Lou Burnard
@lb42.bsky.social
Old enough to know better. Retired digital humanist and TEI editor currently obsessed by 19th c. Theatre. Anyone here heard of thomas hailes lacy?
Reposted by Lou Burnard
This is a good deep-dive into AI slop invading what used to be legit media sites. One thing I’m seeing more and more: slop outlets churning archaeology stories from 1-5 years ago and presenting them as news. 🏺🧪
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
futurism.com
September 17, 2026 at 11:04 PM
This is a good deep-dive into AI slop invading what used to be legit media sites. One thing I’m seeing more and more: slop outlets churning archaeology stories from 1-5 years ago and presenting them as news. 🏺🧪
Reposted by Lou Burnard
When "white sauce" in fish pie
Contains cheese, it’s a lie.
That’s a mornay.
Contains cheese, it’s a lie.
That’s a mornay.
I hate it when food presenters describe a white sauce with cheese in it as a béchamel. It's not. A béchamel is a simple white sauce. Add cheese and it's a mornay. But let's not using the French words and just call one a plain white sauce and the other a cheese sauce.
September 16, 2026 at 6:05 PM
When "white sauce" in fish pie
Contains cheese, it’s a lie.
That’s a mornay.
Contains cheese, it’s a lie.
That’s a mornay.
The 180th lacy title is a really bad attempt to make sophocles' Electra amusing. On the other hand I did another blog post about the workflow foxglove.hypotheses.org
Foxglove – A British Perspective on the Digital Humanities in France
foxglove.hypotheses.org
August 30, 2026 at 6:19 PM
The 180th lacy title is a really bad attempt to make sophocles' Electra amusing. On the other hand I did another blog post about the workflow foxglove.hypotheses.org
Reposted by Lou Burnard
Interested by a corpus of 19th/early 20th c. French for your research?
Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo!
📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597
📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178
Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo!
📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597
📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178
Hors d’usage: Curated French Fiction from Gallica, 1800–1950 | Journal of Open Humanities Data
doi.org
August 24, 2026 at 9:23 AM
Interested by a corpus of 19th/early 20th c. French for your research?
Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo!
📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597
📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178
Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo!
📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597
📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178
Reposted by Lou Burnard
"Research databases are not preserved. There is no system in place in the UK (or anywhere else, so far as I know) to ensure that research outputs are officially preserved in perpetuity, as though they were books, when they are in the form of a database. " lukemckernan.com/2026/06/28/l...
Lost resources
To lose one database is a misfortune; to lose four feels like a conspiracy. Recently three online databases and one audiovisual digital archive with underlying database, on each of which I worked f…
lukemckernan.com
August 6, 2026 at 4:52 PM
"Research databases are not preserved. There is no system in place in the UK (or anywhere else, so far as I know) to ensure that research outputs are officially preserved in perpetuity, as though they were books, when they are in the form of a database. " lukemckernan.com/2026/06/28/l...
All you ever wanted to know about Charles Eyre Pascoe now online at lb42.github.io/Pascoe
All about Charles Eyre Pascoe (1842-1912)
Assorted web pages from Lou Burnard Consulting
lb42.github.io
June 27, 2026 at 7:11 PM
All you ever wanted to know about Charles Eyre Pascoe now online at lb42.github.io/Pascoe
Reposted by Lou Burnard
UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years
But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not
This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc
The strategy has run out of road
A 🧵 on what happens next.
But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not
This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc
The strategy has run out of road
A 🧵 on what happens next.
June 5, 2026 at 2:11 PM
UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years
But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not
This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc
The strategy has run out of road
A 🧵 on what happens next.
But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not
This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc
The strategy has run out of road
A 🧵 on what happens next.
New bloggage as the lacy tei count reaches 150 ! Http://foxglove.hypotheses.org has the details
March 28, 2026 at 12:39 PM
New bloggage as the lacy tei count reaches 150 ! Http://foxglove.hypotheses.org has the details
Digital Lacy now has 141 titles, the latest being H T Craven's "Miriam's Crime" Premiered at the Strand in 1863, this features a comic Irishman, a drunken lawyer, and a singularly wet heroine. Also much inheritance-shenanigan. See the full list at lb42.github.io/Lacy/report....
Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays
lb42.github.io
March 3, 2026 at 9:40 PM
Digital Lacy now has 141 titles, the latest being H T Craven's "Miriam's Crime" Premiered at the Strand in 1863, this features a comic Irishman, a drunken lawyer, and a singularly wet heroine. Also much inheritance-shenanigan. See the full list at lb42.github.io/Lacy/report....
Reposted by Lou Burnard
‘No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week!’
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
‘I’d been Chaucer for a week!’: Forging the Medieval in Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’
ABSTRACT. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ describes the creation of a Chaucerian forgery in immense detail. The short story, first published in 19
academic.oup.com
January 30, 2026 at 10:36 AM
‘No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week!’
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
"Two members of staff are participating in a major international initiative on standards for encoding of texts for scholarly purposes. This project has received funding from sources in the United States until August 1990, but is very likely to continue beyond that date."
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk
February 16, 2026 at 5:03 PM
"Two members of staff are participating in a major international initiative on standards for encoding of texts for scholarly purposes. This project has received funding from sources in the United States until August 1990, but is very likely to continue beyond that date."
This week's additions to Digital Lacy include an 1846 version of a French adaptation of Richardson's unreadable English novel "Clarissa Harlowe". Credited to Lacy and his in-house hack John Courtney, it reduces the 5 vols of the original to a routine 3 act melodrama by focussing on the essentials +
February 15, 2026 at 2:26 PM
This week's additions to Digital Lacy include an 1846 version of a French adaptation of Richardson's unreadable English novel "Clarissa Harlowe". Credited to Lacy and his in-house hack John Courtney, it reduces the 5 vols of the original to a routine 3 act melodrama by focussing on the essentials +
Reposted by Lou Burnard
"This is a CORE COMPONENT of the pudding ..." [this is amazing content, precisely what the internet should be for, putting the rest of us to shame] [mmmm, pudding]
“I’ve reviewed over 50 sticky toffee puddings” is an incredibly powerful way to begin a video
February 13, 2026 at 8:00 AM
"This is a CORE COMPONENT of the pudding ..." [this is amazing content, precisely what the internet should be for, putting the rest of us to shame] [mmmm, pudding]
More fun with geminipro foxglove.hypotheses.org/1221
January 28, 2026 at 3:41 PM
More fun with geminipro foxglove.hypotheses.org/1221
Reposted by Lou Burnard
The Call for Papers for the #TEI 2026 Annual Meeting is out! See tei2026.tei-c.org/CFP.html for details. The submission deadline is February 19th.
TEI 2026 Call for Papers – TEI2026
tei2026.tei-c.org
January 20, 2026 at 5:21 PM
The Call for Papers for the #TEI 2026 Annual Meeting is out! See tei2026.tei-c.org/CFP.html for details. The submission deadline is February 19th.
Reposted by Lou Burnard
reminder to donate to wikipedia if you’re able to x
wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage
January 15, 2026 at 7:24 PM
reminder to donate to wikipedia if you’re able to x
Reposted by Lou Burnard
Pleased as Punch to see that our retrospective of the "Pictorial Punch - Treasures from the Archives" study day we held at the @britishlibrary.bsky.social last month is now online on @rs4vp.org's website! Wonderful speakers, keynotes and audience. Thank you all!
Happy Friday! Some light reading to enliven your weekend: a retrospective on the "Pictorial Punch: Treasures from the Archive" study day by our friends @punchspocketbook.bsky.social in November. Several candid photos from the day included! Thanks for #SharingYourNews!
rs4vp.org/pictorial-pu...
rs4vp.org/pictorial-pu...
Pictorial Punch: Treasures from the Archive – RSVP
The Punch's Pocket Book Archive team shares a retrospective on their one-day study day hosted at the British Library on 7 November 2025.
rs4vp.org
December 12, 2025 at 10:43 PM
Pleased as Punch to see that our retrospective of the "Pictorial Punch - Treasures from the Archives" study day we held at the @britishlibrary.bsky.social last month is now online on @rs4vp.org's website! Wonderful speakers, keynotes and audience. Thank you all!
An encounter with Gemini Pro foxglove.hypotheses.org/1216
December 10, 2025 at 10:11 PM
An encounter with Gemini Pro foxglove.hypotheses.org/1216
Did some more bloggage after a long gap. Representativeness and how to check it. Foxglove. Consulté le 9 octobre 2025 à l’adresse foxglove.hypotheses.org/1104
Representativeness and how to check it
As the number of TEI encoded titles in Digital Lacy is about to reach a milestone, it seems a good moment to consider its representativenessity. So I have been dusting off my utterly decayed spreadshe...
foxglove.hypotheses.org
October 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Did some more bloggage after a long gap. Representativeness and how to check it. Foxglove. Consulté le 9 octobre 2025 à l’adresse foxglove.hypotheses.org/1104
Reposted by Lou Burnard
Reposted by Lou Burnard
But after the depressing loss of Rayner last week, it is very pleasing to see the eminently sensible loss of Mandelson this week.
September 11, 2025 at 9:53 AM
But after the depressing loss of Rayner last week, it is very pleasing to see the eminently sensible loss of Mandelson this week.
Another blog update happened foxglove.hypotheses.org
Foxglove – A British Perspective on the Digital Humanities in France
foxglove.hypotheses.org
August 7, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Another blog update happened foxglove.hypotheses.org
Reposted by Lou Burnard
This is the last thing the BBC needs
June 17, 2025 at 5:44 AM
This is the last thing the BBC needs