@martin.rocek.dev
Digital humanities scholar doing 🪄in JavaScript and Python, focusing on UX and UI. Artist and traveller whenever time allows. 🇨🇿 living in 🇮🇸 Member of @digilab-imafo.bsky.social and @medieval-cuni.bsky.social
Interested in AI for historical text-reuse and text-similarity detection? If you’re in Vienna on March 5–6, join our "Ruse of Reuse" workshop at the @imafo-oeaw.bsky.social .
Registration and details: indico.global/e/ruse-of-re...
✨ Our lecture series continues this spring ✨
Join us for Lunch with Digital Humanities
We invite researchers, artists & practitioners to share their work on digital culture, media, archives & more!
Schedule at mshl.is/vidburdir/lunch-with-dh/
🗓 Tuesdays, 12 GMT
📺 Live at tinyurl.com/4su9evxf
Definitely not obsolete! 😅 There are many projects and opinions. Level of use of digital methods varies a lot across Europe.
People in DH often forget what is important for humanities, how to communicate benefits and disadvantages, and (in my perspective) most importantly usability & design (UX).
📢 Call for Book Chapters for our Book Series Old Norse Studies
Networks in Old Norse Literature: Methods, Models, and New Directions, edited by @liamh2os.bsky.social and Erika Dell’Aquila
Abstracts (300–400 words) due 1 May 2026
Full papers due 1 December
More here: shorturl.at/wbnEe
I think there is still room for humans in the loop and will be. In terms of design, I’d say even more-AI can do some UI, so the ugly won’t have an excuse. But to have an appealing app, you’ll still need designer, because you, as a designer, understand the intentions way better than any word gen llm.
AI-generated code is very dependent on the context window the model can use, so the bigger your code base gets, the harder it is for the model to keep it in memory, and it eventually starts duplicating some logic - which makes it harder to maintain, which is why we don’t see vibe-Uber.
We found that you need to truly understand the subject to be able to spot what is going on and steer the AI thinking in the right direction. In some cases, I spent more time prompting and “cleaning” the code after Claude Code (Opus 4.5) than writing the code myself with a little help of IntelliSense
I think services that are used by everyone will still take some time. We were playing with vibe-coding/ai tools with my colleagues on different scales from AI Studio to Claude Code to Figma, and although all these tools seem impressive in terms of what can be achieved.
I think so far the biggest thing is openclaw.ai by Peter Steinberger.
If you’re in Iceland today, you have to stop by Harpa for UTmessan!
The real magic is happening upstairs with the universities—we’re talking VR, 3D scanners, and interactive sims.The tech companies downstairs could honestly take some notes! Definitely don’t miss the @mshl-cdha.bsky.social stand.
There are free options where you can easily host with custom domain (depends on stack ofc), Let’s Encrypt is around since ~2015.
It’s not about me not trusting Google Forms or the website, it just doesn’t give a good message to people who visit it.
It might be a good idea to get an SSL/TSL certificate for the website, as it screams “unsecure” on a visit. :)
Linkedin Post from a Pinterest designer reading: "Yesterday I was impacted by the Pinterest layoffs. I was Pinterest's only icon designer and product illustrator. In his email to the company, the CEO said "we’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach – prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working". I WAS working on AI projects including the Pinterest Assistant that soft-launched in October. If you haven't heard about that feature launch, you can find it on Pinterest's own newsroom or with a Google search. I was vocal internally about how our users don't want AI slop or features on the platform, how we as employees are feeling uncomfortable and discouraged about AI, and what I wanted from leadership. Last year, I told my manager I was worried about AI-based layoffs. I was told not to worry. At an onsite, we were told that "in the future", we would all be "managers of AIs". That I would be expected to manage some sort of AI employees, rather than craft and design my own work. Human-made art and design matter. I am never going to stop creating, even if the "home of inspiration" decides that creators are secondary to profits. If you want to support me, you can follow me on threads or instagram @bonniekatewolf where I post my hand-knit sweaters and oil paintings. If you want to hire a human illustrator, designer, or iconographer, my email and DMs are open for freelance, contract, or FTE roles."
Pinterest CEO says in layoff email: "We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach – prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working"
So it's time for me to move to another platform to save images
Airport wait thoughts while joking about vibe-coding with @vanlinduist.bsky.social:
It’s all fun and games until you realize… would you actually trust a company running vibe-coded apps in critical systems? 😬
We are looking for one more #DH paper for The Endless Scroll, IV! 😊
Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of complex AI-generated code. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much code must be AI-generated... yet results are far from what was promised 1/
www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...
📣 Hlutastarf í boði!
Umsóknarfrestur: 2. febrúar
Umsóknir með ferilskrá & stuttu myndbandi 👉 mshl@hi.is
Við leitum að hugmyndaríkum nemanda í BA eða MA námi með reynslu af miðlun á samfélagsmiðlum í um 20% starf.
Progress report on the XML database project:
• Basic Auth: Done
• Fulltext Search + Indexing: I'd say it works
• XPath 1.0: Implemented (rough around the edges, but functional)
It's probably a better choice than building a custom DB. :D
I was thinking about making an alternative to existing open-source XML dbs for quite some time, though. I'm not sure if it will come to fruition (implementing XPath and XSLT is quite a task), but at least it's a fun exercise.
I’ve been getting a bit annoyed trying to make ExistDB + TEI Publisher run in Docker behind ProxyPass. Honestly, it was pain.
So I thought, why not inflict a little more pain on myself?
Decided to try and create my own XML database in Rust.
A little bit of today’s and yesterday’s Northern Lights from Iceland.
If you're looking for advice on how to plan, create, collect, process, share, and deposit data in the humanities, social sciences, education, and the arts, check out these guides I wrote for @mshl-cdha.bsky.social.
They mainly target an Icelandic audience, but the info is universal!
Ack-AI just got more multilingual. Added support for Python, C-style, and hash comments + a new "whole file" flag function and slightly improved performance too.
marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...
To be fair, the "entertaining supporters" are no less cool! That's the landvættir (land wights), guardian spirits for each quarter of the country: The bull in the west(fjords), the eagle in the north, the dragon in the east and the (mountain)giant in the south.
Weekend! Finally found some time to open Figma and test out icon ideas for the Ack-AI extension. Which one you like most?
Now on the VS Code Marketplace!
marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...
P.S. It’s fully configurable and you can customize the specific trigger tags and "approval" keywords to fit your workflow.
AI writes code faster, but humans still need to own it.
I built a small VS Code extension called Ack-AI. It forces a "Human-in-the-Loop" workflow by highlighting @ai-gen tags with a warning until you explicitly sign off on them.
Unexpected start of the year! 🌌🇮🇸
Tomorrow, 6 January, is the last day of Christmas in Iceland, simply called the Thirteenth. It's a good one because there is a lot of folklore attached to it (some of it is also said to apply to New Year's Day and/or Christmas Day).
A little 🧵
Happy new year! 🎊
