substack.com/@alisonbooth... Let me be sure not to feature my profile picture. Fall cheer pictured from NY. All posts I read are suitably concerned about latest events. We keep on. I share a talk (outtakes and images) I gave to the hospitable Victorian seminar at CUNY Graduate Center.

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... In this post, I honor a book by Sheila Gerami that ties the 1901 Hall of Fame for great Americans to the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. But that ain’t all I share some AI chatbot absurdities about the proposed Garden of American Heroes in 2025.

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I post weekly or so. subscribe for free. I look at race and place, statues, memories about changing technology and academia across a lifetime. Practicing prose and poetry and keeping some hope a bit apart from the news.

UVA, with an Interim President, pays dear to a search firm and squanders human hours instead of serving the mission of learning! Instead of freaking out: share your pernicious or bizarre autocompletes. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

In a remarkably sedate Board of Visitors meeting (why, closed session for 1.5 hour at least), members of the community were able to hear the roll call to appoint Paul G. Mahoney the Interim President of UVA. www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/prof...

While I am feeling the changing of the guards in the library.virginia.edu/dh-center I take delight in rewriting today: Substack newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... A sabbatical in this day and age doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

Why AI chatbots lie to us | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A sensible account of why we must keep humans in the loop, ignore sycophancy, and keep a leash on "agentic" AI driven by the doubtful goals, roles, and notions that slipped into the pre- and posttraining. Humans still have work!

Inconvenient truths from @alisonbooth.bsky.social: 1. The narrative genre that ends in death is not (necessarily) tragedy. (See: biography.) 2. Reference entries (e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of Nat'l Biography, etc.) are not biographies. (Because genre, not bcse poorly written) #DH2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I think about the secrecy of outsiders. As the white faculty family in a small town, we had little to fear, but we really were extremely bent to please. This post is wondering about Black-white relations in the 1950s where I was born.

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... Have a look, and share any statue interests of your own. Have you ever seen a Madonna of the Trail in person?

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u... After last night's headline, this outcome. What next, all y'all? There will be no university presidents safe from trumped-up charges in Newspeak. I actually invoked states' rights in my messages to senators and congressman this morning.

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This begins My Race and Place, memories and investigations from childhood onward, probing privilege and contact zones. It's a thread in my Writing without Surveillance sabbatical newsletter.

I am just starting alisonbooth.substack.com/p/writing-wi..., my year of writing in genres I supposedly outgrew after I got my tenure track job. I need my other favorite Substack authors for the most timely insights. What I past feels urgent to me but runs along memory lane.

@megsmith.bsky.social Like the Rocovery Hub for American Women Writers and your "infrastructure as mutual aid." I'm serious about satirizing the throwback National Garden of Heroes and the data implicit in the list of people offered as subjects for statues. #ACH2025

@lyndamk.bsky.social shares praise of www.sucho.org Love the image of the skeuomorph blue "floppy" disk on the life raft, fits with the rowing crew metaphor. The organized collaboration.

@lyndamk on @datarescueproject.org #ACH2025 keynote. Sped-up precarity of meta/data now. Not to hoard, but proceed with calm, expert care. Their data is knowledgeable in all senses: not noise or "raw" data, and because they know this loss has precedents, e.g. 1890 census. Also DataRefuge.

📣Tune in to the “Digital Blackness” panel at #ACH2025 today (06/11) at 7p ET!📣 Panel will feature presentations from #DigBlk’s @dejaworkman.bsky.social, @weygudey.bsky.social‬, & @dburgher.bsky.social, and chaired by @jimccasey1.bsky.social‬. Register at ach2025.ach.org/en/

Looking forward to #ACH2025. It opening with a webinar with closed chat makes me speculate on which friends and colleagues are responsible for the emojis flying up the screen.

#ACH2025 Starting with Rahul Bhargava, "Civic Jugaad" dataculture.northeastern.edu We live in experimental/precarious/fascinating times for transdisciplinary and intersectional DH. See Data Culture Group. Participatory community data is where going gets tough.

Maybe anxiously doomscrolling isn’t the best thing to do the night before #ACH2025 starts. But at least I know I’ll be in good company for the rest of the week, as our #DigitalHumanities community comes together to create a space of care & solidarity. Looking forward to seeing y’all in a few hours 🫶

I'm attending No Kings's event, “NO KINGS CHARLOTTESVILLE” - sign up now to join me! www.mobilize.us/progressived...

I plan to participate online in the wonderful ACH Conference next week, ach2025.ach.org/en/ which has the coolest landing page ever. Registration is very reasonable for members.

www.neh.gov/program/nati... This is so timely, as in the Hall of Fame (NYU, the Bronx) 1901, competing with Munich's Temple of Fame and other pantheons in other nations: tablets in a colonnade designed by Stanford White. Statues were added after 1920--a busy era for statues as we now realize.

Considering 1) humor as a tactic to challenge autocracy 2) How Harvard could play nice. 16 Presidents have received Harvard honorary degrees. Photo by Anon: AI and a small group of Jewish friends who don't feel safer because of anti-antisemitism sheep's clothing on the rampaging wolves in academe.

@mvsa.bsky.social I'm thinking about Genealogies and looking forward to the conference in Fort Wayne, IN. Do you find anyone you research/descend from/want to know about at cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/perso.... Why not? It's a bibliography, not Wikipedia.

The new deadline for MVSA in April 2025 in Fort Wayne, IN, is Dec. 1! Attendees wishing to workshop a written project can apply for seminar spot by Jan. 5. Grad students doing dissertation research may apply for the Arnstein Prize, deadline Jan. 2. Visit our website for info: midwestvictorian.org

I see we cannot link to a certain Chinese LLM so I only tell of its hilarious result: "Rewrite this story in the style of Henry James" with the words (it knew exactly) of "Hills Like White Elephants." 28 uses of "shall," and phrases like "whose countenance bore the marks of a restless energy."

My students and I are playing with "Hills Like White Elephants" in a course on taste and textual DH: experiment with the words and punctuation of the text (no title, no author). I asked DeepSeek,"Rewrite this story in the style of Henry James." It was ready! chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/f43...

Went to Delegate Assembly #MLA vowing to be silent; felt with the die-in; respected the Occupy-style walkout; found myself in smaller quorum of people continuing messy democratic +/-150 yrs humanities advocacy. We (8 or so) crafted a statement against destruction of education in Gaza. Build again!

#CriticalAI is at #MLA. Today's working group #1 on TEACHING CRITICAL AI LITERACIES was packed. Join us tomorrow (Sat 1/11) for the successor at 8:30am!

Proud of our @walshbr.bsky.social's chapter in this exciting book! Join us this spring term (date TBA, will share here) for a related public event w/ @walshbr.bsky.social, @alisonbooth.bsky.social, & @gabrielh.bsky.social.

We begin with a set of provocations by @katinalynn.bsky.social, @alisonbooth.bsky.social, @walshbr.bsky.social and Travis Bartley on the crises in graduate training and the academy, including Katina's invitation to simply stop what we're doing now and rethink our programs. (5/14)

Day 10 is... Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries by @alisonbooth.bsky.social global.oup.com/academic/pro... #bookchallenge #booksky 10/20

greenwoodsearch.com/wp-content/u... Almost a decade co-leading Scholars' Lab and now the Center that includes IATH. now I "retire" to a sabbatical, then fulltime what I was trained for (research, teaching). Reach out with any questions about the amazing opportunity to redraw my footsteps! Jan. 15!

Circles of friends & family have shared: new images of the cosmos; recommended reading about other catastrophic times in history; and revitalizing talks that call out what is at heart in a warped electorate. www.instagram.com/reel/DCCpe5T... Mayor of Baltimore cf. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark.

In that context, we talked about Annie Swafford and the costs to junior scholars of getting into it on Twitter with senior scholars, even if they're right. Even though Annie's out of academia and students wouldn't recognize her name, she made a difference. Keep telling the old stories that matter.

Finally made headway, after seven years of trying, on teaching as part of the curriculum in addition to all the Scholars’ Lab stuff. Teaching “Data for the Rest of Us” this spring. Syllabus is still in progress but I’ll share when it’s together. Half workshops and discussion half project.

#Local: On 10/17, a Special Collections exhibit opens on the Anne Spencer Collection, curated by DHC faculty director @alisonbooth.bsky.social!

Linda Ngari keynote #DH2024 Big Tech won't "moderate" social media; data journalist training needs advanced tools for research/transparency. Disinformation/malinformation doing health, political harm, targeting poor populations. Could we have a nonprofit new-AP network? A don't-trust Trust?

#DHmakes does ADHO COB/EB meeting. Because sometimes the Award Chair is the best person to teach needle felting to a COB member's junior assistant. #DH2024

@britishlibrary.bsky.social at #ADHO2024 in Arlington, VA: hearing Mia Ridge describe how the BL invitingly teaches machine learning. Greetings to all current and former inhabitants of the machines for living in LWM project! www.turing.ac.uk/research/res...

Our 1919 project, our Gallery of WWI Women, continues with a blockbuster post by Dr. Lloyd Sy (now of Yale): scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/cbw-abo... Issue 2 of what happened to representation of women during the war. All-Black or all-white collections of American women in 1919. Alcott, Tubman?

In a humble tribute to the 1619 Project, a student team and I have focused on "about 1919"--collective biographies of women during World War I--nation and race! scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/cbw-abo... Watch for pieces by Lloyd Sy, Mackenzie Daly, Isabel Bielat, Yichu Wang, and Anna S. Lee.