms with AI?

The Robot at the Back of the Classroom: Student Engagement and Assessment under the Shadow of Generative AI (Workshop)

Session Chairs: M. Willis Monroe, University of New Brunswick; Emily Hammer, University of Pennsylvania

Description: Students and instructors across our disciplines have been impacted by the advent of easily accessible tools for generative AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). These tools present problems for traditional pedagogical methods and have a deleterious effect on students’ motivation to learn. However, these tools are not going away and their usage is only going to become more common. How can we teach, engage, and assess our students in this rapidly changing landscape? This workshop will consider the unique benefits that courses structured around archaeology and ancient texts can offer, including innovative pedagogical solutions that facilitate deeper engagement and more effective assessment methods. We will focus on three aspects of teaching in our modern pedagogical landscape: 1) How to assess students accurately despite the threat of generative AI being used in lieu of actual student work. This can involve various techniques from the basic switch to analog in-class writing or oral exams, to prompt injection in lecture slides. This is not just about catching academic dishonesty as such methods can result in improvements in pedagogical outcomes. 2) How to change our pedagogical structures so that generative AI is not an easy crutch or an attractive shortcut. This can involve substantially more discussion-based courses, flipped classrooms, and group research projects. 3) Potential ways to incorporate generative AI into the classroom. Our students in their education and careers will need to learn the potential benefits, harm, and limitations of these tools, as well as how to critically assess their outputs.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 30/01/2025

Same here, free 3d-printing in the library... The models on sketchfab from the BM and other institutions are excellent for teaching resources...

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 06/01/2025

This is an amazing amount of work, and such a cool output! It would be interesting to see whether his talks aligned at all with his scholarly output as well... this is what I found in OIP 138 for Banks' bibliography:

A bibliography of the works authored by Edgar Banks taken from OIP 138.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 03/12/2024

We just had a wood stove installed (Jøtul 602 v2 if you're wondering) and was dreading informing our home insurance company... I sent the e-mail this morning and they just replied that it reduced(!) our bill by $10. (maybe because it counts as a secondary heat source and prevents pipes freezing)

A small wood stove surrounded by a fence in a living room, with a very happy cat sitting on an ottoman.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 02/12/2024

Here's a section from Ossendrijver's 2012 book (title: Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts) on astronomical procedure texts (pgs. 18-19) on the concept and writing of zero.

A screenshot from Ossendrijver 2012, pgs. 18-19 on the concept of zero in cuneiform mathematical astronomy.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 03/09/2024

That's rough, maybe cover him in something really smelly for a week or so?

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 30/08/2024

3D Printed cuneiform objects from museum collections (h/t The British Museum and Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East for making their models publically available!) using UNB Library's Fabrication Lab. They were awesome to work with, the end results are fantastic. Can't wait to teach with them!

Three 3d printed cuneiform objects from museum collections. One is the Babylonian "mappa mundi", another is a cone from the Sumerian king Gudea, and the final object is a large accounting tablet from the Early Dynastic period.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 08/08/2024

New faculty photo just came in... unfortunately this hat has been glued to my head for the past decade.

A bearded, bespectacled, behatted, two shirt wearing, watch sporting, assistant professor of ancient history standing in front of some bushes with arms crossed.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 18/04/2024

NB: Everything about this article is made up, aside from the citations. Please do not believe that Babylonian cuneogrammers invented programming or neural networks. That being said, what they did accomplish with clay and reed sylli was really amazing and very cool!

BM 34580 courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. This tablet contains a huge amount of astronomical calculations.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 18/04/2024

It's been a goal of mine for a while to submit something to SIGBOVIK "The Association of Computational Heresy". This year I wrote something with a few colleagues and published it in the 2024 proceedings: sigbovik.org In this article we created a fake cuneiform programming language...

A screenshot of the first page of an article in SIGBOVIK 2024. The article has lots of cuneiform.

A screenshot of a later page in the same article where a lot of cuneiform is displayed on the screen. This is meant to replicate a cuneiform tablet containing our fake programming language.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 28/03/2024

Currently reading some cuneiform astronomical diaries from Babylonia and just noticed that rain is categorized as whether or not you have to remove your sandals...

Photo of a translation of a cuneiform text that mentions "slow rain, so that the sandal was not removed"

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 25/01/2024

This is our standard evening glass... we switched a while ago. I'm guessings it's around 4 oz.

A standard beer flight glass filled with red wine.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 24/11/2023

In today's class we did some basic data work with the Valley of the kings (thanks to thebanmappingproject.com ). We started off thinking about some hypotheses about the size of tombs and the duration or date of a Pharaoh's reign. Then we graphed all the data and talked about our conclusions...

Two x-y graphs on a chalkboard showing the size of tombs from the Valley of the Kings compared to the duration of a kings reign and when they died.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 24/10/2023

Ever wonder how to exclaim the impossible in Hittite? The rather short (and badly broken) myth entitled "A Tale of Two Cities, Kanesh and Zalpa" preserves what must be similar to "when pigs fly" in Hittite: "What have we come to that a donkey can climb up (a staircase)?"

Hittite transliteration of the phrase: "What have we come to that a donkey can climb up (a staircase)?"

KBo 22.2 a cuneiform tablet from Hattusa

The full myth from Hoffner's Hittite Myths (1998)

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 20/10/2023

I was curious how old my wikipedia account is, my first edit was December 2004 (en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...) It's cute how short wikipedia pages used to be. Compare that little stub of a page to the monstrosity it is now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midhurst And no, I have no idea why I added that.

A screenshot of a wikipedia diff from 2004.

A screenshot of the content I added to the wikipedia page in 2004 still present on the page now.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 22/09/2023

They solved it! They did a great job and worked together to uncover the full dynasty of queens

The results of the seriation exercise, a series of strips of paper arrayed on a table showing the full pottery sequence.

A slide showing the a list of imaginary queens' names from the seriation exercise.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 22/09/2023

Today's archaeology exercise in class is seriation. I used midjourney to create a group of "ancient" pots arranged into stratigraphic layers (with some missing strata), tomb assemblages, and a few vessels with queen's names. The students each get one piece of "evidence" to reconstruct the dynasty.

Seven page pdf of ancient pots generated with midjourney ai. This exercise will walk students through the idea of seriation.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 14/09/2023

My department at the University of New Brunswick is hiring a Canadian historian of the long 20th century: www.unb.ca/hr/careers/p... It's outside of my normal field, so please share if you know other modern historians.

Job posting for a Canadian historian position at UNB: https://www.unb.ca/hr/careers/posting/academic.php?id=2870

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 14/09/2023

Trialing a new exercise on stratigraphy in my intro level class on Friday. Designed a tell with 3 trenches, 8 strata per trench, groups of students will get one page, have to find their fellow trench mates, tell a story about the trench, then the class will tell the story of the tell.

24 pages of a stratigraphy worksheet, each page has a archaeological stratum, each layer has different archaeological evidence suggesting an overall history of the entire site.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 06/09/2023

First day of teaching at my new job at the University of New Brunswick. Starting with "Discovering Ancient Civilizations" this morning and following up with "The Ancient Near East", particularly excited for the latter as its the first time I've been able to teach my core discpline since my PhD!

New Yorker cartoon showing a caveman exiting a time machine wearing a funny helmet and telling two cavepeople listening "I come from a hundred years in the future to warn you that nothing really changes in the next hundred years."

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 30/08/2023

Celebrated finishing up one syllabus with a quick sail on the Wolastoq (Saint John) river: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ASK...

A sailboat with a red sail moving away from shore across the river.

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 28/08/2023

Chatting with friends today about baby solidarity--they have it rough--and did some digging to find the "Jr. Wobblies" I love the black (sabo-)cat pin:

A selection of buttons for Jr. Wobblies including a kitten with the phrase "An owie to one is an owie to all"

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 13/08/2023

Thus begins our battle with the knotweed in our new garden. We just moved in and the previous owners had let a stand of the stuff become quite pernicious... We dug it all up and sandwiched it between thick black tarps. In a few years we might have a vegetable patch here?

A large black tarp covers a mound of dug up knotweed

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M. Willis Monroe @willismonroe.com · 10/08/2023

Wait, what is Proto-Elamite? It's an undeciphered (natch...) script from south-western Iran, mostly from the site of Susa. It's roughly contemporaneous to Proto-Cuneiform (i.e. circa 3100 BCE) and is also written on clay with a stylus. There are about ~1700 known tablets. Here are some fun pictures:

A standard economic tablet with accounts, MDP 06, 210: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/8010

A fun doodle on the back of a small tablet fragment, NMI BK 02878: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/520300

A beautiful seal impression of a boat with standards on either side, MDP 06, 223: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/8022

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