ICYMI - wrote this week about AI, student motivation, and writing.

Btw, I created the Bluesky feed "CLS in DH/NLP". It collects posts containing the keywords: #CLS, #CCLS, #JCLS, #CCLS2025, CLS INFRA, Literary Computing, SPP-CLS, Computational Literary Studies, Cultural Analytics, Digital Literary Studies, etc. 👉 Feel free to like and share

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and starts in 2024—a 31-year leap. Are creators imagining futures that are closer or further away? Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting. doi.org/10.18737/552...

What do Elon Musk, Joyce Carol Oates, Adam Schiff & Ezra Pound have in common? They all remixed T.S. Eliot lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper" Why have these lines become a meme—used across the political spectrum? Find out in our new book chapter!

Lost David Bowie sessions from 1974 rediscovered!

This is a great intro activity-- I've done something similar, but always a bit more structured-- next time I'll try it this way and see what kinds of variables emerge --

So grateful for the people on YT who post videos showing how to fix random things! (Today it was how to remove a drawer from a piece of Ikea furniture I assembled at least 15 years ago and couldn't easily figure out.)

Looking forward to reading this!

Reminder: You actually have three more days to get your shit together for the new year because 2025 doesn't really start until Monday.

As a Gen Xer, I have always associated "vibes" with hippie boomers. This essay explains their return: "They are precious fairy dust to keep the all-seeing algorithms from sinking their vampire teeth into our culture, and yet they are a modern marketing tool." www.theguardian.com/culture/2024...

Currently enjoying this take on the "spooky abandoned space ship" genre: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes. #FridayReads us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

A poem appropriate for the (grading) season, by @josephfasano.bsky.social: poets.org/poem/student...

A frustrated letter from the Library of Congress asking Norbert Weiner what section of a library his book is supposed to be in (1949).

Happy to see #fridayreads starting to flourish here! I'm currently enjoying The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard: pirate space opera politics and intrigue, with sentient ships in the mix.

Wonderful strategies here for non-poets too:

some little bluesky tips 🦋 your blocks, likes, lists, and just about everything except chats are PUBLIC you can pin custom feeds; i like quiet posters, best of follows, mutuals, mentions if your chronological feed is overwhelming, you can make and pin make a personal list of "unmissable" people

University presses putting together starter packs of all their authors on Bluesky is such a good move.

I'm giving another paper tomorrow on Annie Edwardes, my favourite Victorian sensation novelist you've really never heard of. Cover 👇 from the yellowback edition of Archie Lovell (1866), depicting a dramatic moment between the heroine & the caddish Gerald Durant on a steamer to London.

Next level

Didn't find one, so made a computational literary studies starter pack, with notable bunch of european folks and early career scholars. My circle here is small, so please reply/dm to be added or removed and suggest people from your networks! go.bsky.app/4et1nxZ

+1 (h/t @ncecire.bsky.social )

I love to see the paleography bat signal go on -- this is what a social network is good for! (I don't have any answers for this one but maybe you do)

Hard to know if it's just the influx of new joins or the new visibility offered by "starter packs", but I'm encouraged by finding lots of once-familiar names and faces now on here-- as well as new ones!

At last, there's a searchable directory of Bluesky starter packs, courtesy of @mubashariqbal.com! Just one more way third-party developers are helping to make this place better. Search starter packs by keyword, and sort by "Uses" to see which ones people are finding the most helpful

I've started a starter pack for academics and organizations focused on the #19th century! I'm sure I have missed many, many people (I was trying to get this started quickly) — comment below if you want to be added. go.bsky.app/6ZkJ592

A starter pack for #NLP #NLProc researchers! 🎉 go.bsky.app/SngwGeS

Looking forward to this!

Leaving #DH2024 with a full brain and warm heart. Grateful to see friends and colleagues again in person, and inspired by sustained intellectual exchanges throughout the week. Thank you to everyone who made this conference happen!

While teaching network analysis, I became interested in the aesthetic and algorithmic differences among the widely used open-access software tools. This chapter examines the default aesthetics used in Pajek, Cytoscape, and Gephi as part of a critical hermeneutics of dataviz. doi.org/10.1515/9783...

Happy to have a chapter in this new collection, Technology and Literature, edited by Adam Hammond. My chapter situates methods of distant reading within the technological changes of the past 25 years. Other chapters on a range of topics in book history & technology: www.cambridge.org/core/books/t...

Taking a few minutes to say something positive can really make a difference for someone else -- and by extension the larger scholarly community

+1

How do you solve a problem like a séance? With Python and GPT3, is my answer. Creating a voice-activated AI responder in Python eve.gd/2023/09/24/c...

My mom's book club is reading a book about AI, and asked me for input on it, so I gave her a reading list of accessible articles that I think best summarize what's going on. Posting below. ↓

New blog post, trying to get beyond a debate that has so far treated students mostly as consumers of AI. In the twenty-first century, critical thinking will require understanding how models work.

With powerful, well-developed algorithmic search available in any browser tab, why do people persist in trying to use ChatGPT and its ilk as a search tool? AI models are good for many things, but search is not typically one of them.

Went back to the haunted manse of today’s Twitter. Saw a grand staircase that no longer connects to the second floor. A desiccated meme in a Ming vase. A sexy, rain & tear stained gif. A shrunken troll in the corner of a guest bedroom whispering to himself, “actually, actually, actually.”

In updating my syllabi, I found it useful to look at this Google doc of examples of AI policies for different courses crowdsourced by Lance Eaton: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Recirculating this ahead of the Fall semester: it's a critical class on AI images and generative art, using AI images as a lens for visualizing data ethics, representational harms, and popular myths around AI systems. The syllabus and videos are all there, dig in! www.cyberneticforests.com/ai-images

Looking forward to reading this! I always learn a lot from Mark A-H.

Very useful models for how to set the tone for the semester, especially if your students may be accessing your syllabus in a CMS before the first meeting:

A really thoughtful interview with Vauhini Vara about both the beautiful and troubling aspects of AI writing. Saving this one to teach, since it complicates the usual binaries of the current AI discourse. (h/t @jbj.bsky.social) https://embeddings.substack.com/p/vauhini

Reposting for the evening crowd....Do you want to be included in an expansive, inclusive Digital Humanities Bluesky feed? Add your username here: forms.gle/EKTCqMBp31eaoFdd6

Aha, now this makes more sense

Thanks to @quinnanya.bsky.social I'm here and feeling cautiously optimistic as I look around for familiar names . . .