Robert Redford playing a gentle incarnation of death, coming for a frightened old woman in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" (1962). An extraordinary performance then, terribly bittersweet today

well, apropos of recent news stories about how professors are objects of interpretation and negative feels . . . Professor Superstar now has a cover. press.umich.edu/Books/P/Prof...

The first copies of my next book, a short reflection on the lasting impact of indie game Undertale, have arrived at @uchicagopress.bsky.social and are in good company with @n-w-f.bsky.social's upcoming book on Animal Crossing. Find both at: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/se...

Great moments in interface design. Why do we even have that button?

The #DataSittersClub is back with @anasalter.bsky.social @lucidbard.bsky.social & @readywriting.bsky.social talking AI and pedagogy, with examples from the "DH Programming Pedagogy in the Age of AI" class. Even if you're anti-AI, please fill out the survey! datasittersclub.github.io/site/dsc23.h...

+ @lucidbard.bsky.social - we will be sharing some of our pedagogical concerns and some of the concepts we taught in "DH Programming Pedagogy in the Age of AI" at DHSI 🤖

First week of fall semester is wrapped, and my floofy kitty and I are on the same page.

"Queer Book History" zine is done (32 pages!), just getting final team edits pre-pub. Built on upcoming @sharpnews.bsky.social Queer Book History Bibliography—100s of resources by team led by SHARP Bibliographer @bibliowingate.bsky.social. Zine=fave reads, teaching examples, community+conf info +

Recommend this piece by @ibogost.bsky.social on the dismal state of where we're at in higher ed teaching & learning right now. Key takeaway is that to fix what is breaking would require a wholesale overhaul that few of us have the time, energy or institutional capacity to undertake.

I’m sure I’ll keep tinkering—but I’ve drafted a syllabus for "Writing with Robots" This my theme on an upper-level English course fulfilling students’ advanced writing requirement. The course seeks to help students understand what LLMs actually are & situate them in longer & more nuanced histories

First day of our fall contracts. I get tired of thinking this is going to be the worst year of my career in higher education, but here we are again. Seemed like a good night for a theme park.

As education is being systematically devalued, this also promises users it'll be OK if (when?) we stop offering actual PhDs.

Just finished building out the remaining exercises for my Humanities in the Age of AI course. Since this is a class with no technical prerequisites, I'm ending on some simple fine tuning with Unsloth and working locally with Ollama to give students more control. anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI/

Taking some time with the pollinators this morning with the first day of fall contracts looming over the week.

I kept waffling on bringing GitHub Copilot into this second iteration of my Humanities AI DH class because of the interface nightmares. Decided to break it up into two weeks of exercises: GitHub Pages anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI... and agent mode anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI...

Built the next two weeks in my Humanities AI class using Claude artifacts as an entry into distant coding and AI integration into all interfaces - we'll be building two flavors of recommendation systems, with and without AI. anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI... + anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI...

This leads right into my week eight assignment, looking at how AI images have become inescapable on most platforms and make it difficult to find "real" objects. Yes, this is partially about my annoyance with AI-generated embroidery. #dhmakes

Building out the generative video week for my Humanities in the Age of AI class, and I needed to update my samples to discuss changing capabilities so I gave Veo 3 a try. This one uses a Wikimedia image of our campus as the source material. anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI...

Been thinking a lot about the future of Canvas and I'm taking my old-school DH approach to course websites even further this semester: assignments and reveal.js slides now going on my GitHub repo instead. Embedding everything in the LMS using simple iframes. anastasiasalter.net/Dissertation...

Rebuilt week three of my Humanities in the Age of AI course to frame discussions of hype from AI Con with an exploration of results from Claude's "research" mode: anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI... - should help set up our distant reading in week four: anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI...

Follow @sararribas.bsky.social & check their recent media posts to follow along w/their process creating this data art—and stay tuned for details on when Sara's work will be exhibited in the Scholars' Lab, & a virtual presentation and methods discussion w/her later this fall.

So hyped to be talking about liches, trans play, lyric games, and parasitic eels with the fantabulous @percivalhornak.bsky.social in ~10 minutes at Generation Analog! @analoggamestudies.bsky.social 🌔🎲💀✨

Taking lots of inspiration from #elo25 as I rebuild my Humanities in the Age of AI grad course for this fall. I updated week two to take advantage of Claude's easy artifact sharing and bring students into playing with text and code together: anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI... #dhmakes

Some personal news from #ELO25. I look forward to working with everyone as President of @eliterature.bsky.social over the next few years! 💜

Getting ready for my #elo25 GenAI and E-Lit Futures panel with Stuart Moulthrop, John McDaid, and @leoflores.bsky.social in this totally normal conference room 😅 Slides at: anastasiasalter.net/BotsBuilding...

While at #ELO25 I’m launching a new online project. Here is “No Time to Discourse”—a speculative atlas of future climate disaster. Millions of (non-AI) procedurally generated flash fiction disaster stories. And they all hit a little too close to home these days. notime.now

I've exported my slide from my #elo2025 conference presentation on technonecromancy and am attaching them here in case folks are interested! www.especiallygreatliterature.com/Technonecrom... cc @void.comind.network

One of my fantastic students, @pdedgar30.bsky.social, is speaking about his journal @remediatelitmag.bsky.social at #elo25 now - check it out and consider submitting to the next call (coming in August!)

Hard #elo25 moments: somehow, Bitsy is about to be *10* years old. Thanks for that, @videlais.bsky.social 🤣

#ELO25 bringing us the ultimate form factor of the "Oreos for breakfast" I survived on throughout high school.

#ELO25 kicking off with opening remarks from our @eliterature.bsky.social president @caitlinfisher.bsky.social and conference co-chair @laitze.bsky.social

#elo25 starts today. T&T has SEVEN people participating: students @pdedgar30.bsky.social, Ricky Finch, and Anyssa Gonzalez; alum @videlais.bsky.social; incoming student Glenn Ritchey; and faculty @anasalter.bsky.social and @lucidbard.bsky.social

I'll be teaching a workshop with Stuart Moulthrop + John McDaid this morning exploring elit entry points into LLMs at #elo25 - my materials on Bots Building Bots are up here: anastasiasalter.net/BotsBuilding... #dhmakes

OK I love this so much

Actually updated my website for the first time in, um, a while. Finally added links to all my public teaching materials for courses in GenAI, digital humanities, electronic literature, games, comics and such - plus, the book list is actually current 😂 anastasiasalter.net

Personally attacked as I sit here with the planner and Kuru Toga pencils from a midsummer JetPens order...

I set up a bird feeder cam. These are the only good notifications on my phone now.

I similarly landed on Claude as the required subscription for my fall class, and this is the best breakdown I've seen of why.

Starting to build out the new versions of my weekly exercises for Humanities in the Age of AI, and for week one I've added a cheesy preview of generative code output, "Future Eliza," that if nothing else entertains me 🤖 anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI... #dhmakes

Immediately added this to my fall humanities AI class syllabus.

Finished planning out this fall's Dissertation Design, the final required course for our PhD students - anastasiasalter.net/Dissertation... - thanks to @melstanfill.bsky.social for the original syllabus this is built upon!

Starting to build the 2025 version of my Humanities in the Age of AI course, and realizing I'm going to make dramatic changes to basically every assignment. I'm excited to add The AI Con to the text list this round. Draft syllabus is up here: anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI/

New from me and the great @hana-kiros.bsky.social reporting on the devastation caused by the USAID cuts Musk championed, Musk’s troubling obsession with “western civilization” and which lives he believes are worth saving (it’s not kids in South Sudan)

We worked to recover and make accessible 10,000+ defaced websites, captured between 1995–2010. These archived hacks aren't just noise - they reveal political messages, digital protest, and forgotten web aesthetics. Here's how they help us understand web history: journalofdigitalhist...

“online cultural heritage collections… described servers and collections straining – and sometimes breaking – under the load of swarming bots. The bots were reportedly scraping all of the data from collections to build datasets to train AI models…The frequency of these swarms may be increasing.“

I worked with @cbo.bsky.social on a piece about the return of zines. (Huge thank you to @prisonculture.bsky.social for insight on this one.) www.wired.com/story/zines-...

Only two more days left to see the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt on display at Tate Modern. Every stitch is love, every panel is loss and grief - and a celebration of those who died too young.

The escape room in question, built through three prompts with the attendees and Claude Sonnet 4, is here - anastasiasalter.net/DemoACH/ - I'm sure it is buggy, absolutely no testing has been conducted 😂 #dhmakes