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Dr Franziska Kohlt

@frankendodo.bsky.social

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · Nov 18

And it's a wrap! I concluded my Carrollian Fellowship at the University of Southern California with the launch of the "Spectral Science" exhibition, and world premiere of the completely sold out, hour-long Phantasmagoria Magic Lantern show I co-created from my research. Absolute life highlight! 🪞🔮

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Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Nanna B Thylstrup @nannathylstrup.bsky.social · 9d

✨Deeply honoured to deliver this year's Annual Digital Lecture at The National Archives! Drawing on our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project, I'll explore how preservation creates loss in the digital age and what that means for the politics of archives. Nov 20 6pm at Senate House, London. Do join us!

Jane Winters @jfwinters.bsky.social · 9d

Join us on 20 November for the Annual Digital Lecture, a partnership between The National Archives, UK and the School of Advanced Study. The wonderful @nannathylstrup.bsky.social will be speaking about ‘When saving becomes loss: archival memory in the digital age’. Free to register!

When saving becomes loss: Archival memory in the digital age

Explore archival memory, data loss, and attempts to preserve the past in the digital age at this year’s Annual Digital Lecture.

www.eventbrite.co.uk

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 10d

How, after all this, is it still Monday...?

Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Efram Sera-Shriar @dreframss.bsky.social · 11d

We are currently open to receiving proposals for themed issues with @advancesjournal.bsky.social, which is published through Taylor and Francis, and is the official journal of @incsa.bsky.social. If you have ideas for a collection, email me.

Details👇
in-csa.com/themed-speci...

Special / Themed Issues Call for Proposals – International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association

Call for Proposals Special / Themed Issues Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research The Journal of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (INCSA) Follow on BlueSky Advances in Ninetee...

in-csa.com

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Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 13d

Let’s say, hypothetically, you appreciated our position paper and @olivia.science and I would be recording answers to questions about it. What questions would you have?

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 20d

🧵 Thread with my favourite quotes from:

📝 Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

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Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia

Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these col...

doi.org

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Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Ritabrata Chowdhury @ritabrata1907.bsky.social · 14d

The Cambridge University Entomological Society is hosting a symposium on ”The good, the bad, and the monstrous: insects in mythology, literature and media”, at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, on 20th November 2025.

Huge thanks to @royentsoc.bsky.social for supporting us!

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 14d

Oh what a wonderful thing to see in my news feed today! I have such fond memories of their congregation when Ilived in Cairo as a child

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 14d

I feel that deeply.

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 14d

Yess! Amazing! (Not that I didn't know all along, haha!)

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 14d

Great news for everyone working on cultural entomology - Call for Papers from the @cam.ac.uk Entomological Society & @royentsoc.bsky.social - “The good, the bad, and the monstrous: Insects in mythology, literature and media"
Deadline for Abstracts: 20 October '25
Symposium Date: 20 November '25

Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Dr Suresh Singh @palaeosingh.bsky.social · 15d

New paper by Petrulevičius & Gutiérrez presents the oldest winged insects 🦟 from Argentina 🇦🇷 dating back to the early #Carboniferous - More insight into the early diversification of animal life & ecosystems on land. ⬇️

#Paleontology #Science

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Oldest winged insects: first Megasecoptera from the early Carboniferous (Serpukhovian) of Argentina

Mississippian insect records are extremely rare. Formally, winged insects occur only at two sites from the Serpukhovian: Delitzsch in Germany, with one species of Palaeodictyoptera; and Guandacol 1 i...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 14d

*excitement increases*

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

As this version of the Labour party is sadly our response to fascism, I didn't have much hope on that end to begin with

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

Reading 19th century Luddite gaslighting in the context of current AI criticism is also never not *an experience* #histsci #histSTM

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

hmu - dodgy Marx translations are my forte

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

Right? I once attended an anniversary event for this, when lots of archival stuff was got out, and the conversations around it at the time, sounded exactly what you'd expect them to - and yet it was astonishing to hear it spelled out

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

*looks away sheepishly in 5"4 woman in martial arts*

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

Oh very interesting!

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 17d

Really excited to be returning to Amsterdam as Keynote Speaker for the Capegemini Executive Congress to reflect on lessons, in the many fast-moving debates we can learn from the history of Artificial Intelligence& Automata, with Industry& Academic leaders in the field www.sogeti.com/summit2025/s...

Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Dr Lindsey Fitzharris @drlindseyfitz.bsky.social · 17d

Please: if you have Indefinite Leave to Remain and are eligible for citizenship, apply now. In 2015, I went through a terrible divorce. I was on a marriage visa, and my ex reported me as illegally in the UK in order to get me deported. It was VERY scary. Your rights can disappear in a flash.

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 18d

Reform's plans to end indefinite leave to remain go to the post I wrote last week on their slide towards chaotic authoritarianism.

The British constitution would allow them to do it if they had a majority but at vast cost to our society and way of life.

samf.substack.com/p/the-route-...

The route to chaotic authoritarianism

Why Reform’s deportation plan would have consequences well beyond asylum

samf.substack.com

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Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 18d

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review

Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 19d

That's an instant follow from me

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 19d

I have now on more than one occasion seen AI plagiarism of my own publications in peer review. None of this is a drill.

Leon Black @drleonblack.bsky.social · 20d

Enhanced privacy and security, having already been trained using the works of others.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly

Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright.

www.nature.com

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Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 19d

This is my favourite reply.

Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · 19d

Fun fact: the Oxford DPhil (PhD) and its 3 year model was introduced to make them competitive with US and German universities - they knew they could then not compete academically, but, they could, as a business model: against a fee, you'd be done quicker.

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