Dr Franziska Kohlt
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frankendodo.bsky.social
Dr Franziska Kohlt
@frankendodo.bsky.social
7.6K followers 870 following 160 posts
Leverhulme Research Fellow HPS Leeds | Inaugural USC Carrollian Fellow | Tutor Oxford ContEd | Editor Lewis Carroll Review | Public Speaker | Polymath | Erdős–Bacon No 8 | #histsci #sts #scicomm #envhist #histmed
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frankendodo.bsky.social
Dr Franziska Kohlt @frankendodo.bsky.social · Nov 18
And it's a wrap! I concluded my Carrollian Fellowship at the University of Southern California with the launch of the "Spectral Science" exhibition, and world premiere of the completely sold out, hour-long Phantasmagoria Magic Lantern show I co-created from my research. Absolute life highlight! 🪞🔮
frankendodo.bsky.social
270-page academic monographs for £150 - and a peer-reviewer recently responded to a book proposal of mine why I am not pitching the book to a "better" publisher (who would give me fewer pages at £110 purchase price more).
How did we get here?
October 22, 2025 at 11:31 AM
frankendodo.bsky.social
Attracting the brightest and best still going swimmingly
hetanshah.bsky.social Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · Apr 22
Another report on how our high visa costs deter top R&D talent
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
"The UK's upfront immigration costs now vastly exceed other leading research nations, so the UK is struggling to compete. EU countries can more easily attract talent from the EU due to free movement, and from non-EU countries due to their relatively low visa costs. "Non-EU countries are also attractive to global research talent due to lower comparative immigration costs than the UK." British scientific institutions are having to spend huge sums on visa costs for cancer professionals they wish to attract and recruit. The Francis Crick Institute, one of the world's leading biomedical research centres, is now spending more than £500,000 a year on visas for cancer scientists. Cancer Research UK institutes are spending almost £690,000 a year, up 44% from £470,000 in 2022-23.
October 21, 2025 at 8:33 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
frankendodo.bsky.social
How, after all this, is it still Monday...?
September 29, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
ritabrata1907.bsky.social
Last day to submit abstracts for the Cambridge University Entomological Society symposium is tomorrow! Please send your abstracts to entosoc@cambridgesu.co.uk!!

@royentsoc.bsky.social @frankendodo.bsky.social @britentsoc.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @zoologymuseum.bsky.social
ritabrata1907.bsky.social Ritabrata Chowdhury @ritabrata1907.bsky.social · Sep 25
The Cambridge University Entomological Society is hosting a symposium on ”The good, the bad, and the monstrous: insects in mythology, literature and media”, at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, on 20th November 2025.

Huge thanks to @royentsoc.bsky.social for supporting us!
October 19, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
nannathylstrup.bsky.social
✨Deeply honoured to deliver this year's Annual Digital Lecture at The National Archives! Drawing on our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project, I'll explore how preservation creates loss in the digital age and what that means for the politics of archives. Nov 20 6pm at Senate House, London. Do join us!
jfwinters.bsky.social Jane Winters @jfwinters.bsky.social · Sep 30
Join us on 20 November for the Annual Digital Lecture, a partnership between The National Archives, UK and the School of Advanced Study. The wonderful @nannathylstrup.bsky.social will be speaking about ‘When saving becomes loss: archival memory in the digital age’. Free to register!
When saving becomes loss: Archival memory in the digital age
Explore archival memory, data loss, and attempts to preserve the past in the digital age at this year’s Annual Digital Lecture.
www.eventbrite.co.uk
October 1, 2025 at 7:00 AM
frankendodo.bsky.social
How, after all this, is it still Monday...?
September 29, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
dreframss.bsky.social
We are currently open to receiving proposals for themed issues with @advancesjournal.bsky.social, which is published through Taylor and Francis, and is the official journal of @incsa.bsky.social. If you have ideas for a collection, email me.

Details👇
in-csa.com/themed-speci...
Special / Themed Issues Call for Proposals – International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Call for Proposals Special / Themed Issues Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research The Journal of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (INCSA) Follow on BlueSky Advances in Ninetee...
in-csa.com
September 29, 2025 at 6:27 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Let’s say, hypothetically, you appreciated our position paper and @olivia.science and I would be recording answers to questions about it. What questions would you have?
September 26, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
ritabrata1907.bsky.social
The Cambridge University Entomological Society is hosting a symposium on ”The good, the bad, and the monstrous: insects in mythology, literature and media”, at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, on 20th November 2025.

Huge thanks to @royentsoc.bsky.social for supporting us!
September 25, 2025 at 2:40 PM
frankendodo.bsky.social
Great news for everyone working on cultural entomology - Call for Papers from the @cam.ac.uk Entomological Society & @royentsoc.bsky.social - “The good, the bad, and the monstrous: Insects in mythology, literature and media"
Deadline for Abstracts: 20 October '25
Symposium Date: 20 November '25
September 25, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
palaeosingh.bsky.social
New paper by Petrulevičius & Gutiérrez presents the oldest winged insects 🦟 from Argentina 🇦🇷 dating back to the early #Carboniferous - More insight into the early diversification of animal life & ecosystems on land. ⬇️

#Paleontology #Science

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Oldest winged insects: first Megasecoptera from the early Carboniferous (Serpukhovian) of Argentina
Mississippian insect records are extremely rare. Formally, winged insects occur only at two sites from the Serpukhovian: Delitzsch in Germany, with one species of Palaeodictyoptera; and Guandacol 1 i...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
September 24, 2025 at 5:11 PM
frankendodo.bsky.social
Reading 19th century Luddite gaslighting in the context of current AI criticism is also never not *an experience* #histsci #histSTM
September 22, 2025 at 3:18 PM
frankendodo.bsky.social
Really excited to be returning to Amsterdam as Keynote Speaker for the Capegemini Executive Congress to reflect on lessons, in the many fast-moving debates we can learn from the history of Artificial Intelligence& Automata, with Industry& Academic leaders in the field www.sogeti.com/summit2025/s...
September 22, 2025 at 9:08 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
drlindseyfitz.bsky.social
Please: if you have Indefinite Leave to Remain and are eligible for citizenship, apply now. In 2015, I went through a terrible divorce. I was on a marriage visa, and my ex reported me as illegally in the UK in order to get me deported. It was VERY scary. Your rights can disappear in a flash.
samfr.bsky.social Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · Sep 22
Reform's plans to end indefinite leave to remain go to the post I wrote last week on their slide towards chaotic authoritarianism.

The British constitution would allow them to do it if they had a majority but at vast cost to our society and way of life.

samf.substack.com/p/the-route-...
The route to chaotic authoritarianism
Why Reform’s deportation plan would have consequences well beyond asylum
samf.substack.com
September 22, 2025 at 9:01 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
carlbergstrom.com
Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122
Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review
Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...
arxiv.org
September 22, 2025 at 6:11 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
frankendodo.bsky.social
I have now on more than one occasion seen AI plagiarism of my own publications in peer review. None of this is a drill.
September 20, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
onslies.bsky.social
Well, that's the next advert campaign for Cambridge sorted: "come to Cambridge, future employers will know you've learnt to think and write for yourself".
September 19, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
ptomj.bsky.social
Universities: "If you plagiarise on your essay, you will be failed and expelled"

Oxford: "Here! Use the hallucinating piracy machine for free!"
ox.ac.uk University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk · Sep 19
NEW: Oxford will be the first UK university to give all staff and students free ChatGPT Edu access, from this academic year.

ChatGPT Edu is built for education, with enhanced privacy and security.
Graphic from the University of Oxford, featuring an image of a glowing, digital brain with the text: 'Generative AI at Oxford'. Highlights that ChatGPT Edu is now available to all staff and students. Includes a link for more information: ox.ac.uk/gen-ai
September 20, 2025 at 4:37 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
ferrydanini.bsky.social
To "accelerate high-impact, curiosity-led research and innovation, and to facilitate breakthroughs" - let me tell you my students using genAI are NOT curious and what it is accelerated so far is lying, cheating and data fabrication
ox.ac.uk University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk · Sep 19
NEW: Oxford will be the first UK university to give all staff and students free ChatGPT Edu access, from this academic year.

ChatGPT Edu is built for education, with enhanced privacy and security.
Graphic from the University of Oxford, featuring an image of a glowing, digital brain with the text: 'Generative AI at Oxford'. Highlights that ChatGPT Edu is now available to all staff and students. Includes a link for more information: ox.ac.uk/gen-ai
September 20, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
hystericalblkns.bsky.social
If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.
The new TOC from academia dot edu. By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.
September 17, 2025 at 7:09 PM
frankendodo.bsky.social
Like many others, I will be deleting my academia [dot] edu account this morning in light of their change of policy.
September 20, 2025 at 10:07 AM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
richardckeller.bsky.social
Colleagues in the history of psychiatry: please see this call for special issue proposals and help spread the word!

journals.sagepub.com/page/hpy/cal...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
September 18, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
disabilitystor1.bsky.social
The fact that this company and pretty much all the AI companies rolled out their tech without first considering the harms to the most vulnerable among us is horrifying. Again and again they show us how little they care about harms except as reputational damage
September 16, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Dr Franziska Kohlt
frankendodo.bsky.social
Honestly, writing about 19th century women scientists is never not a ride.
August 6, 2025 at 9:27 AM