Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/

Goodbye Google Chrome, nice to have met you …

CfP: Revolutions and Reflections: A Conference for Editing and Recovery Practitioners elaboratories.org/event/revolu... August 8-9 at UVA #PublicHistory #archives #DH #preservation

I re-shared this earlier before I had finished it but it merits doing so again now that I have. @plach.bsky.social has a singular voice here that helped clarify a lot for me about how we might chart a path for AI resistance that pushes back against vendor control and imagines different futures.

Here in NYS, I think public institutions need to see if state guidance changes, since we also have local mandates coming down... In the meantime, here is the online version of the Federal Register's ADA Title II compliance extension

I thought this essay was spot-on in comparing vibe coding with gambling rushes and a “sinister flow state.” They’re not a staunch critic, but describe a disorienting experience quite well.

Btw my press funded a small study into best-practices for alt text for illustrations, especially of illustrations of art. The resulting guide is short and clear and available free to download.

What makes Pennsylvania perfect… @mwoluchem.bsky.social and @livgar.bsky.social of @datasociety.bsky.social on our latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 episode, “Data Centers Go Nuclear”. Check out their latest piece in @newint.bsky.social. newint.org/science-and-... (w @emilymbender.bsky.social)

Ditto his comments on libraries

This story has everything, a focus on desal that led to overlooking other water sources, a city manager making $400K/yr saying don’t panic, a former water system manager saying residents should absolutely panic, and magical thinking: “The last hope to avert disaster was a 20- to 30-inch rainfall.”

The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!

«The user experience and applications of the technology may change, but the foundational incapacity for accountability, and the underlying ideological and material infrastructures of the AI industry, remain.» Great text by @eryk.bsky.social

Here we go again. Excellent cover story of @thecontinent.org in 3 parts. "The US-Europe love pact rekindles their colonial kink" "This time around, the colonisers have AI" And: "The African Union is paralysed" Read it!

"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence." Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI. Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...

"The Protocol distinguishes between retrieval-based AI systems, which keep source materials under organizational control, and general-purpose model training, which absorbs knowledge into model weights irreversibly." 📜 libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...

@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.

The promise was always that digital humanities would be fully subsumed into the humanities - make the "digital" redundant. But the AI age has really accelerated the the "D" over the "H" in the field, causing big splits between "digital" and "public" humanities instead of "digital" vs "traditional"

Art History will continue to be seen as an elitist discipline if the public apparatuses for communicating it refuse to acknowledge the scholarship that has drawn attention to art's role in serving and subverting power. Read the righteous review by Sherry Lindqiust here. hnanews.org/hnar/reviews...

Docs is an open-source alternative to Google Docs for collaborative writing, developed by a French-German government collaboration: impress-preprod.beta.numerique.gouv.fr/home/

Visual art media can be made accessible and tactile. The link here describes a photography exhibit that was made for folks with visual impairments, including tactile versions of the photographs with braille descriptions. www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

Searching for any form of "magnus" followed by any noun—just one example of flexible pattern matching possible with LatinCy Readers `find_sents` call... from this demo notebook: github.com/diyclassics/...

Beautiful thread from my ride-or-die @charliejane.bsky.social about the organization that our @humblebundle.com is benefitting. Buy some books (cheap!!) and help the amazing Miss Major Alexander Lee Black Trans Cultural Center!

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

Really looking forward to exploring this open access special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn dedicated to the intersection of Children’s Literature and Digital Humanities co-edited by @drfitzphd.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/issue/56268

University of Arizona Libraries is hiring for a RARE BOOK LIBRARIAN! 1st review of applications February 9, 2026. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... We have great collections and great people here. Not on the committee, happy to chat.

Proud to have Dine weaving in my personal collection, this recent video about weaving is really great and personal and moving: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWis...

Our tribute to Natalie Zemon Davis, in the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Please share widely! www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

Paste any IIIF manifest → model classifies every page locally → see where illustrations appear. Part of small-models-for-glam: small, efficient models for cultural heritage work. Not everything needs GPT-4! Try it: huggingface.co/spaces/small-models-for-glam/iiif-illustration-detector

happy to see Tressie encourage people to refuse AI. when people ask me about AI, I give them permission to say no :) (I even did the useless thing of putting it in my email signature lol)

Lastly, we made an interactive tool for exploring these borrowing trends, and we also released a public dataset. Exploratory tool: melaniewalsh.github.io/whats-seattl... Data: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

For "Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives," congrats to: Jim Casey, Christopher Dancy, @snblickhan.bsky.social, Tiffany Smith, Benjamin Lee. (And I must also include @profgabrielle.bsky.social !)

“An enduring benefit of Watters’ book is the way it functions like an X-ray machine, providing readers with the ability to see through terms like ‘personalized learning’ to reveal familiar pedagogies and politics of control and conformity.” - Me, on why everybody should read Audrey Watters.

📽️ WATCH: Photographer @annie-flanagan.bsky.social went to Clairton, PA, where residents live in the shadow of the country’s largest coke plant. Coke is a product used to manufacture steel. This is what Annie saw — and inhaled — while on assignment in Clairton. Link to our story below ⤵️

We are going to focus @douglassday.bsky.social in Feb 2026 on the Colored Conventions and their visions for citizenship. We need to tell a much fuller story about the 14th amendment. The history is crystal clear. The Constitution is crystal clear.

Western PA (where a 4 GW gas power plant is being constructed) does have access to the underground reservoirs required for seasonal green H2 storage and the combustion system could be modified to run the same turbines on pure H2. Now we just need the solar and wind resources and the electrolyzers.

We are hiring at the University of Arizona libraries for a Data Science Specialist/Librarian. Expertise/experience in Python is a must. Not on the search committee, will be your colleague. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

PJM is the regional grid serving 67 million customers in 13 states

New #AIstories publication by @annesigrid.bsky.social! I love this one: it compares human-told variants of a folktale with LLM-generated variants, finding 1) the implicit is made explicit 2) floatif motifs (fascinating new concept) 3) sex is censored, cannibalism augmented doi.org/10.3390/h141...

Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!

“After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon.” Eewwww

why "today’s LLMs might be the best that they will ever be" asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/are-llms-t...

📣New paper! Thrilled to share the methodological recipe for @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social in this article co-authored with @adiod.bsky.social @krystalkauffman.bsky.social Camilla Salim Wagner, Laurenz Sachenbacher @alexhanna.bsky.social & @timnitgebru.bsky.social 👉 ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

If you are interested in a primary source for the beginning of next semester, may I recommend the earliest recorded indigenous description of Appalachia, translated by yours truly? I'm working on a published version and would love any feedback you have as well. www.scottcave.net/blog/2025/10...

I'm very happy to have published a chapter in this excellent, open-access collection, "Being Human in the Digital World:" www.cambridge.org/core/service... Kudos to expert editors Beate Roessler and Valerie Steeves, as well as fellow authors Julie Cohen, David Lyon, Helen Nissenbaum, & more!

“Teaching curiosity is perhaps what we really need to be doing at this moment in time, more than anything else.”

On the third anniversary of ChatGPT, I aimed to pull back from “AI” as a flowing current of new models, new data centers, new initiatives, “new new new” — and look at it as a product of a specific and unique moment in history. What *was* ChatGPT? A few points in the thread ⬇️

It took some time, but now my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» is finally out in open access, as part of the latest issue of «Photography & Culture» www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....