gamification, smartification

Zotero 9 is out! www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-9/

Unfortunately print, as print, tends to be prescriptive.

In April 1991, Gopher system was created at the University of Minnesota as a text-based system that used the hierarchical menu structure for navigation. #InternetHistory

Jane Eyre reimagined in Classics Illustrated #39 (1947), cover by Harley Griffiths. There's just something about these 1940s-50s pulp and comic-book remediations of 19th-c. texts...

New book: Macaulay and English in India (Routledge). Details at z.umn.edu/MandEI. @routledgebooks.bsky.social

Look! It's finally happening, I'm so excited! Please share with your friends, people who assign books, and pets.

To be published by Routledge this month: Macaulay and English in India. Details at www.routledge.com/Macaulay-and....

🔎 Rare 18th-century punches used to create the original Baskerville typeface have been digitised and released online. Designers, historians and the wider public now have the opportunity to study the physical tools that shaped modern typography. 🔗https://loom.ly/1ulLaFI

The NYT has included True Color in their "books to read in March" round-up! Of course: True Color is out March 31, so you'll have to read it really, really fast to stay compliant with the NYT's demands. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/b...

Kristin Bluemel's book "Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain" focuses on artists Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall. And it is available in paperback! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791477...

stochastic hamartia I'm pretty sure that today I coined the term "stochastic hamartia." (Google Search reports zero instances of use.) I made it up because both of these important words are archery-related, and so they might belong together.

Much baggage on that horse, explained in Chapter 7 of ohiostatepress.org/books/titles....

Macaulay and English in India. Proofed and indexed. Due out next month. www.routledge.com/Macaulay-and...

Could be an excellent watercolor.

A good, old-fashioned (viz., New Historicist) take on Gatsby, re-imagining the idea of illustration, Grangerizing the book anew. new.artsmia.org/exhibition/g...

Four of the over 225 owls carved, chiseled, and sculpted into the walls, doors, columns, light fixtures, and grates of Walter Library at the University of Minnesota.

Portrait by Millais.

Alice & Co. at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival @patrickleary.bsky.social @theotherprofessor.bsky.social

Last call! Colby Book Prize nominations are due TOMORROW, 31 January. This prize is awarded to a book published during the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the #19thC British press. If you recently read a book that fits that description, we want to know!

We're now accepting applications for our 2026 Patrick Leary Resource Development Grants and Mitchell Dissertation Prize! Both awards offer 💵 for tools and research relating to the #19thC periodical press. More information about each award can be found in the thread below.

With a few hours to go in the tax year, I wanted to make sure I got an extra donation in to @wikimediafoundation.org and to @archive.org, among a range of other causes. Wish I could manage more, but this is at least something I know I can do.

Yes, “the meaning depends on the context,” always. But in this context, or in any context, does AI have a sense of humor?

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. As ever - sharing Tennyson’s exhortation to leave the old year dying in the night. In gratitude, fellow travelers. #everynightapoem

No need to go to the gym when you can shovel snow at home.

Stephen Mihm’s “The 2025 discourse about grade inflation deserves a C” takes a long view. www.startribune.com/college-stud...

Season's Greetings books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Season's Greetings books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Once more, with feeling Ad Reinhardt 1913–1967 | Tate share.google/RQwdZIbv5kAv...

A few more recently popular ngrams, gleaned from this morning's Star Tribune: do the right thing, feel equipped to. people and businesses need, plain old, watch your mouth, we really want to make sure, what the data actually says. For context see z.umn.edu/Ngrams.

Gehry's Weisman Art Museum speaks to the corrugated limestone cliff below. @weismanart.bsky.social

Gehry's Weisman Art Museum speaks to the corrugated limestone cliff below.

The word of the day is pre-order.

“ . . . from Los Angeles to Bilbao,” with Minneapolis in between: Weisman Art Museum (1993), before Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997). hga.com/john-cook-lo...

close reading, critical thinking books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

U Minnesota Press's Spring 26 catalog, listing our new Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (in Debates in DH series), eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, @jamessmithies.bsky.social): z.umn.edu/spring26. Table of contents: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

Footprints in Minneapolis

“The new forms cannot fully substitute for the actual physical objects in which those earlier texts were embodied at particular times in the past.” Thirty years old and ever more timely, regarding primary records: www.mla.org/content/down... @modernlanguage.bsky.social @paulakrebs.bsky.social

It's #blackfriday here at the ILT: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2nd Dublin edn.) Two single-sided black pages face each other at pp. 56-57. "The ‘blackness’ is printed on both sides of the leaf with what appears to be a solid woodblock." The Laurence Sterne Trust

"Painting, turkey cock, by Mansur, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, Mughal, ca. 1612." Victoria and Albert Museum, IM.135-1921. collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O17088/...

"Texts are inevitably affected by the physical means of their transmission; the physical features of the artifacts conveying texts therefore play an integral role in the attempt to comprehend those texts.

New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

If you live in Minnesota you have access (no login required) to thousands of journals and ebooks, the full text of the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Star Tribune (all the way back to the 80s), and much more. All thanks to eLibrary Minnesota. Libraries rule! 2/4 elibrarymn.org

Despite the recent banner, not actually on sale yet: Macaulay and English in India (Routledge: March 2026). www.routledge.com/Macaulay-and....

Scribe ready to transcribe what Homer says. Detail of Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus, engraving after Raphael by Marcantonio Raimondi; c. 1517–20. Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Well antedates the OED for jaywalk ("1957 C. Brooke-Rose"). More at books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Hjeriñ sind begriffen vier Bücher von menschlichen Proportion durch Albrechten Dürer von Nürenberg erfunden und beschriben (Nürenberg: Jeronymum Formschneyder, 1528). primo.lib.umn.edu/permalink/01...

Dictionaries 46:2 (2025) is now available (open access!) on @projectmuse.bsky.social Read here about: Arabic in China, Wittgenstein & Austrian German, etymology, Georgian learner-lexicography, antedating & linguistics pedagogy + Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary review muse.jhu.edu/issue/55471

"It's an ill wind," etc.: "Before the introduction of the zebra mussel, visibility of only 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m) was usual, slightly decreasing as the years passed. Water clarity improved markedly in the mid-1990s with the arrival of zebra mussels, which feed on algae."

A terrific opportunity to be at the forefront of periodicals' research (and to develop editorial chops!). Don't miss out.