I have almost changed a bike tire for the first time. It’s been a journey. And now, at the end of it all, my brakes are permanently on and I can’t solve it. What happened to WikiHow? Why is everything a hyper YouTube video? Am I in hell?

In case you missed it, this workbook is a guide to thinking through when and how to take risks as a higher ed worker. It aims to help us differentiate between danger and discomfort, while also offering some practical information about how to protect yourself while taking meaningful action.

#digitalhumanities and #dhmakes friends -- have you tried or do you currently hold regular hours that invite people to the space without strict programming? E.g., promoting a co-working environment, opportunities for collaborative work, office hours... Beyond "stuff," what helped shape your space?

I'm sorry, but Microsoft should not be allowed to do anything with AI until you can open a UTF-8 csv file in Excel.

Great panel at #DH2025 and it's great to hear more about AI resistance & refusal, giving consideration to whether our methods serve the communities we work with. Though this ex. does raise questions for me about the impacts of the absence in training data if scholarship is closed.

conference season is upon us

✨stunning achievement: a conference presentation with a brain injury✨

Because we need a bit of fun in the world too, here is a post about the sonification of the data in our Data Rescue Tracker (now DRP Portal). Very much worth a read and listen. Thanks to Will Clary for making this! www.datarescueproject.org/sonifying-da...

Just spotted this opening for a Research Associate, Managing Editor and Digital Data Specialist for the World Historical Gazetteer, whgazetteer.org. Deadline is July 11, 2025 tomorrow! Great for folks doing critical GIS & working w/JSON, python: networks.h-net.org/jobs/68811/u...

Overheard from a campus tour: “I don’t really know AI but I’ve never read a textbook, I’ve never watched a video. I just use ChatGPT.” 😰

If you missed my talk "Misinformation in the Age of 'AI'" at the Durham County Library, Digging down on dis-/misinformation, authoritarianism, generative "AI", the stakes for consensus reality, and what we can try to do about it, the recording is now up on the tubes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE5...

So I’m walking my dog and suddenly, I am sprayed with water. I hear, “Oh shit!” I look to see a woman on her porch with a super soaker. “Did I get you?!” She launches into explaining about rabbits in her garden. I, groggy, start asking Q’s about gardening. Glossing over—water gun? Rabbits?

I’m frustrated for many reasons at surface-skimming media history takes on AI like “people opposed the printing press too!” If media history is going to help us navigate the present, we have to reckon with something people often omit from those comparisons—the intersection of power & new media (1/4)

What does this mean for our little DH projects? I've been poking around and haven't found much chatter. I know our best practices for sustainable DH projects, but I've never prepared for the Battle Bots arena.

I am begging people to stop deleting webpages until they check their analytics. The number of my resources that are IA links is TOO DAMN HIGH.

Seen on a walk: this tree completely engulfing a fence. The way Boston just plants trees right in the sidewalk and directly under power lines is astounding. We don’t really have other options, but still… wild!

Everyone around here is way too on edge for the city to have under-advertised fireworks for an obscure holiday.

can i ignore well established grammatical rules because i don’t like the mouthfeel

The essay about this in DH+Lib is out! I talk about the workshop I ran and my somewhat failed attempt at avoiding "buttonology" as the complexity of teaching the craft recreated some of the challenges I face when I teach digital tools. dhandlib.org/weaving-the-...

The first section of this issue has two articles that feature weaving as a method for data physicalization:

🧵1/9 I’m temporarily using screen readers and I just want to thank everyone who has advocated for a culture of accessibility here. I’ve been slowly able to reconnect with the world. I’m really clumsy with it. It’s hard to learn accessibility tools all on your own with a sudden new disability.

Whether it's a DH project, a personal site, or even gov site that is going offline, all you need is a WACZ file created with any of our tools (Browsertrix.com, ArchiveWeb.page) and you can host a web archive-powered mirror of your own, for free! To get started, check out: github.com/webrecorder/...

Last month I was working out how to capture changes to gov websites for a workshop and landed on these little track changes tapestries. I saw the CDC HIV site removed a ton of pages and information. I thought it was fishy…. And so it was! This little tapestry captures the loss in a few lines.

My first post as a regular contributor to ACRLog is about LC not only implementing the changes to "Gulf of America" and "Mount McKinley," but *fast-tracking* those changes. acrlog.org/2025/03/28/a... #critcat #LCSH

Love this new initiative by @webrecorder.net: GovArchive.us, mirroring dynamic sites as a static web archive, while preserving the previous URL structure. Could be a really compelling options for digital humanities projects, too.

Love to get an email from my professional org @ach.bsky.social within hours of it surfacing that DOGE had come for NEH, with specific steps people can take, a form to collect info on research impacts, and a commitment to further advocacy. Keep it up, ACH. MLA, AHA & friends should take note.

Amazing. Will do again.

A coworker and I are visiting a class tomorrow where students are doing digital projects for their final assignment. There isn’t a ton of time for full project updates, so instead we’re asking “on a scale of medieval cat, how are you feeling about your digital project?”

Since I don’t drive, the only time my dog gets in a car is when the sitter is taking her hiking. Now, every open car door is the path the hiking. She is literally trying to crawl into strangers’ cars on busy Boston streets. Stranger danger, dog!

Everything is pretty terrible but at least March Meowness is coming back.

Good morning ☀️

Enjoy this video of my dog and three golden retrievers in the snow.

Working on transcriptions for #DouglassDay, but for anyone having issues w/the Library of Congress site, this collection from the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian can be a place to direct energy! transcription.si.edu/project/59479 #MSUDH @dhmsu.bsky.social

The wonderful opportunity to visit the Library of Congress at #DH2024 is what gave me the idea to use these datasets for our workshops all week. ❤️ I’ve been participating in @douglassday.bsky.social since 2020 but had no idea the transcriptions were available as csv’s. Great resource.

For our third #lovedata25 workshop @pnadelofficial.bsky.social taught about building your own search engines with NLP. He demonstrates his streamlit app where you can load your own data and customize your search. It just so happens that the LC’s crowdsourced transcriptions are perfectly formatted.

Extremely cool post

Prepping for all these workshops this week has been a great opportunity to dig through Library of Congress collections and the transcription data (which is in spreadsheets!) It seems like Rosa Parks would write on anything. There’s a pancake recipe on a bank deposit envelope?

Today @akijas.bsky.social and I did a workshop on analyzing historical documents with minimal computing methods (aka, TEI). We’re continuing to use LC collections that connect to Douglas’s Day on Fri. Today we used colored pencils to encode a postcard from MLK to Rosa Parks.

We have a whole week of workshops coming up in-person on the Medford Campus. Wed: Analyzing historical documents with minimal computing methods (i.e., TEI) Thu: Building your own search engine Fri: Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon tinyurl.com/tufts-lovedata

Just completed the first workshop of our Love Data Week at @dh-at-tufts.bsky.social. Today, I taught Handwriting Text Recognition with Transkribus. We explored materials from Frederick Douglass's papers at the Library of Congress, looking toward Friday's transcribe-a-thon.

Includes a helpful 5-step guide to thinking through data quilt block design that sounds useful for any kind of data viz/embodiment design brainstorming, including #DHmakes. Excited for @claudiaeberger.bsky.social's data quilt+zine to be part of @scholarslab.bsky.social's public space!

All the talk of eggs has me craving absolutely everything egg-based and egg-centric. I’m eating more eggs right now than I have in a year. 🤦‍♀️

Excited to see the datasets going into @icpsr.bsky.social data lumos. A lot of our volunteer work here!! We have more coming! www.datalumos.org/datalumos/

I start my email bluntly, not because I am rude, but because I know that it does not "find you well," just as I am not well.

We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.

It’s snowing like every other day and I have never had a nosebleed in my life until now and it’s been *constant.* But at least the sun sets after 5? 😭 Boston is wrecking me.