Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · 23d

Also, if you are a scholar of the Ancient Near East, consider sending us your stuff! It will be published in our edited collection for Nature:

www.nature.com/collections/...

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · 23d

Second week of travel of a busy September, I am at the great Bytes&Bygones conference as a complete intruder, but with good friends.

Incredible organization and such an honour to be here.

www.bab.ugent.be

From bits of history to bytes of data: AI and the study of the ancient Near East

This Collection aims at examining the computational and digital study of “greater Western Asia” and its epistemological implications.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Rainer Simon @aboutgeo.bsky.social · Sep 8

We just released IMMARKUS 1.0 - our first full release!

An open-source tool for semantic image annotation: multi-image workbench, AI-powered selection tools, ontology builder, knowledge graph, #IIIF support.

Runs fully local–no login, no-signups, no data sent to the cloud!

👉 immarkus.xmarkus.org

IMMARKUS

An image annotation environment for the MARKUS platform. Developed by Prof. Dr. Hilde De Weerdt, Dr. Rainer Simon, Dr. Lee Sunkyu, Dr. Iva Stojević, Meret Meister, and Xi Wangzhi with funding from the...

immarkus.xmarkus.org

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Sep 5

I have officially arrived at the office 😆

Katherine McDonald @katherinemcdon.bsky.social · Sep 5

Thought my new robot hoover was exciting, but I've just been talking to someone about their smart travel mug so clearly I'm behind the times 😄

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Gabriel Bodard @palaeofuturist.bsky.social · Sep 1

W00t!

Three fantastic people, who now make @durhamclassics.bsky.social one of the premier centres for digital classics in the world.

#DigiClass

Durham Classics and Ancient History @durhamclassics.bsky.social · Sep 1

🎉 Happy new (academic) year, and welcome to three new colleagues!

💻 We are joined today by Dr Chiara Palladino and Dr Thea Sommerschield, both as Assistant Professors in Digital Humanities and the Ancient Greek World.

👩🏫 Dr Ilaria Bucci joined us back in May as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Sep 2

Almost forgot!

There are some news...

Durham Classics and Ancient History @durhamclassics.bsky.social · Sep 1

🎉 Happy new (academic) year, and welcome to three new colleagues!

💻 We are joined today by Dr Chiara Palladino and Dr Thea Sommerschield, both as Assistant Professors in Digital Humanities and the Ancient Greek World.

👩🏫 Dr Ilaria Bucci joined us back in May as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Gary Hornseth @garyhornseth.bsky.social · Aug 30

A website that lets you select a country or state and move it around a Mercator projection map to yield better size comparisons.

thetruesize.com, created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice

Five rescaled maps of Minnesota on a Mercator projection map, covering 1) a large part of northern Greenland, 2) a large part of northern Scandinavia, 3) a part of central Europe, 4) a region of southern India, 5) a region of southeastern Australia.

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Gil Shalit @dh-dev.com · Aug 30

Join us why don't you :-)

e-editiones.bsky.social @e-editiones.bsky.social · Aug 30

The e-editiones community meetups are back! 🎉

📅 Sept 2, 2025 · 17:00 CEST

🎙️ Gil Shalit (@dh-dev.com): The Hasidic Stories Browser – an alternative frontend to a TEI-Publisher corpus

🔗 Details: www.e-editiones.org/posts/commun...

#DigitalHumanities #TEI

Screenshot of https://www.hasidic-stories.org/

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Gabriel Bodard @palaeofuturist.bsky.social · Aug 29

#TEIFriday
I've been looking at recommendations for the most interchangeable way to encode interoperability data from person datasets in TEI XML (which in some contexts is more useful and feasible than using RDF).

Starting with first couple lines of code in this thread.

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · Aug 28

Please share! We're trying to crowd-source a dataset of post-1929 novels with maps.

Axel Bax @axel-bax.bsky.social · Aug 28

We are trying to create a list of in-copyright novels that contain maps. If you know of some, drop them in the thread below! 🧵👇

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · Jul 23

Over the weekend I drew these two subway maps for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and shared them. A lot of you asked about purchasing them, and now you can!

You can buy one or both (as digital files or as prints) at my brand new Etsy shop:

surprisedeelmaps.etsy.com

Subway-style map of the itinerary in The Hobbit. The main journey is show in three different lines: red (Hobbiton to Goblin Town); green (Goblin Town to the Elvenking's Halls); and blue (Elvenking's Halls to Erebor). There are multiple stops on these lines. There is a yellow line going back from Erebor to Hobbiton, making stops at Beorn's Hall, Rivendell, and the Troll's Lair. There is an orange line directly from the Iron Hills on the map's right side to Erebor, and a purple line from Gundabad directly to Erebor.

The map's title reads: "Hobbit Transit Map" and there are directions for both There and Back Again listing the lines and transfer points. Between them, in the middle of the page, is a dragon drawn to resemble the dragon on Thror's Map from The Hobbit.

A key shows the names of each colored line:
Red: Western Lands Line
Green: Mountains and Forests Line
Blue: Barrel Line
Yellow: Gandalf Express
Orange: Iron Hills Business Line
Purple: Orc and Goblin Reserve Line

Text at the bottom right reads Surprised Eel Maps, 2025

Subway style map to go with The Lord of the Rings, showing the different pathways of various parties throughout the book. The title reads: "Lord of the Rings Transit Map: One Does Not Simply Walk Ino Mordor When One Can Ride." The map takes up the middle part of the page, and there are two keys. The one on the left is titles "Standard Service Lines, and has color keys matched to the subway lines on the map. Lines are named:
"Shire-Bree Commuter Line
Old Forrest Crescent
Wildland Scenic Line
Fellowship Line
Gollum / Sméagol Line
Uruk Hai Express
Three Hunters Line
Fangorn Slow Service
Rohan to Gondor Business Line
Black Ships Ferry Service
Oliphant Direct Line
Army of the West Line
Gandalf Express

A smaller key on the right side of the map is labeled: "Limited Service Lines" and has color keys matched to the following names lines:
"Eagle Express
Paths of the Dead Line
Nazgûl Search & Resuce
Valinor Ltd."

Two notes at the bottom read:
"* Mount Doom station only accepts Rings of Power in payment. Plan accordingly.
+ Transfer voucher for ferry service at Grey Havens station is for outbound tafle only."

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Tom @alas-not-me.bsky.social · Jul 20

For all students and scholars facing a deadline, you are not alone. Tolkien wrote to his son, Michael, on 1 March 1939:

"I am going off to Scotland on Monday night or Tuesday morning, & have not written the infernal lecture yet. Not much bed for me between then and now, I fear"

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Elisa Beshero-Bondar @epyllia.bsky.social · Jul 18

Locations for next ADHO conferences:
2026 : Daejeon, South Korea
2027: Galway, Ireland
2028: Capetown, South Africa !

dh2026.adho.org

#dh2025 #dh2026 #dh2027 #dh2028

DH2026 in Daejeon, South Korea

dh2026.adho.org

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

I guess there is a legitimate concern about credit mechanisms, especially when people spend years curating data and when jobs and funding depend on demonstrating impact. Perhaps we need a serious and honest discussion about attribution mechanisms, beyond paper citations?

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

Very nice final thoughts:

"Your local community is my global community" #DH2025

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

Reuse of data through interpersonal collaboration and shared projects can change the academic culture. However, data are deeply dependent on research questions and data models - reuse can become a double-edged sword. #DH2025

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Javier Cha @javiercha.bsky.social · Jul 18

This is super important. In several instances at #DH2025, I've heard colleagues say that newer releases of ChatGPT have gained domain expertise in their subfield—probably because OpenAI scraped and absorbed open data refined and curated by specialists from GitHub and HuggingFace. No credits given.

Glen Layne-Worthey @gworthey.bsky.social · Jul 18

Matt Gold on ethics & complicity of OA publishing: encouraging students to publish openly their work that may (or will) be monetized and capitalized by the AI industry.

Citation: "Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons." doi.org/10.48550/arX...

#DH2025

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. To our knowledge, we conduct the first, ...

doi.org

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Glen Layne-Worthey @gworthey.bsky.social · Jul 18

Matt Gold on ethics & complicity of OA publishing: encouraging students to publish openly their work that may (or will) be monetized and capitalized by the AI industry.

Citation: "Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons." doi.org/10.48550/arX...

#DH2025

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. To our knowledge, we conduct the first, ...

doi.org

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Glen Layne-Worthey @gworthey.bsky.social · Jul 18

'Rethinking the Ethics of “Open” in the Shadow of AI' :: a eye-poppingly important and panel with @medievalben.bsky.social @mkgold.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social @filipa-calado.bsky.social

Ben situates the panel by first proposing "shadow" rather than "age" of AI to defang it a bit

#DH2025

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

Impressive how complementary conversations are going on at two different panels at the same time.... #DH2025

Glen Layne-Worthey @gworthey.bsky.social · Jul 18

Rather than "protect" free speech and open data rights of AI-scrapers, how about respecting rights of data owners, and differentiating rights based on intended uses?
Example of the granular Nwulite Obodo Data License, which is tripartite, has different terms for users in/out of Africa, etc.
#DH2025

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

Also, what is #data? Not everyone actually knows that they have data, because they are not familiar with the concept. Definitions matter. Data is collections, corpora, archives, libraries ... "stuff".

#DH2025

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

Barbara McGillivray emphasizing the excellent work of the Journal of Open Humanities Data in empowering data-centric research. #DH2025

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Chiara Palladino @geophilologist.bsky.social · Jul 18

@tolonen.bsky.social at open language data panel at #DH2025: researchers have to prioritize the research questions. Scalability, expressed as interoperability, standards, data sharing are infrastructure tasks. Data publications, data releases should not be byproducts but actual outputs.

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

DH2026 | X/Twitter (@DH2026_Daejeon) @dh2026daejeon.bsky.social · Jul 18

We're now on Mastodon! You can find the official account for DH2026 Daejeon at the link below.

Please give us a follow for the latest news and updates. We look forward to connecting with you there!

#DH2026
mastodon.social/@dh2026daejeon

DH2026 (@[email protected])

mastodon.social

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Reposted by Chiara Palladino

Christof Schöch @christof.fedihum.org.ap.brid.gy · Jul 18

Oh! Cool talk and important task, but in this case, it turned out that all general LLMs performed better than the fine-tuned, task-specific, language-specific LLMs for NER in Urdu, in this talk at #dh2025 on "Leveraging LLMs for NER Task on Historical Literary Data in Urdu as a Low-Resource […]

Original post on fedihum.org

fedihum.org

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