I did not use canvas in any of my classes this semester. I set up a google drive (yes, I know, imperfect but I did it in ~1 week) for each class with subfolders for various materials and assignments. Things went well with only a bit more checking in *until* the end of the semester crunch. A thread 🧵

This! Take time to plan and fortify and relish the world we want to build. Libraries can be such a central piece of that.

Wherever you live, this story has significant implications because the trend of defunding libraries, when we should be fortifying these outposts of learning, sharing, and survival, is a national phenomenon. Libraries are models of the kind of infrastructure we must EXPAND to get the world we want.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed disastrous cuts to our city's libraries while setting aside $5M for a ShotSpotter replacement. As library associate Sara Heymann told me, “Libraries embody everything we need to fight back against fascism.” My piece on what’s at stake and how to fight back:

I really hate it when scientists keep saying that “we need to rebuild trust in science,” because it implies that scientists are to blame for the mistrust rather than the millions of dollars of dark money that have funded political attacks on science in order to advance a far right agenda.

Interesting 🧵

So true and this is what I’ve been saying too. Our admins say: “We’ve lost public trust.” No, we’ve bern target of focused attacks for many years and you haven’t lifted a finger to fight back or to protect our work. Makes it seem like you kind of like where we headed.

It is clear what we need. It is to re-communalise academic publishing. Its costs funding are met by learned societies and their funders; profits go back to research, as do the data it generates. Researchers repeatedly call for this. tinyurl.com/bdekus68rofits

Our libraries are cutting staff so that Elsevier can have its 32% profit margin

Profits from scientific publishing are eye-watering, costing us billions. In ‘The Drain of Scientific Publishing’ (arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820), (building on ‘The Strain of Scientific Publishing’ doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00327) we show how it is harmful – and unnecessary.

Our friend Janneke Adema says that scholar-led publishers are not best seen as an alternative to the commercial publishing industry but instead as positioned against the marketised university. We can carve out space for good stuff without wasting effort trying to unseat commercial publishing.

This is the Epstein reading that matters.

And how do we get there? First, stop working with commercial publishers to reform the system. We have had decades of failed attempts at reform in which the only constancy is publishers’ profits. We cannot continually try to reform a broken system.

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

My last RT goes for university administrators, too.

COMPLICITY NOT COWARDICE. COMPLICITY.

I don't think it's cowardice. I think that they are OK with what the GOP is doing. The sooner folks reconcile with this, the better.

I’m no great fan of the ACA. I believe we should guarantee health care as a human right through a single-payer Medicare for All system. But — at minimum — we cannot allow Republicans to destroy our already-broken system by doubling insurance premiums for 20 million Americans.

Set aside the NYC election results this week. There were major D/Left wins all over the stare — including the Onondaga County legislature (home of Syracuse), which just flipped to majority D for the first time in 50 years! So why in the WORLD are NY’s elected reps caving on this?

The smartest thing a politician can do in 2026 is to come up with a bold plan for shoring up and EXPANDING public libraries. Call it Project 2050. It's a way to reintroduce the grammar of commoning and the commons to a new generation in a way they can easily grasp. Such low hanging fruit.

The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. At best, we can say that this deal could have been worse. Read our full statement here:

My heart breaks again.

Yes, yes, yes!!! I always say libraries are *tech organizations.* They have the potential to model the antithesis of the Silicon Valley tech organization, which is NOT the only way to be! Digital doesn't have to be extractive, exploitative, *worse.*

Allowing AI on a course supposedly training students how to think is as useful as allowing mobility scooters on an exercise run. And the result for the long-term welfare of the participants will be much the same.

Commercial knowledge dissemination predicated on proprietary systems and logics sutures hierarchies across spaces, places, and peoples. All to serve hegemonic, capitalist, power fantasies. They are tools of and for oppression, not liberation.

🧵

Again, the public & parents about to send kids to colleges don't understand the scale of this threat & what it means for the quality & quantity of classes/degrees/etc, bc university leaders are totally MIA (bsky.app/profile/mcop...). Meanwhile, stuff everyone takes for granted is just disappearing:

Again, you cannot unplug 1/4-1/5 of an R1 university's budget & expect the same quantity or quality of "things" on campus. The math simply doesn't work. And pretending it does & we can uphold our "core values," & not talking loudly & publicly about how it doesn't, is not a strategy. It's madness.

New reporting on those threats against Tompkins County (Ithaca) from the feds earlier this year. #twithaca

Yessssssss. Best description yet. Thank you for articulating that, @shannonmattern.bsky.social

Was talking to an actual machine learning scholar about this common phenom of researchers bringing us AI-generated fake citations for us to find for them. She was gob-smacked — “But why do they trust it so much?”

Extremely important to foreground that this is not only about faculty IP. Think hard about what students have divulged to you - health diagnoses, immigration status, political affiliations - either via private messages or personal essays. How many of those confessions are warehoused on Canvas?

As was posted earlier, how to delete your account without agreeing to the ToS: Opening this "privacy policy" link www.academia.edu/privacytakes you to a page where you can access the drop-down menu and reach "account settings." From there I was able to delete my account without agreeing.

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class. This is Kirk's legacy. You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

The fascists will keep pushing and if there's no push back then they will continue to escalate. It's really that simple.

You can now buy this great book, Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians (alastore.ala.org/text-and-dat...) ft. a chapter from ~yours truly~ on understanding why sociolinguistics is important for doing TDM research, that you can read right now for free repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150...

I respect Anil so I want to talk seriously about harm reduction and public health messaging. First let me acknowledge that yes, many regular, not-super-online people are trying out AI tools. Of course they are! It's been aggressively pushed into everything and given heavy institutional support.

Linguistics lesson for the day: Accountability is crucial to interpreting language. We make sense of something based on who we believe said it. Synthetic text extruded by LLMs was not said by anyone -- so a crucial step in the chain is broken. >>

In the last few days, there's been a lot of fearful chatter about how "ICE NOW HAS THE CAPABILITIES TO HACK INTO ANY PHONE" with Paragon Systems Graphite spyware. This isn't an accurate assessment of how the spyware works and who is at risk, so at LFP we made some graphics to help folks understand.

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Most of these private companies are also, at heart, data surveillance companies. Their real profits come from data collection, analytics, and resale of data products back to the university. Universities are paying big bucks for these services AND their faculty, staff, and students are the product.

People working in universities know a lot of the work that makes the organization function is outsourced to for-profit companies (catering, landscaping) or runs on platforms requiring payments to such companies: Workday, Canvas, Microsoft, Zoom. This thread will be for less obvious examples. 1/

Academic or student in the USA? Our research techniques can be useful in assessing fake news. We're helping students to investigate and better understand the anti-democratic online ideologies that threaten their communities with two free webinars on digital investigation skills this September 🧵

Library Freedom Project is seeking survey responses about library workers’ attitudes, experiences, and concerns about AI! forms.gle/c9tt8zQ5zs8y...

I started at Case a year ago with a question: what role does a digital scholarship center play in 2020s when AI is pushed everywhere, there are too few staff, and personal computers are pervasive. The Freedman Center reopens next week with some answers to those questions. case.edu/library/news...

This is an excellent illustration of how useless the "Impact Factor" metric is. The most influential multidisciplinary chem journals are JACS and Angewandte. They did not make the list. In this short ad hoc 🧵 I will analyze in real time what made the list and why. I have a bad feeling about this.

She's here and ready for your eyes! repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150... The whole volume, Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians, eds. Whitney Kramer, Evan Muzzel and Iliana Burgos, is headed to the printers and will be linked when its out. But for now enjoy this ACRL-approved preview