Home / Humanities
History, philosophy and culture, the long conversation I never want to leave. Papers I have written, digital tools for researchers, books I keep returning to, and journal pieces. Some pieces are in Spanish and are always marked ES.
Academic
Formal articles written across the years. More to come.
A formal specification of SAEL, the language behind the Transcriba hieroglyph editor, with a comparative analysis against other notation systems for Middle Egyptian.
Digital humanities
Small online tools I build for the long work of reading old things, for epigraphers, palaeographers and curious readers. Free to use, no account needed.
Compose Middle Egyptian text with the SAEL language: syntax highlighting, a searchable sign catalogue and dictionary, and real-time validation. Export as PNG or plain text.
Visualize historical events on interactive timelines, load several chronographies at once, and let it surface synchronous coincidences across cultures and regions.
Enhance photographs of ostraca, papyri and clay tablets to reveal faded text, with Retinex and CLAHE filters and presets tuned for each material.
Transcribe an old manuscript or papyrus directly on its image: highlight words, add transcriptions and notes, and save the whole session to a single JSON file.
On the shelf
Not reviews, exactly. More like the companions that shaped how I read, think and write.
E. R. Dodds. A classic that reads Greek culture against its own irrational currents: madness, dreams, shamans and the fear of freedom.
Geraldine Pinch. How heka, the Egyptian power to make things happen, ran through religion, medicine and daily life, from pharaoh to expectant mother.
Erik Hornung. The Egyptians saw their gods not as one or many but as both: divinity as a totality that manifests in a plurality of forms.
Erik Hornung. A wry history of Egyptosophy, the West's habit of finding secret wisdom in Egypt, from Hermes Trismegistus to Freemasonry and theosophy.
Frances A. Yates. Places Bruno, philosopher and magician burned at the stake, inside the Hermetic tradition and reshapes the history of Renaissance science.
Journal
Shorter pieces on history, memory and culture, written for the Journal and tagged as Humanities.
Marginalia taught us how to pay attention. Somewhere we let the digital margin shrink to almost nothing.
From wax tablets to the cloud: a short history of the devices we outsourced our remembering to.