Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Matthew Kollmer @matthewkollmer.com · 17h

If you, like me, sometimes need to generate thousands of clipping images from Chronicling America, then you may find this post helpful.

It provides my pipeline (code and explanatory text) for programmatically generating newspaper clipping images via the Chronicling America API.

How to Create Newspaper Clipping Images in Chronicling America, Programmatically – Matthew Johannes Kollmer

matthewkollmer.com

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 3d

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

CFP: A Time of Monsters

The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

contingentmagazine.org

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Bryan Banks @bryanbanksphd.bsky.social · 5d

And we have our cover! @cindyermus.bsky.social

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Daniel Hutchinson @dhutchinson.bsky.social · 6d

Absurdity of this existence **gestures around** got you down? Maybe @absurdcompliments.bsky.social can offer some solace?

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @hannahshelley.bsky.social · 6d

I have created a bot that will give you an absurd compliment if you mention the username @absurdcompliments.bsky.social

Absurd compliment generator @absurdcompliments.bsky.social · 6d

Your vibrant voice could teach philosophy to plants

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Nathan Ellstrand @nellstra.bsky.social · 8d

Attention scholars of the Digital Humanities:

Nathan Ellstrand @nellstra.bsky.social · 8d

***Job Opportunity***

Assistant Professor (Teaching-Track) in Computational Humanities, Carnegie Mellon University

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careers.historians.org/jobs/2170109...

Assistant Professor (Teaching-Track) in Computational Humanities in Pittsburgh, PA for Carnegie Mellon University

Exciting opportunity in Pittsburgh, PA for Carnegie Mellon University as a Assistant Professor (T...

careers.historians.org

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 8d

"Would you like to play a game?"

"Wargames" are simulations involving adversarial conflict that are used to assist in decision-making.

More than war, they are used for business, geopolitics, emergency response, entertainment, & more.

We wrote a paper on LLMs for wargames
arxiv.org/abs/2509.17192

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Bryan Edward Stone (שָׁלוֹם) @bestonetx.bsky.social · 9d

The editors of Southern Jewish History are pleased to announce the publication of the journal's 28th annual issue.

Since 1998, SJH has published peer-reviewed scholarship about Jewish history in the American South. Contributors are historians, archivists, librarians, and genealogists. 🗃️

Cover of Southern Jewish History, v. 28 (2025). The cover displays a color image of a fiber art depiction of Rachel Brill Ezekiel, an early 20th century suffragist, shown in a dark black dress and hat. She stands in front of a window, through which can be seen a group of women in white dresses and gold sashes demonstrating for suffrage carrying American flags. The background behind Ezekiel is bright blue and gold.

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Cindy Ermus @cindyermus.bsky.social · 9d

Please join us a week from today for History of Medicine Week! Free registration through link below. @aahmhistmed.bsky.social

Cindy Ermus @cindyermus.bsky.social · Sep 3

On 6 Oct, 10-11am CST, Dr. Cath Burns of U of Johannesburg will deliver a Zoom talk for medical hums. at Nebraska titled "Faith, Hope and Science in the Time of AIDS: The Sinikethemba Centre and McCord Zulu Hospital." Flyer, abstract, & bio below.
Advance registration required: go.unl.edu/hmedburns

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 9d

Excited that longtime Viral Texts collaborator Avery Blankenship’s *American Literature* article is out—stemming from a chapter of her diss, it outlines her research using infrared spectroscopy to analyze food stains in C19 cookbooks—interesting for DH, book history, bibliography, and foodies alike

Literary Forensics as Method: Chemical Analysis, Food Stains, and Readerly Encounters with Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks

Abstract. Much of the study of cookbooks relies on guesswork and reading between the lines that are written down—the type of guesswork that requires cookbooks be read alongside other types of texts ra...

read.dukeupress.edu

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 11d

And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data

How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Daniel Hutchinson @dhutchinson.bsky.social · 13d

Recommend this really moving piece by @bcgl.bsky.social on the challenging questions raised when representing the past with technologies like AI.

Longreads @longreads.com · 13d

“But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?”

The grandson of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor grapples with the use of AI to reanimate the dead.

A new essay on @longreads.com, by @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 15d

I think this miiight be the best feed for machine-learning news on Bluesky. It strikes a good balance between new/popular and whitelist/regex factors in the algorithm.

Scott McGrath @smcgrath.phd · 16d

🔁 If you are enjoying the feed, please like and share it with others for discoverability!

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20d

The Ohio State University is now requiring students to become "fluent" in AI. It's a perverse metaphor, and as always, the wisdom of Star Trek proves useful in understanding its perversity.

sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

Can You Become "Fluent" in "AI"? — Sonja Drimmer

No. But the Ohio State University says that its students are required to pursue this goal if they want to receive their degree. Time was when engineers, linguists, and psychologists wanted to create ...

sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com

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Daniel Hutchinson @dhutchinson.bsky.social · 21d

I've used Clio for some great teaching exercises - highly recommend for those interested in mapping the past or cool forms of public history.

History News Network @myhnn.bsky.social · 21d

Read @davidtrowbridge.bsky.social on Clio.

History News Network @myhnn.bsky.social · 22d

🗃️ We’re kicking off a new series today on public history. www.hnn.us/article/star...

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

The JER Pano @thejerpano.bsky.social · 22d

Read the last "Teaching the Early Republic" #JERPano post!

Molly Nebiolo explains how student mapping projects boost classroom engagement in "Connecting Across Time and Space: Using Maps and Memory to Teach the Eighteenth Century."

Available on The Panorama: thepanorama.shear.org/2025/09/16/u...

Connecting Across Time and Space: Using Maps and Memory to Teach the Eighteenth Century

Student mapping projects become an opportunity for better student engagement in Molly Nebiolo’s courses.

thepanorama.shear.org

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 22d

Our tool Riveter💪 used for a creative and interesting study of fan fiction! Riveter helps you work with “connotation frames” (verb lexica) to measure biases in your dataset. @julianeugarten.bsky.social’s overview and explanations are really clear, highly recommend!

github.com/maartensap/r...

Julia Neugarten @julianeugarten.bsky.social · 23d

Proud to see my article 'Using Riveter to map gendered power dynamics in Hades/Persephone fan fiction' in @journal.transformativeworks.org, my favorite academic journal.

Want to know how fanfiction portrays power dynamics between these two? Read on!

journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...

Using Riveter to map gendered power dynamics in Hades/Persephone fan fiction | Transformative Works and Cultures

journal.transformativeworks.org

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22d

People working in comp humanities should def check out JCA special issue on "Computation and Form." It's actually very historical! Editors' intro explores the history of DH; @jeddobson.bsky.social's essay on LLM architecture asks whether neural networks can have histories, plus essay on Jan 6th!

Vol. 10, Issue 3, 2025 | Published by Journal of Cultural Analytics

In this special issue, we bring together scholars from across multiple disciplines to reconsider the intersections of computation and form at this emerging technological and critical moment.

culturalanalytics.org

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Sarah E. Bond @sarahebond.bsky.social · 23d

The Association of Ancient Historians meeting will be in Iowa City from April 16-18, 2026. For those new to the AAH, we have preset panel themes; you pick 1 to apply to. The theme overall is Ancient Exchanges in a Global Antiquity. See CFP: abstracts are due by December 1. aah.conference.uiowa.edu

AAH Annual Conference 2026 | The University of Iowa

The 2026 AAH Annual Meeting will take place in person at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA from April 16-18, 2026. We invite abstracts for papers of 15-20 minutes in length. Please submit anonym...

aah.conference.uiowa.edu

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 23d

LLMs introduce a huge range of new capabilities for research, but also make it possible for researchers to "hack" their results in new ways by how they chose to use models for annotation

This is a useful pass at quantifying some of the risk, and some mitigation strategies arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · 27d

I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress.

Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 26d

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

Survey on Serendipity and Information Seeking in Digital Collections

Purpose of the Study We are seeking to understand the different methods of information seeking in digital collections. In addition, we would like to understand what the participants' perceptions of se...

forms.gle

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 29d

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches
dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News

dhq.digitalhumanities.org

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Karen Averby 🌊 @karenaverby.bsky.social · Sep 9

Completing a rural #HouseHistory with tall tales of escaped German POWs hiding in the barn, complete with plane crash & complicit farmer. The truth is less Boys' Own Adventure but no less interesting. Such stories are v much part of the house's history!
POW camps: www.theguardian.com/news/datablo...

Every prisoner of war camp in the UK mapped and listed

What would happen if the UK's prison population suddenly increased by 400,000 people? That's what happened between 1939 and 1948, when thousands of Germans, Ukranians and others became Britain's priso...

www.theguardian.com

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Daniel Hutchinson @dhutchinson.bsky.social · 29d

Available here: archive.is/ugSFF

archive.is

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Reposted by Daniel Hutchinson

Mark Stout, Ph.D. in History, Miskatonic University @markstout.bsky.social · Sep 8

An October 1942 FBI leaflet asking the residents of Buffalo to report any "possible violation[s] of our national security statutes" or anything suspicious to the Buffalo Field Office. It concluded, however, with the paragraph below.

Seemed relevant today somehow.

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