Ruth Ahnert

Hi to new followers, a bit about me: I’m an early modernist by training but I have worked more and more on collaborative digital humanities projects in recent years. Here’s a thread of a few things I’ve published recently.

U of Guelph is hiring a TT Assistant Prof in Philosophy/AI Ethics to teach in part with @antimony27.bsky.social, @paulbarrett1.bsky.social, and me in Culture and Technology Studies, our DH undergrad major. Pls check out the job ad & reach out with any questions! careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-A...

Any thoughts from the afternoon/non-UK crowd?

DH friends. Anyone have ideas for publication venues for outcomes of smaller bits of exploratory work? We have some fun outcomes but probably don’t want to spend time working them into something big; but feel they are interesting to the community. I know I’m forgetting something obvious!

Ooh I’m so excited to see this. Paget gets mentioned in my Tudor Networks book as someone who the stats make clear should have more scholarly attention! Glad he’s getting some. Looking forward to reading.

'Numerous universities have begun employing staff through subsidiaries in a bid to cut pension costs. Institutions are not required to submit to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) pay data relating to such staff, whereas they are for directly employed staff.' Adding insult to injury.

We are delighted to be hosting another series of the 'Race and the #earlymodern' seminar with @folger.edu. This term we will be hosting three WIP sessions with Dr. Mira Zoubeida 'Assaf, Aman Williams, and Rebecca Adusei, respectively. Full details below! kingsearlymodern.co.uk/upcoming-sem...

It's just weird isn't it when the British Museum is running a sold-out exhibition, when The Odyssey reports $1billion at the box office, when the V&A has just opened the most innovative and accessible museum model in Europe....and this is what our minister for research comes out with.

When did the UK decide it didn't need Higher Education? How did we move from deindustrialization, to a knowledge economy and then decide that we could do it all on vibes and 'entrepreneurial spirit'

I know I’m a bore on this but here’s why the Science Minister should absolutely care about the humanities and social sciences rather than thinking it is for DCMS ukri.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...

When asked in the Q&A about arts and humanities he says he personally values them (seems very genuine) but that he is the Science Minister, and it’s for the DCMS Minister to make the case for those. He’s perhaps not yet clocked he is responsible for all R&D. Would Wissenschaft Minister work better?

My job must be real because there’s a blog post! www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/c...

My new article about LLMs is finally out in AI & Society! It argues that LLMs produce text metaphorically, through juxtaposing tokens that are related in some dimensions yet unrelated in others. This is why we see misaligned citations in scientific articles. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

'Research from the British Academy shows that graduates in the arts, humanities and social sciences are just as likely to be employed as their STEM counterparts. They are equally resilient during economic downturns and more likely to move between sectors without wage penalties.' 1/3

🚨 Excellent opportunity for grassroot organisations: The €2 million Building Narrative Power funding and learning programme offers grants of up to €150,000 to develop and test narrative strategies around three areas: data centres, jobs and young people’s lives europeanaifund.org/newspublicat...

'Early career opportunities have rapidly declined in the fields of arts and humanities amid UK job cuts, with teaching-only roles increasingly the only positions available for those just starting out, an analysis by the British Academy has found.' 1/3

A new resource from @britishacademy.bsky.social, out today, maps changes in UK academic staff numbers and contract types between 2012/13 & 2024/25 for the arts, humanities & social sciences bit.ly/4w47SmP You can search by subject (incl history), provider, region & forms of employment #Skystorians

The Society will write up a summary for History for next week. Key points at this stage include: > 11% decline (-440 FPE) across all History staff between 2018/19 and 2024/25, compared with a 7% decline across all humanities > loss of 140 FPE History roles 2022/23 to 2024/25 #Skystorians 1/3

“Without intervention, we risk narrowing the UK’s research and development knowledge base, reducing opportunity and access to key subjects, particularly in regions already underserved, and weakening the long-term sustainability of the Shape disciplines". (Margot Finn) 1/3

Feel this so hard. Although of course respondent is right: all we humans just use a minus sign!

Society for Renaissance Studies: Two scholarships of £4,000 each, to contribute to the costs of postgraduate study. rensoc.org.uk/apply/schola...

still waiting for the “difficult decision” not to fund the latest tech scam

Trying to clear the decks a bit before starting the new job, and finally submitted something I’ve been fiddling with for 10 years - and I’m not rounding up for effect! That makes me feel old…

New chapter out in this OA book, which I co-authored with the inimitable Delfi Neto-Isabel. It’s called ‘Data Feminism, Network Analysis and the Pre-modern Archive’. www.peterlang.com/document/141...

'When Labour took power in 2024, it was braced for a host of problems. One of those it did not anticipate, or perhaps want to deal with, was the financial crisis inherited in the university sector.' Except for universities being specifically named in Sue Gray's Top Ten Problems list, that is.

Also working-class autodidacts didn't just read alone - they read in groups, set up libraries and reading rooms, and battled for Mechanics' Institutes (many long ago merged into unis) to teach music, history, and politics. They built the public adult education infrastructure that's being destroyed

The sub-head is seriously questionable: “how changing student preferences are fundamentally reshaping universities” buys into the university’s narrative that this is driven by falling recruitment leading to deficits. How can that be, when Exeter has been eating other people’s lunch for years?

Consider applying! This is an incredibly rewarding role both because of the great and friendly team you work with, the ideas people share with you, and the editorial experience. Also fun!

I genuinely do not understand why vocational pathways are for working-class youths rather than for youths as a whole. Just as universities are meant to be available for higher education learners, not for middle-class learners or the posherati.

Hey Bluesky crowd! You also should be signing our petition opposing the announced redundancies at the University of Exeter. 📢 We're 17k and growing! Redundancies ARE NOT necessary and we must #DefendExeterUni 🩷 c.org/RFqMvrKb6z

Don't miss the June issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities, brought to you by World Cup superfans @jenguiliano.bsky.social & me ! ⚽️ #ReviewsInDH reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v7-n6

'Andy Burnham has set out ambitions to put universities “at the heart of local economies” and to make the UK the world’s leading “innovation nation”, in a speech making those goals central to his “Manchesterism” vision for the UK if he becomes prime minister.' What's left of universities, that is.

Nothing tells historians that someone is not a historian more than their belief that manuscripts should be handled with gloved hands.

If young people are being taught by society/government messaging/their parents/schools that they won't be able to make a living if they study a humanities subject we are creating a vicious cycle. We must ask who does this messaging serve and why is our society buying into it?

the cuts to higher education in the UK are ideological. they are based in a false valuation of the humanities that is entirely founded in erroneous concepts of employability and demand. these cuts are not financially necessary; they are a stripping of the humanities for political reasons.

Humanities, arts and social sciences prop up stem - we cost less to run but are modelled as costing the same. Exeter does not have a financial deficit. This is ideological.

ANOTHER opportunity at Cambridge Digital Humanities: 2026/27 Methods Fellowship. Deadline 17 July. More details here: www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/methods/meth...

Cambridge Digital Humanities (my new home from Sept!) is inviting proposals for the next round of British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Esp in memory studies, semiotics, semantics and AI and emergent literary forms. Details here: www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/b...

Thanks for this thoughtful review Adam!

My review of 'Tudor Networks of Power' by @ruthahnert.bsky.social and @sebastianahnert.bsky.social is now out in the Journal of British Studies. A really interesting work for those interested in the 'how' of historical research. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Can the new DiffusionGemma model help fix broken OCR? In theory, denoising tokens in parallel could work better for OCR correction since context is seen upfront? Pointed it at 19th-century newspaper OCR. It corrected better than the autoregressive baseline — at ~8x the speed.

Job Opportunity! Assistant Professor in European and or Global History (pre-1800) University of Limerick - School of History and Geography www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRU993/a...