It is extraordinary how much better Sol is than Terra. One of my Codex tasks is visual triage - let Codex trawl through hundreds of thousands of manuscript images I`d never have time to go through looking for the needles in haystacks - and Sol goes on forever, while Terra needs constant nudging.

Reading the English edition cover to cover is a kind of rediscovery. @roperlou.bsky.social and @davidveevers.bsky.social, were you aware of this Irish attempt to migrate from Saint Christopher to Brazil in the 1640s? Are there Anglophone records on this? I had forgotten all about this. Fascinating!

I’m reading the English updated edition of Alencastro’s “The Trade in the Living,” and it is fascinating how he thoroughly updated a book that was already of the best works of Colonial Brazilian history ever. I first read it in my first year of college, and have reread it many times since, but…

"Blacks chained in a link to Satiate ye Averice of a man who sells ye Human race to fill his Bags, in another the Sons of Liberty strutting in all ye pomp of ye American shoar..."

Copenhagen’s Black Diamond is kind of unbeatable.

Incidentally, it references at least one voyage that does not seem to exist in the slave voyages database... It's a pity these manuscripts usually stay in private hands!

And by losing their voices they are losing their abilities to think, because writing leads to thinking. www.ft.com/content/1c83...

This is an older model, new ones do better. Not perfect, but useful enough - and much less work than training a bespoke model! (Meaning you just upload and press transcribe).

2) It points to footnote 58, which cites the published edition of the diary, p. 79. It isn't there, nor in the Clements online and transcribed version. quod.lib.umich.edu/w/weldgrimke...

1) "leading race" does read like a quotation - "After all, Angelina wrote, white people as the 'leading race' were supposed to uphold the spirit of God so they could minister successfully to the enslaved." (The Grimkes, p. 85) - and it is the only instance in which "leading race" appears in the book

Agreed.

Sadly, I don't think it's this one! Luca Lo Basso cites it as clearly separate from the ASG.

Finally submitted to University of Alabama Press! Thank you so much, @klracine.bsky.social, for the patience and support along the way!

Oh, I know they are digitized! I’m looking at them. That’s why I want to visit Antwerp. Not the case of the Insolvente, sadly.

Just read over 1,000 pages on Luiz Gama (1831-82) to update two paragraphs of my "Império em Disputa" for the translation, and... Wow! His articles in the press in the 1860s and 1870s championing abolition, public education, freedom of conscience and much more are extraordinary.

“The great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.”

After five months, I finally got my hard copy! I’m grateful Brill sent it to me. Otherwise I would have to sell my car to buy it…

Well, for a more empirically-grounded and updated history of capitalism that has a similar aim, you can tackle Beckert’s 1300-page magnum opus! I’m still making my way through it (slowly).

I think it’s a well-written and persuasive book, but too Anglocentric and extremely flawed in empirical terms. I do not think it is very relevant to specialists nowadays. I liked it as an undergrad. Today not so much. I’d go with DuPlessis’ for a more balanced overview.

I was curious about the new Gemini release, but the ability that interests me the most - computer vision for transcription - seems to be relatively unchanged. It continues to fail spectacularly on hard hands, and to do well on easy hands. At least it seems less prone to hallucinations...

One thing translating my own book has made me develop is a newfound appreciation for translators - damn, that's a hard job, and I'm the author and can make any changes I see fit! And no, LLMs are not capable of producing publishable translations (nothing I would stick my name in, at least).

I've decided that I need to read more novels (and less news). I think the next in line is Lerner's "Transcription," then maybe something lighter like Wallbrook's "History Lessons," and then Zadie Smith's weightier "The Fraud," and Everett's "James." Any suggestions? The more the merrier!

Liars, liars, pants on fire.

Very cool, just as I was going to get my grades from Canvas to submit them.

It's awesome when you finally read a book that you knew it was going to be great, and it is just as good as you expected it to be. Isadora Mota's "Freedom Horizon" is definitely one of those. Extraordinary archival research to recover Black resistance from 1848 to 1870 and many wonderful stories!

My grad student João Covolan is organizing a nice workshop in Florence. Spread the word! Tuscany and the Iberian Empires. Migration and Knowledge Transmission in the Early Modern Period (30 October 2026, Florence) www.medici.org/cfp-tuscany-...

Transkribus used to struggle with tables, but I've heard its getting better. I just ran it through Gemini, though...

Oh, the excitement to know that the job is actually running, after a few tries...

Almost a year later, my review of @maryhicks.bsky.social's great book was finally published! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...