do you like Tarot? do you like #openaccess history?
have i got the mildly interesting new research article for you!
https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/crad043/7310795
(image courtesy BNF https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53139578w)
How magicians' clients in 19th century France learned to be 'good victims' for fraud prosecutions.
https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2022/11/17/good-victims/
Because writing for the blog *always* feels easier than finishing the drafts I have overdue.
#newbies like myself might find this Mastodon for beginners guide useful, from the people at #hcommons - I did, and am now wondering whether I should change servers. #histodons
https://hcommons.org/docs/mastodon-quick-start-guide-for-humanities-scholars/
I still don't really understand Mastodon: is this going to appear as a reply to my last post?
Anyway, just to say that it was always - in my opinion - a mistake to see for instance Twitter as just another 'academic' forum. There are good reasons to want to cite tweets (I've done it), but of course social media have never followed the same rules as e.g. academic publishing. Old discussions disappear, which is frustrating (and I've tweeted about that before) but also part of the nature of the medium. If it wasn't ephemeral, it would lose many of its functions of immediacy, playfulness, and fallibility.
It's possible that the meltdown of the other social media platform is going to see years of discussions, links, networks, images etc lost to posterity. If the t.co link system goes, all the references go.
This alarms many historians and feeds into longstanding, important concerns about the failure to archive the web.
I do sometimes wonder if there is space in those concerns for the recognition that lots of people have always wanted social media to be ephemeral: auto-deletes of old tweets, anonymous accounts etc. Although historians are fond of complaining about the scarcity of sources on given topics, history is impossible where everything is preserved. It is an inherent feature of an archive to exclude as well as include.
None of this is an argument against preserving the internet - many are already grateful and many more will no doubt be grateful for that work of preservation. But I am interested in the totalizing instincts that sometimes peek through our concerns about oblivion.
Here's my #Introduction
I'm Will, a historian mainly of France, mainly from 18th-20th century, and (at the moment) mainly of witchcraft. I'm also particularly interested in creative forms of history making. My last book was a collaboration with a poet and a theatre-maker.
This is my second stab at a Mastodon (and should be redirecting followers etc from scholar.social).
Dave Troy 
Jessica Reinisch