Sarah Ames
@semames.bsky.social
540 followers 250 following 38 posts
Digital Scholarship Librarian, National Library of Scotland Here for the digital humanities, open research and the long nineteenth century
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semames.bsky.social
(dataset used, 'Scotland on the Internet', available on Data Foundry soon...)
semames.bsky.social
'Who decides what’s worth remembering, and how does that shape our shared story?' @andreakocsis.bsky.social and Dorsey Kaufmann's exhibition, Digital Ghosts, opens in November. Really happy that NLS could partially fund this work through our Digital Research Fellowship: data.nls.uk/projects/dig...
Digital Ghosts – Data Foundry
data.nls.uk
Reposted by Sarah Ames
celiarichardson.bsky.social
Customer feedback this week;

‘Please can you get some more diversity at the National Trust by encouraging more hot men to visit.’

Ideas for how we do this v welcome. Nothing too racy please - we are the National Trust not the National Tryst.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
melissaterras.bsky.social
So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!
Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration
digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk
Reposted by Sarah Ames
sarahebull.bsky.social
Spent the morning seeing if I could map some of London pornographers' addresses during the mid-19th century w/ the National Library of Scotland's georeferenced maps. Did I need to do this? Probably not. But very neat to see some of them laid out spatially.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
transkribus.bsky.social
Is this our youngest author on Transkribus Sites?

Scottish writer Marjory Fleming was just seven years old when she starting writing her diary, which became popular in the late Victorian period.

You can read the diary in full on Transkribus Sites 👇

app.transkribus.org/en/sites/mar...
Reposted by Sarah Ames
nickames82.bsky.social
The fact this confected issue has smothered everything else in the national debate – and is being allowed to by the government – is a tragedy and going to end very badly if the course does not change quickly.
rolandmcs.bsky.social
'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone.

This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
cwarzel.bsky.social
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
www.theatlantic.com
Reposted by Sarah Ames
samuelmoore.org
"Developing AI technologies in ways that truly benefit the public and treat common resources with care would constitute a more responsible practice, requiring further commitments to transparency and accountability around negative externalities."

Noroozian et al on AI and the digital commons.
Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons: Five Open Questions and Knowledge Gaps
The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) relies heavily on the digital commons, a vast collection of free and open online content that is created, shared, and maintained by communities. However,...
www.arxiv.org
Reposted by Sarah Ames
eve.gd
The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere.

But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.
A banner advert for the University of Warwick, which says "Beyond ignores curiousity". This is a spelling error.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
natlibscot.bsky.social
🎪 The mayhem begins!

Celebrate with us! Doors open at 10am at George IV Bridge (Edinburgh) and Kelvin Hall (Glasgow). Be among the first 500 at each site to get your special edition centenary comic, created by Beano!

#NLS100 #Beano
A sign reading ‘It’s our birthday! 100 today’ in front of the National Library of Scotland building in Edinburgh.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
danielvanstrien.bsky.social
Many VLM-based OCR models have been released recently. Are they useful for libraries and archives?

I made a quick Space to compare VLM OCR with "traditional" OCR using 11k Scottish exam papers from @natlibscot.bsky.social

huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/ocr-time-capsule
Screenshot of the app showing a page from a book + different views of existing and new ocr.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
aarontay.bsky.social
[Blogged] The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search - From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched
aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...
The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search
From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched
aarontay.substack.com
Reposted by Sarah Ames
roopikarisam.bsky.social
Here's a write-up of my keynote from #DH2025, since academic publishing is slow and this was written for right now. roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...
Slide with title Digital Humanities for a World Unmade, blue background with stylized images of a Dutch windmill, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Hagia Sofia, Big Ben, and the Singaporean lion.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
eve.gd
Unsure if that's an opposition to AI or an opposition to the opposition of AI. But the culture of backlash it has created is a real danger that could undo 20 years of utopian thinking, argumentation, and implementation.
Reposted by Sarah Ames
tjowens.bsky.social
The Library of Congress is looking for feedback on their amazing/unique "Selected Datasets" collection. You can see the collection here and the survey link is at the top of the page. www.loc.gov/collections/... Anyone interested in working with datasets check out the collection and take the survey.
About this Collection | Selected Datasets | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
Datasets are increasingly a key digital resource used in a wide range of fields. The Library of Congress selects, preserves, and provides enduring access to datasets with the goal of cultivating a bro...
www.loc.gov
Reposted by Sarah Ames
miaout.bsky.social
Stanford HAI AI Index: 'training compute doubles every five months, datasets every eight, and power use annually' but AI models 'often fail to reliably solve logic tasks even when provably correct solutions exist, limiting their effectiveness in high-stakes settings where precision is critical'
The 2025 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI
hai.stanford.edu
Reposted by Sarah Ames
wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy
For 30 years I've been experimenting with ways to see & use the online collections of libraries, archives & museums. I've made useful things, playful things, & weird things. Here's a big list of them for you to explore! https://wraggelabs.com #glam #histodons #digitalhumanities
Wragge Labs
A compilation of things I've built over the last 30 years to help people see and use the online collections of libraries, archives, and museums.
wraggelabs.com
Reposted by Sarah Ames
suelacey-bryant.bsky.social
Is it human to make a huge profit from knowledge? asks Hilde Van Wijngaarden from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in this afternoon's session on Knowledge as a Catalyst. #LKFS2025
semames.bsky.social
Happy to see this published today, and it's been a real privilege to work on with Paul Gooding, @melissaterras.bsky.social and the @facetpublishing.bsky.social team. Thanks to all the wonderful contributors! Here's the link: www.facetpublishing.co.uk/page/detail/...
Library Catalogues as Data book cover