I attended the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association’s conference, which was held at the University of Glasgow this week.  See the programme here: https://digitalhumanities-uk-ie.org/2025-annual-event/2025-annual-event-programme/.  It was a great opportunity to hear about new and ongoing Digital Humanities related research.  As expected, there was a lot of discussion of AI, with a wide range of viewpoints represented, from enthusiastic adopters to a speaker giving an impassioned account of the dangers of big tech and the risks of reliance on AI.  I learnt a new term – ‘retrieval-augmented generation’, a concept that allows large language models to consult and incorporate a specified set of documents in addition to training data before generating answers, which helps reduce AI hallucinations and allows users to access cited sources.  Another speaker discussed ‘digital necromancy’ and ‘AI afterlives’ – how AI is used to create representations of dead people based on the data they have left behind.  Another speaker discussed how we are now in the ‘post-API era’ when companies that used to make their APIs publicly available for researchers to access have now closed these off to prevent access to them by web scrapers for AI systems.

Another speaker used the term ‘digital dinosaurs’ and although this wasn’t greatly expanded upon in the talk it got me thinking that maybe I am such a digital dinosaur – one of the first generation of born digital people who still very much lives a digital life but has been somewhat left behind by the pace of change – who doesn’t engage with social media and doesn’t use AI and instead uses ‘traditional’ digital systems such as web sites and emails.

Other speakers discussed specific tools and approaches they use.  A library discussed their use of the Omeka platform, a PhD student discussed using OpenRefine (https://openrefine.org/) for analysing data and Flourish (https://flourish.studio/) for generating visualisations.

There was an interesting presentation by a team who are using Transkribus to transcribe the Darmstädter Tagblatt newspaper, which has multiple layouts over its more than 200 years in print.  They discussed how they trained Transkribus to identify the regions and stated that their training is available for other projects, so I’ll have to see whether I could maybe reuse this for the Edinburgh Gazetteer.  They also discussed their workflow system, which they developed using the Prefect Python library (https://www.prefect.io/).  They also used a local installation of Transkribus, which was interesting to hear as I didn’t realise this was a possibility.

Another project discussed qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning, which uses LLMs to extract things relating to space and time from texts, looking for terms such as ‘next to’ or ‘alongside’ in order to extract events and relationships.  The project generated a nice visualisation of spatial clusters by paragraph over the course of a text, showing the number of times certain places were mentioned throughout a text.

Another speaker discussed the detailed digitisation of settlements and used the ESRI Experience Builder (https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-experience-builder/overview) to integrate and visualise the data.  Another presentation discussed using gaming systems to encourage reading in younger people.  They discussed the British Library’s ‘off the map’ game design competition, and ‘Litcraft’ (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/litcraft/) which generates places from works of literature (e.g. Treasure Island) in Minecraft.  It was really interesting to hear all of the talks and I’m glad I had the opportunity to attend the event.

At the event I bumped into Moira Rankin of the University’s Archives and Special Collections, who I used to work with before starting my current job in 2012.  We discussed a couple of the old resources I’d been involved with developing that are no longer publicly available, and whether I might be available to help get them back online again.  We’re going to meet at a later date to discuss this further.

Also this week I added a further updated video to the Seeing Speech IPA charts for Eleanor Lawson and I spent a bit of time working on the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  For this I created a list of all parts of speech referenced in every entry in the dictionary’s management system.  There are more than 100 different parts of speech listed across the entries and these need to be rationalised before I can develop a part of speech limit option for the advanced search.  This list allows the editors to see how many entries feature each part of speech and can then edit the entries as required.  I will also create a script to batch edit entries once the editors have worked through the list.

A couple of weeks ago the Iona people noticed that Google wasn’t doing a very good job of indexing the Iona place-names site and I spent a bit of time investigating what was going wrong towards the end of the week.  The site is hosted on a server within the university network and a while back we encountered an issue whereby web crawlers were swamping the server with requests, making all sites run slowly and in some cases crashing the server completely.  My colleague Luca therefore blocked web crawlers from accessing the sites on the server and the speed increase was remarkable.  However, it turns out that blocking all web crawlers also blocked Google from indexing the sites, an unintended and pretty serious consequence.

Luca and I worked together this week to test out some updates to the server software and these should hopefully block many web crawlers but will still enable legitimate indexing bots (not just Google’s) to access the sites.  Using Google’s search console (a tool available to verified owners of websites) I checked that their systems can now access the Iona site (and all others on the server).  It will probably take a few days (possibly longer) for Google’s indexes to be updated, but eventually we should begin to see the Iona pages appearing as they should in the Google search results again.

I also helped Rob Maslen with an issue he was experiencing with his City of Lost Books blog (https://thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/).  WordPress had automatically classified this as a commercial website and was blocking access to the stats unless Rob paid for a commercial license.  It would appear that a link to another person’s Patreon site from the blog had led WordPress to assume that the site was asking for donations.  Rob has since removed the link and has requested that WordPress reassess the site, and hopefully this will fix the issue.