PhD students in the UK with a Victorianist bent will want to take particular note of the placement titled "Illustrated Newspapers: Beyond the Illustrated London News": cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwki... @rs4vp.org #Victorian

Disabled academics: how often are you made to pay for accommodations out of your ProD account (money that your colleagues get to put toward research travel, conferences, etc.)?

me to grad students: share your work with each other, talk, exchange ideas! me to me: no one can ever see this draft it's garbage and they'll think i'm garbage and then i'll have to move into a dumpster where i belong

In VPR 58.2, @kyleeanneh.bsky.social traces reproductions of F.W. Burton’s 1840 watercolor “A Blind Girl at A Holy Well” to consider how #periodicals deployed its sentimental depiction of blindness in mid-century debates about Irish culture and nationhood: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... @rs4vp.org

One of the most important things settlers who are committed to reconciliation can do today is to stand up to and call out denialist tactics. My colleague @seancarleton.bsky.social alongside Daniel Heath Justice explain more here: theconversation.com/truth-before...

Put less intelligently, the objection to the so-called AI boom is not about the technology being shitty (although it is). It’s about the shitty people who are using their shit technology to treat other people like shit.

The system I developed in grad school for saving and organizing pdfs of 2ndry and primary research is no longer serving me (probably because the "system" is equivalent to the red-string conspiracy theory meme). What do you folks do for keeping stuff logically organized and easily findable?

🧪 How many times and in what different ways do we need confirmation that genAI is crap for anything except the simplest tasks? *Because it doesn't read, or comprehend, or think*. (also, hilariously, it's the same AI Oxford Uni has just paid some huge sum to licence for all staff & students)

For the avoidance of doubt, this is just a silly pun that amused me. I do not wish plagiarism (or heretical pelagianism) upon any university during this crisis era in UK higher education. But I do find it astonishing that AI is being rolled out without the slightest concern for consequences

A plagiarism on both your houses!

Come work where I do! (Spread the word, please.)

By gum, I love explanatory footnotes, and editors will have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands.* *This now common expression originated as an anti-gun control bumper-sticker slogan in the 70s: “I will give up my gun when they peel my cold dead fingers from around it” (April 8, 1975 NYT).

You know you can just not use AI, right? You can make a choice not to be part of this. Even if your job uses it, YOU don’t have to in your normal life. You don’t have to let your kids use it. You didn’t have it three years ago. You can just…be on Team Human. You can choose.

“Some of y’all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows.”

(•_•) <) )╯Publique fundinge / \ \(•_•) ( (> of the artes and humanityes / \ (•_•) <) )> doth benefit everyone! / \

There are a lot of complicated reasons that colleges are making decisions about in-house AI or corporate partnerships, but what I have not heard AT ALL is any initiatives involving strengthening labor protections for faculty or improving pay as we are expected to re-skill in new tools.

Your "dumb little projects" are so important during this harrowing time. Don't forget that. Your creativity has value, for yourself and for the world.

See WeAreHigherEd.org for a clearinghouse of ways higher ed is fighting back.

Do you remember when I told you that your institutional repository was on a list for a future purge? And to save copies of everything in multiple places? It's time you prioritized that. Now.

We already lost a generation of humanists to precarity and starving our disciplines of funding. I do NOT want to lose the work we did get. I do not want work on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, women and gender minorities, and queer folx's work to disappear. I need this history. We all do.

Do not capitulate in advance. Leave your work up. Make them take it down. Throw it on scihub, even! But also. Also, save it. Name it carefully. Let it sit like a seed in the ground that will grow again when this storm has passed. Because it will -- evil will never triumph in the end.

Hi! Are you a US researcher who spent time thinking about humans? Then your work is in danger of censorship and loss. I'm here to walk you through basic self-archiving. Maybe you think I am being hyperbolic. You only worked on bacteria! Not your problem. Do me a favor and join me anyway.

I can't tell you what your employer would do. I can tell you that censorship has been happening in Ohio and Florida unis for a while. I can tell you every employer I've ever had would pick millions in funding over my article on women publishers. I can tell you I've never regretted my archive. 🧡

Those of us who were disabled prior to Covid felt hope when the pandemic hit. Hope for a more inclusive society. For chronic illness research to advance faster because Long Covid was too big to ignore. Instead we’ve ended up with fascists cutting all research funding. The grief is real.

My fellow Victorianists: Is anyone else having trouble with the Waterloo Directory? I'm trying to look up Good Words in Series 3 of the Directory, and nothing's showing up -- but if I go into Series 2, I can find it.

As everyone knows, the thing professors are actually most afraid of is teaching two of the same prep on different days when one has a holiday and the other doesn’t.

I'm making desperate last-minute revisions to an article, and the British Newspaper Archives website is giving me a "bad gateway" message. 😨

Marking my favourite assignment again! Takes me ages, but I enjoy every minute.

In Canada Indigenous women continue to be eugenically sterilized. People neglected in poverty have been euthanized. Class action lawsuits are in motion for the former. Why should marginalized people trust medical and legal systems?

Well, hello potential student! Have you ever read a comic book? Are you, maybe, a little comic-curious? Would you like to behold the awesome glory that is printed on those pulpy pages between those glossy covers?

Of the multitudinous joys ChatGPT has stolen from us, I truly miss the opportunity to watch students improve their writing abilities over the course of a term. Far too many students deny themselves the chance to learn from a low grade, resorting to generative AI rather than striving for real growth.

This will be a must-read

About to start working on a draft that I haven't touched in 2-3 years. I'm terrified. Will I remember anything from the hours of research I put in after abandoning it for so long? Does anyone have any advice or experience doing something like this? Or do most people leave abandoned things abandoned?

Today's marking motivation was brought to me by a note from my husband, cuddles from my dog, and brilliance from my students.

Like most things in patriarchal systems, this silence is bad for dads and worse for everyone else involved in caregiving.

Earlier in my career, I tried to get academic men to talk about this. Didn’t really work. There was one panel on parenting at a major conference in which the only two men in the full room were me, a panelist, and a (gay) friend who is not a parent and doesn’t want to be one.

Some days, I have the best job. #childrenslit #commonplacebooks

YES. That word is the brightest thread in its rich tapestry of bs bsky.app/profile/pfyf...

How many times I saw the word "tapestry" in undergrad papers in the 20 years I've been marking papers before the invention of ChatGPT: 2. Maybe 3. Number of times in the two years since the invention of ChatGPT: 60. Maybe 70.

At the time of writing, our staff are witnessing people being shot at as they attempt to flee the Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.

Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks! What the fuck?

“The pattern of underspending across Canadian provinces suggests both an ideological motive and a certain degree of coordination amongst conservative premiers. Is the push for healthcare privatization, then, a calculated move, fueled by the concerted hollowing out of our provincial systems?”