Mia

I don't want this important news to go unnoticed: the National Library of Scotland's Access team have given names to collection trolleys including: Trolly Parton, George Orwheel, Wheeliam Shakespeare, Daphne du Trollier, Rene Descart, Cart Cobain, JRR Trollkein, Cart Vader, and Mary Wheelstonecraft.

Via @cawston.bsky.social's https://cawston.ghost.io/weeknotes-12-monsters-only/

The poster session at #DH2026 was full of delicious snacks *and* hope for the future of digital humanities. Yay!

A random selection of the last four poster photos I took

'What changed from the abstract, and why' is the most Digital Humanities slide ever. So many presentations sharing honestly what didn't work as expected or yield useful results. This one is by Jiwoo Choi (I think) https://dh-daejeon.vercel.app/abs/65?q=Newspaper

(Here, 'bag of words'-style access to a text corpus was no good. Is it too snarky to ask, is it ever any help?)

#DH2026 Edited to add light sarcasm and hashtag

Big news! I'm incredibly privileged to take on leadership of the Museum Data Service while continuing half-time in my role at the British Library. The MDS is already a success story, and I'm so excited about taking it further! https://artuk.org/discover/stories/museum-data-service-appoints-mia-ridge-as-head-of-service

Some quite personal news for long-time followers and personal connections - 9 years after my initial cancer diagnosis, and six years after treatment for a recurrence, the oncology team have officially discharged me. Which is kinda NHS-speak for: I'm in remission! Yay!!

'Libraries are among the most powerful discovery engines available to an author. The person who borrows your book from the library is, far more often than not, a reader who would not have purchased it at all' https://starkreflections.substack.com/p/the-library-is-not-the-enemy-but

Discover, borrow and read lots of library books! In many countries, the authors get lovely money for it.

I love this, from @ryancordell@hcommons.social : 'In their discussions of hacking, building, and making, we see that DH scholars do not generally seek to convey simple technological skills, but instead to cultivate technological imagination. Specific platforms, applications, and even coding languages come and go, but a technological imagination is able to abstract a problem—whether intellectual, professional, or personal—and formulate a plan for how a tool or suite of tools might help answer it'.

And, 'The complexity of current technological systems, most dramatically evident in the black boxes of artificial intelligence platforms, exacerbates a sense of alienation that hacking, building, making, and indeed crafting seek to ameliorate.' https://ryancordell.org/research/anemoia

In awe of @WScholger@fedihum.org mobilising previous @adho@hcommons.social conference organisers to help a previous reviewer get information she needed for officialdom. Thanks Walter!

[Edit: you'd think I'd be able to get the @adho@hcommons.social handle right! But no]

AI company ad on the tube: 'help me build an app to find dog friendly pubs'. But my friend, where would that data come from? Scraping the websites that already list dog-friendly pubs? Searching pub websites?

And would anyone trust it enough to book a table with friends in the hope that the listing is current and correct? So many questions.

I read: 'Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?
Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930' https://resobscura.substack.com/p/are-vintage-llms-the-start-of-a-new

(Probably not, but it does remind me of work in Living with Machines about the wider impact of language about accidents in newspapers)

Are any vegetarians / vegans at #DH2026 who aren't going to the banquet interested in finding a properly veg*n-friendly dinner?

Audrey Tang @au@g0v.social on 'Software Freedom as Civic Care' and so much more - 'care ethics, democracy, local stewardship and self-governance' https://civic.ai/software-freedom-as-civic-care/

(Edited to add username)

It's a really hot day for all the furries at ComicCon. I admire their commitment to the bit but I also hope the internet doesn't need any emergency fixing today!

Incredible: https://bsky.app/profile/theladyred.bsky.social/post/3mmmitj3omc2u

If you're looking for the original study: 'Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence', Cheng et. al., 2026 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352

ArXiv version: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13995

Thanks to the unpaywall plugin for the open access link https://unpaywall.org

Jisc report: 'Student perceptions of AI 2025' https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-perceptions-of-ai-2025

'A report on how students view artificial intelligence, how they are using it, and their concerns and hopes, based on conversations with students held between June 2024 and May 2025.'

Interesting conversation starter from @thisisaaronland@orthis.social on the SFO Museum blog: 'Shared cross-institutional vector embeddings – how we might get there' https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04/06/shared-embeddings/ - is anyone up for kicking those tyres?

#IIIF #AI4LAM #MuseTech

@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social maybe it feels like a giant spoiler is being forced on people who liked the anonymity?

I'm volunteering as a parkrun marshall and scanner this weekend - the point about manual scanning promoting interactions is so true! 'Just enough technology' is a great mantra for life https://tumshie.me/its-a-run-not-a-race/

Today I learned that Dee Dee Ramone was really into ABBA

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/ramones-debut-album-50-years-punk-hey-ho-lets-go/106585300

There are some really good points in this: NHS patients should be able to write up their own medical records – Will Parman https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/16/nhs-patients-write-medical-records-healthcare-workers

How can museums use repositories to share research, given that it might look so different to 'traditional' academic outputs? https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/making-museum-research-more-visible-open-access-in-the-glam-sector/

A case study on the treasure trove that is https://iro.bl.uk/ from the Science Museum Group

#MuseTech #OpenAccess

'I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped' https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter

'When an AI records everything rather than what we chose to record... The note stops being a reflection of clinical reasoning and becomes a verbatim archive. And as a PMC piece on note bloat explicitly warns, this risks obscuring the most medically important information under a volume of equally-weighted detail.'

For a site that's all about managing itineraries for trips, TripIt is incredibly awkward about place names. Not being able to find medium-sized locations is one thing, but rewriting trip headlines to a random place is another

A lovely post from Jeanette Croen, a PhD placement student, on her work at the British Library doing computational analysis on early printed book descriptions https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/computational-analysis-of-book-descriptions-a-placement-project

Woohoo! 'plug-in [solar] panels that [UK] homeowners can self-install on balconies would be available in supermarkets in the coming months' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czjw7klkjm2o