From the hilltops around Somerset you can still trace the old roads running toward the Cumberland River and the Tennessee line. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1863 those roads carried refugee families, hungry cattle, and two very different armies. Pulaski County sat on a military fault line. Whoever controlled Somerset and the fords of the Cumberland controlled the doorway between central Kentucky and East Tennessee.

Appalachian History On a hot day in late July 1863, a Confederate cavalry column splashed across the Kentucky River at Irvine and rode straight into local memory. The official records would call it a skirmish. The Kentucky Historical Society marker on Main Street calls it the Battle of Irvine and describes it as the only Civil War battle in the immediate area.

En 1905 llegaron a Tucumán (Argentina) tres expedicionarios católicos para relevar las condiciones de vida de los trabajadores azucareros. El viaje les permitió conocer, describir e informar sobre un distante y desconocido mundo sobre el que consideraban era imperioso intervenir para frenar el avance del socialismo.

Though Canadian multiculturalism is often more an aspirational ideal than practice as I’ve found in earlier research (Beattie 2025), as the above quotes shows, the Canadian government have included it as part of their legal code.  It is also the case that Canada is a common location for American media productions and has been for some time (Matheson 2005).

Though perhaps most recently in the public eye due to one of its co-creators’ appalling transphobia, Father Ted (1995-1998, Channel 4) is still considered to be one of the most popular British sitcoms (Harrison 2018).  And it is that aspect of the series, its perceived-British identity, that I shall discuss in this blog.

This blog was originally published on WFTHN As part of my PhD research, which explores and analyses representations of women in the Third Golden Age of Television,[i] I have been watching many female-centric series. During this research, I have noticed the recurring presence of a narratological device that was virtually non-existent before this period: the voiceover.

Writing better code without AI, AI in peer review, local LLMs, Biothreat Benchmark Generation, R updates (R Data Scientist, RWeekly, R Works), red-teaming an AI vending machine, new papers

Annotating the literature with mentions of key concepts from a given domain is often the first step towards extracting more substantial structured knowledge. This can be challenging, as it typically encompasses acquiring and processing the relevant literature and ontologies then installing and applying difficult-to-use named entity recognition (NER) workflows. This post highlights software components I’ve implemented to simplify this workflow.

Special Issue edited by Amandine D’Azevedo, Anissa Medjebeur and David Roche (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, Institut Universitaire de France) This special issue of Mise au point will focus on fight choreographies in films and television series.

Der Exzellenzcluster PhoenixD (Photonics, Optics, and Engineering – Innovation Across Disciplines) hat erfolgreich die Bewilligung für seine zweite Förderphase erhalten und wird ab Januar 2026 für weitere sieben Jahre mit einer Millionenförderung unterstützt.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On paper, the North Bend Rail Trail is a neatly measured thing. The official guides describe a nearly seventy two mile corridor along the old Baltimore and Ohio line from Interstate 77 near Parkersburg to Wolf Summit, with thirteen tunnels, ten of them still passable, and thirty six bridges crossing creeks and hollows between the small towns of Wood, Ritchie, Doddridge, and Harrison counties.