Matasha Mazis @mattyhari@qoto.org

Lots of people seem to be joining Mastodon right now, so here's a little intro.

I'm a political scientist at McGill U in Canada who has worked on Ukrainian, Russian and EEuropean politics for ~20yrs. I've written abt courts, rule of law, corruption, extremist parties, protest, and conspiracies. Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb, 2022, I've followed closely and I'm now writing a book on the roots of the war with my colleague and friend Oxana Shevel from Tufts U

Time for an #introduction!

I'm a #historian based at Edge Hill University in the UK. I work on the history of Victorian popular culture, particularly things like humour and the press. I also dabble in #digitalhumanities.

I like to post about the unusual things I find in archives (and to moan about how period dramas keep getting newspapers wrong.)

Here's one of my favourite Victorian jokes to kick things off!

#histodons #mediahistory #victorian #nineteenthcentury #19thcentury #history

"The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human awesomeness"

-The Anthropology Department

"The scale of our efforts to control water is vast. But control is illusory. Water does what it wants, as we are seeing increasingly often, as people around the world grapple with severe floods and droughts."

"What Does Water Want?" A terrific piece by Erica Gies on how slowing the movements of #water by restoring its natural agency can be of vital aid in a #climate crisis for watersheds, human & wild communities, and ecosystem resilience.

#slowwater #flooding

https://psyche.co/ideas/what-does-water-want-most-humans-seem-to-have-forgotten

@freemo Thank you! And thank you for standing up for LGBTQ users!

#PastLandUse 13

So much data in now available it’s time consuming to review it all manually. Like most areas, archaeologists are beginning to use technology to reduce the workload. Machine learning is starting to be used to help detect monuments on air photographs and lidar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaVxJ8i-pBU

Most work in is focused on prospection. My personal interest is to extract detail to aid mapping, such as in these tests, where I am trying to isolate lazy beds on Lewis.

#archaeology #Scotland

#archaeogaming citation of the day:

Iza Romanowska, Colin D. Wren, and Stefani Crabtree. 2021. Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology: Simulating the Complexity of Societies. SFI Press.

While this book does not address digital landscapes, its methods can be applied to archaeologists working with human and digital agents in synthetic spaces. Plus, complexity science features heavily in the archaeology of digital things and places. This is a great introduction.

Good Morning. My notifications are a little crazy this morning and I got loads more followers since I was last on. It might take me a while to follow back everyone. 🖖🖖🖖🖖
So please be patient with me. 🖖🖖🖖🖖
#twittermigration

Several years ago, I was invited to poke around in the sheds of an old farm out the back of Hobart. The property had been taken by Europeans in the 1820s, and some of the buildings dated to that time.

While wandering through the upper level of a sandstone shed, I saw tallies of long-sold harvests scribbled onto the walls, partially hidden by the debris of a working farm.

And this.

#Tasmania #Histodons #art #ship #history

Today the #Orion capsule will fly by the #Moon and fire it’s main #engine to enter #lunar #orbit 4 days later. Below is the expected trajectory of the #spacecraft.

The #Artemis1 capsule will skim about 130km (80mi) above the #lunar surface.

Watch it live on the #NASA live stream starting at 13:15 CET / 12:15 WET / 7:15 EST: https://youtu.be/21X5lGlDOfg

#space

May I make a suggestion? It can feel weird here at first. I think if you have just joined, engage with those you follow. You will be seen and will get involved in the conversation. Remember to not just like toots, but to also boost. I have tried to follow back everyone that has followed me.

Please follow new accounts, don’t leave them lonely. We want them all to stay so we should be supporting everyone making the leap from Twitter to Mastodon. It’s logical 🖖
#twittermigration #twitterrefugees

Hello! I’m a scientist studying #paleoclimate using #biomarkers to understand the impacts of #climate variability on #humanevolution. I recently moved to Denmark to begin as an #assistantprofessor in the #geoscience department at #AarhusUniversity. Follow me science, cats, and general silliness!

#introduction
🇺🇸—>🇩🇰
👩🏻‍🔬—>🍃☀️🌧️

Only slowly I am starting to understand the Mastodon etiquette.
So, my belated #introduction: I am a Maastricht-based historian interested in the ways humans have studied, represented and managed nature in the past. This feeds into an interest for (and concern about) our current environmental predicament. More on the concrete project I am working on can be found here: moving-animals.nl.
Pleased to meet you!
#histodons #envhist #histsci #climatecrisis

You might have seen somebody using the proverb Vox Populi, Vox Dei. What was missing was the context in which it was used:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

In case you do not speak Latin, it means in English:

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Eilidh Stimpson discovered a 135-year-old message rolled up inside an empty whisky bottle beneath her floorboards at her home in Edinburgh.
Signed and dated by two male workers, the message read: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor, but they did not drink the whisky. October 6th 1887. Who ever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road.” https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/history/edinburgh-mum-finds-incredible-135-25537021?fbclid=IwAR0xCycSiQ7p9Gn3ppJPZ7jxab1EslEti4QXhSiuqSxCUDVD7afwzqTk-6g

First of all we thank you for your response to the presence of the Memorial in the #Fediverse. Thank you for amplifying our voice.

One of the issues raised was using the CW option. We use it with disturbing images, but...

It is challenging, but should all history of #Auschwitz be a CW? Most of our posts remind people, victims of the camp. We show their names, faces, individuality & commemorate them on their birthdays. Marking them with a CW seems somehow wrong.

What do you think?

The end of twitter as a microcosm of the end of capitalism:

People banding together, helping each other out, trying to salvage what is good, shifting to something unfamiliar, discovering new norms and ways of life.

Revealing the revulsion and stupidity of kings & oligarchs. Former hierarchies tumbling down, some being resurrected, but without the same kind of hold.

Rest, repair, reconciliation.

@richsignorelli Yes I just figured this out yesterday with tips from #Fediverse. If you are using a desktop and have windows press the windows button and period. Can use the GIF Keyboard app for mobile devices.

I've been here a couple of weeks now so I guess it's about time I posted an #introduction.

I'm a British academic living in Canada. I teach Ancient Near Eastern History and I research ancient Mesopotamia based on cuneiform tablets and archaeological evidence.

My career brought me to Toronto via Cambridge, Oxford, Helsinki, and Vienna. Not to mention Iraq, where I worked on digs that first got me hooked on ancient Mesopotamia (and on Iraq).

I'm profoundly pro-EU and anti-Brexit, and well left of centre. I'm interested in UK and Canadian (especially Ontario) politics, and I try to follow covid science.

Last but not least, I am ruled by the cutest tabby cat called Major Tom.

#archaeology #cats #Mesopotamia #cuneiform #academia #ANE

Oh BTW I saw a post that said it's best to add your hashtags to the end of posts (not in them) so screen readers aren't reading out "hashtag" all the way through your toot! It makes total sense, so that's what I'm doing now!

Also Alt-Text on every image, obviously.

Seems like an entirely reasonable and easy courtesy. 😊

#Archaeology #archaeologist