Wilko Hardenberg

Modern historian, unexpected geek, wannabe naturalist, sauntering explorer, and more. A German from Vercelli. He/him. Born 332 ppm.

I am a historian of the environment, science, and knowledge at Humboldt University in Berlin. I am the co-PI of the project "The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950".

My broader research interests focus on how nature has been perceived, explained, and managed in late modern Europe.

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-07-09

Just voted for Sandi Toksvig as the next chancellor of #CambridgeUniversity and I have rarely been as proud of my vote #GirtonCollege

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SCDH Münsterscdh@fedihum.org
2025-07-07

Unbefristete E14-Stelle in Münster! Jetzt bis zum 5.9. bewerben und die Leitung des SCDHs übernehmen:
stellen.uni-muenster.de/jobpos

#DigitalHumanities #Transformation

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:

Our latest society notepad, with a few words from the President on the importance of community and exchange in the life of an academic society, is online, as usual in free access:

liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

#envhist #histodons

Thank you as usual to Environment and History and whole team at White Horse Press for the hospitality and friendship: whpress.co.uk/EH.html

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-07-04

I just updated the feed of the European Society of Environmental History with announcements from the last couple of weeks!

historians.social/@eseh

Follow us for (irregularly updated—I'll do better, I promise!) #envhist news!

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Javier Jimenez Shawjjimenezshaw@mapstodon.space
2025-07-02

#NOAA Released the "beta" version of the Modernized National Spatial Reference System

beta.ngs.noaa.gov/

It will become the official CRS in the US, probably next year.
Everything is new: geographic system, vertical system, geoid model, state planes,... and to make it funnier, the geographic coordinates move between 1 and 2 meters respect to nad83 🫣

If you want to play with it in PROJ, look at github.com/jjimenezshaw/NSRS-2

#gis #gischat

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
2025-07-02

Meet the botanist who discovered a new "ghost plant" species hiding in plain sight for decades! Dr. Kenji Suetsugu shares how childhood wonder led to groundbreaking discoveries about plants that abandoned photosynthesis.

wp.me/pdRZhH-m8q

#Botany #PlantScience 🧪

A researcher in glasses and a dark blue sweater crouches in a dense forest environment, examining plants with a handheld magnifying glass. He is surrounded by ferns, fallen logs, moss-covered rocks, and leaf litter on the forest floor.
Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-07-02

@fidromanistik @sasastanisic Schade, dass der Post nicht die ganze Studie analysiert, in der steht, dass Brain-to-LLM-Nutzer ein höheres metakognitives Engagement haben: linkedin.com/pulse/mits-chatgp. Kurzgesagt: Es hängt immer noch davon ab, wie man es benutzt. Die Studie selbst ist auch voller Tricks, die LLMs triggern sollen: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-07-02

@steko it says that epigenetics won’t kick in for a few more generations, and thus we need to adapt the way we live instead of hoping in biology. It sort of fits in with numbers given by historian of medicine David S. Jones that heat beyond our basal temperature or even less) are lethal in the long run: salatainstitute.harvard.edu/th

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-07-02

Interesting interview with the philosopher Telmo Pievani about #heatwave #climateAdaptation #epigenetics «Inadatti a questo clima, i geni non ci aiutano» (Corriere della Sera), 02. Jul 2025
pressreader.com/article/282149 (in Italian) TEST: not sure if this share will allow to skip the paywall

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
2025-06-29

According to AI:

Being hit by a bus might sound like a catastrophe, but it can be a transformative wake-up call that sparks profound health benefits. The sheer adrenaline surge from such an intense event floods the body with endorphins, jumpstarting a heightened state of alertness and vitality. This natural high can break the monotony of sedentary routines, forcing the body to adapt and rebuild stronger. The physical impact can act like an extreme stress test.

garymarcus.substack.com/p/gene

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
2025-06-23

Mastodon ist jetzt offiziell „Digital Public Good“ – also digitales öffentliches Gut – und steht damit auf einer UN-Liste neben Projekten wie Wikipedia oder LibreOffice. Das Fediverse bekommt damit Rückenwind als gemeinwohlorientierte Alternative zu Big Tech. Anerkannt wurde Mastodon von der Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), einer Initiative der UN. Die Kriterien: Open Source, Datenschutz, kein Konzerninteresse. Für alle, die digital unabhängig und demokratisch kommunizieren wollen, ist das ein starkes Signal.

#Mastodon #Fediverse #DigitalPublicGood #UN #DigitaleDemokratie #BigTechAlternativen

blog.campact.de/2025/06/mastod

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
2025-06-23

In our quest to make #OCR as easy to use as possible, we've added two new services to #IMMARKUS: Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT. (You’ll need to bring your own API keys to use them.)

Both return full-text transcriptions–no bounding boxes–so you’ll need to select a region before running them. Works with local images and any #IIIF source!

The IMMARKUS annotation interface, showing an area selected on scanned atlas index page, and the corresponding automated transcription.The IMMARKUS OCR tool, showing a digitized Chinese gazetteer page in the OCR preview and settings dialog.
Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇straphanger@urbanists.social
2025-06-19

"A cyclist can go 3 or 4 times faster than a pedestrian, but uses 5 times less energy. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match metabolic energy to impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well."
—Ivan Illich, 1974.

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-17

H-Oceans just published a very kind review by Christine Keiner of my book Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

What I can definitely agree on are the compliments to the jacket designer, Rae Ganci Hammers, for a stunningly beautiful cover.

networks.h-net.org/group/revie

#envhist #histsci #oceanhist

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-17

@overholt I had something to say on this article as well (even if I somehow missed reading that specific sentence, the way it is written must have dulled me out big times)

hcommons.social/@wilko/1146977

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-17

I’m playing around just with NotebookLM (the AI the article advertises) to plow through a selected bunch of verified primary sources. It seems useful to do the “distant reading” kind of work I tried to do on that corpus already, as it lowers significantly the coding bar. I also use Claude.ai for some editing, not being a native speaker. But, it’s true, I haven’t seen any of it able to actually sub me or take over the historian’s work. Up to now it is always me steering it, no great brilliant ideas have come out of AI alone. Maybe occasionally it prompted me to think deeper, however. fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app #histodons #digitalhistory

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-14

Crossposting this thread about #hope and #pessimism because the excerpts from Mara van der Lugt “Hopeful Pessimism” are gold bsky.app/profile/daeganmiller. #envhum #climate

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-13

I set up a cheap and dirty homepage for #measuringtheearth using Linktree and short.io to help anybody interested in navigating my repository on the history of #geodesy to find their way: measuring.earth/home

#histsci #digitalhistory

Wilko Hardenbergwilko@hcommons.social
2025-06-13

after listening to a talk by @joguldi on AI and historical objectivity and receiving a hint in this direction on the chat, I started playing around -- multiple ethical qualms notwithstanding -- with NotebookLM. I have now set up a publicly accessible notebook with my #MeasuringtheEarth dataset on the history of #geodesy (a complete collection of digitized conference minutes and reports of the Internationale Erdmessung, 1862-1912, also available on GitHub: measuring.earth/IAG).

As long as you have a Google account, you can explore the dataset and ask questions about the history of geodesy using AI: measuring.earth/notebook. As soon as I have time and resources, I will look for freely accessible alternatives. BTW, I'm open for suggestions on how to set up a publicly accessible #AI interface that draws on #GitHub (and in perspective #Codeberg) to go through such a collection in a way comparable to NotebookLM

#histsci #digitalhistory

Wilko Hardenberg boosted:
2025-06-13

Really interesting piece: “I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me” understandingai.org/p/i-got-fo #AI #science #physics

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