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Today, I am very pleased. Yesterday I received the proofs of my article on John Roberts. I started work on this as a palaeography training project before I began my PhD in 2011, so it’s been a long time coming. His first mention on my blog, I think, was back in 2012. He (which is…

A keynote paper given at The Experience of Loneliness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Conference, 29-30 June 2021 Postscript: In August 2022, after 8 months of negotiations, I was given a 2 day a week indefinite teaching and scholarship contract and a 2 day a week indefinite teaching and scholarship contract with an end…

This is the final post in a short series about the 2024 Historical Association Conference, held in Birmingham in May. The final session of Day 1 was a Roundtable which discussed the value historians can add to contemporary and future issues? Jonathan Phillips opened by suggesting that the main contribution is perspective born of context.…

This is the second in a series of three posts about the Historical Association Conference, held in Birmingham on 10 and 11 May 2024. After lunch on day 1, I went to hear Ann Hughes talk about the role and reputation of Birmingham during the civil wars. She acknowledged that this stage Birmingham was less…

This is the first in a short series of posts about the 2024 Historical Association Conference in Birmingham. I haven’t been to the HA Conference since it was online during COVID, so it was lovely to go back this year. I went down the day before the conference started and spent a few hours looking…

After Easter, I attended three sessions of training on Transkribus, the Handwriting Recognition Software that works a bit like Optical Character Recognition to create automatic transcriptions of manuscripts. This is the last in a series of three posts about the training. Our third session, we started by looking at our own case studies. I started…

This week I escaped the university. I did my teaching on Monday, of course – a two hour workshop on sources related to Luther’s Reformation, as well as an extra lecture on preparing for the exams aimed at our third years, who are taking their first in person Lancaster exams this year. Then on Tuesday…

After Easter, I attended three sessions of training on Transkribus, the Handwriting Recognition Software that works a bit like Optical Character Recognition to create automatic transcriptions of manuscripts. This is the second in a series of three posts about the training. The second session was a bit different. Before going into further information about how…

After Easter, I attended three sessions of training on Transkribus, the Handwriting Recognition Software that works a bit like Optical Character Recognition to create automatic transcriptions of manuscripts. This is the first in a series of three posts about the training. The first session was a bit of an epic – 4 hours of training…