Old Habits, New Tools
We have had computers for half a century and still make digital editions as if they were printed books. My new lesson for Programming Historian en français, the first of two parts, …
Skyrails, Rebuilt from Screenshots
Skyrails, Yose Widjaja's remarkable 3D network explorer, vanished from the web years ago. From a handful of screenshots, Claude rebuilt it overnight. Then the original turned up on …
persNamer 1.2: One VIAF Number, Nine Authority Files
persNamer takes a VIAF number and hands back a TEI person entry. Version 1.2 makes that entry worth having: variant names, normalised dates, the identifiers of nine national and …
The Fence, Not the Fire
Amazon is destroying second-hand books to scan them, and the press has reached for Savonarola and the Berlin pyre. The comparison does not hold. The real question is who gets to …
Dear Editors: If You Want My Voice, Give Me Back My Language
Progress in Human Geography threatens retraction for authors who use AI to write "in a language they would never themselves normally employ", while requiring everyone to publish in …
tei-mcp v0.3: Encoding TEI Without Rewriting the Source
tei-mcp v0.3 introduces span-locked composition, which makes the most damaging hallucination in AI-assisted TEI encoding impossible: silent rewrites of the source. The model never …
A Different Kind of Digital Edition
Most primary sources never get published. The grant-funded digital edition model is too expensive, too centralised, and too fragile to work at scale. Here's why I'm building the …
tei-mcp: TEI P5 for AI Agents
tei-mcp is an open-source MCP server that gives AI coding assistants direct access to the TEI P5 specification — element lookup, attribute resolution, nesting validation, …
Teaching Binary with the ITA2 Telegraph Emulator
An interactive demonstration of the ITA2 (Baudot-Murray) telegraph code that helps students grasp fundamental concepts of binary encoding and state machines
A Perceptual Geography of the Levante
The Levante is an elusive toponym, as it is usually defined in relation with--or in opposition to--another territory. What was then Tuscany's Levante in the 16th century? The data …