After 17 (!!) years I'll finally finish my doctorate as a "PhD by Prior Publications." I must assess my 151 articles, books, websites, and software packages for their contributions to and impacts on my field. As one way to make this manageable, I'll share one thing from the dossier every few days.

Situation right now. If you know, you know.

Am I wrong or is absolutely everyone secretly happy that Canvas is down?

The most hilarious thing is that I'd never used canvas until this semester. Being a DHer and a pro-privacy pirate, I always made my own simple websites for courses (I understand most of you don't know how to do this. I'm aware and not judging). The one semester where I got lazy.... Good times.

Just seeing the canvas news. So, no grading this Spring semester? I mean... 🙂‍↔️

I recommned Firefox

The Brief and Ok Life of Oscar Wao

Our RSVP is up for the public portion of Who Owns Black Data III: The Fight for Black Futures. If you're in New Orleans last week of May, come listen, learn and dialogue with Andrea Armstrong, Jo Banner from The Descendants Project, and Gia Hamilton. wobd.blackbeyonddata.org/amistad/

In the last year, ICE has deported nearly half a million people. Killed dozens. Disappeared tens of thousands... These 23 protest songs are soundtracking the movement to stop it

Fellowship Opp: Just Tech CFP is now live. Cohort will run from Jan to Dec 2027. The unrestricted award is for up to $60K, along with monthly virtual gatherings, individualized mentoring, one in-person workshop, and ongoing access to the Just Tech network. www.ssrc.org/programs/jus...

Upset about Hampshire College shutting down? There's a fighting chance now. They have to raise $10M in pledges, but they just started and are up to 250K already. hampshirenext.org?fbclid=IwY2x...

After 10+ year building origin stories for others with bestie Glover, I can't believe I'd never heard her own! And a great one too! Good times. Check out this great interview with Ashley Newby for the Black Studies Podcast. 🤩🤩 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/k...

Errr. Trumpétain, Frumpco, Donollinni, Trumpillo? I can't pick.

Great read, by @soccerpolitics.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/o...

One of the few "terminal velocity" DH projects. The new interface is looking mighty fine, I have to say.

Interesting

Please join @atbw.bsky.social for this next series of three webinars: Uplifting the Workers, Shining a Light on the Invisible Labor Powering AI Technologies www.archivingtheblackweb.org/events/

Wax_tasks is about to hit 50K downloads. Amazing. That old thing had a good life.

listen hun if you can't handle the Washington Post editorial board at their the Texas gerrymander "freakout" is "not a threat to democracy" you don't deserve them at their "Virginia plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss"

Some really cool projects coming out of the Poetry and AI lab. A "Rayuelizator" uses LLMs semantic capacities to turn any novel into Rayuela. Another, "Deletion is Not Binary" works through AI unlearning to test and dev a Residual Influence Index (see Right to Forget & Copyright laws).

Pssst. DH Awards 2025 results are out. We really should change the timing of all this so it finishes much earlier in the year, but well, I'm busy.

Semester almost over, and with it my first practical lab directly addressing (Poetry and) AI. I still don't feel like I have anything clever to say or do. I learned a lot this semester, but no groundbreaking or useful insight from me yet. I cede the ground.

They’re looting the Treasury

I joined Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report this week to talk about something that should be a national story but mostly isn't: a person is dying in ICE detention roughly every six days in 2026.

It was nothing but Linux back when I was student there already. This one shouldn't be much of a haul.

Mamdani: When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich 
Well, today we're taxing the rich...

Good thing I'm not Pope. I would excommunicate his ass in a heartbeat. Shiiiit. I even suggested at our first Yale AAUP meeting that we should petition to revoke his Law degree.

Day 3 of #MSUGlobalDH starts at 9:00am Eastern--that's in 10 minutes! Join us on the livestream at go.cal.msu.edu/globaldh

translating my skills into resumes and cover letters got me thinking about breadth and deph in DH, of how they need each other, and how they reflect our individual learning process. wrote a blog post about it. scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/breadth...

Hungary!

“I had already started working on my dissertation, and like most graduate students, I was struggling to find something new to say.” New at PB: @elotroalex.bsky.social on the moment he made an incredible discovery in Aimé Césaire’s archives.

For those hereabouts scrambling to remediate course materials in order to meet the end of the month deadline for compliance with new federal ADA Title II standards, here is the endgame as I see it: 🧵

Call for Chapters: Minimal Computing for Social and Cultural Heritage -- with James Sullivan, et al. jamesosullivan.github.io/MinimalCompu...

“This was not the drama we knew at all! No. This was a play about the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture.” New at PB: @elotroalex.bsky.social on finding a lost play in Césaire’s archives.

Sat down for an interview with Marlene Daut for @publicbooks.bsky.social on my edition & translation of "......And the Dogs Were Silent" by A. Césaire. Always fun to talk to Marlene. Could not ask for a better interlocutor! Cc @dukepress.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/courage-or-f...

Yale students rally with Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW), hand-deliver petition calling on university to join the Fair Food Program (FFP) ciw-online.org/blog/2026/04...

Massacre upon massacre in Beirut in the last hour. AUBMC announced a “code disaster.” Over 100 airstrikes in 10 minutes across the country. One hit right behind my house. Sirens ambulances & the smell of sulphur. The city is in total chaos the people in complete panic

Nuremberg was an important symbol of German nationhood so I say with 100% sincerity that this is a job for Philadelphia

If anything of this magnitude happens to Iran, no one will ever forget that representatives didn't stop the machine, or that *we* who still have discernment and a conscience did not band together in time to grind the machinery to a halt.

Delighted (and slightly bewildered) to see my article “On the Calculation of Meaning, or Doing Words without Things” finally published in Critical Inquiry. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

I guess I should've asked this a few weeks ago, and not the day before I teach the module on "machine translation" for my Translating the Caribbean course, but here goes: What's your favorite contemporary critical essay on machine translation coming from the humanities?

Is AI inevitable? Basically. You can't put math toothpaste back in the tube. BUT! Gambling is also inevitable. There is no way to eradicate the idea of "betting." There is, nonetheless, a difference between a society with well regulated gambling and our current state of Betting Platforms for Wars.

"The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Budget proposes to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) & provides $38 million to conduct an orderly shutdown of the Agency." Disinvestment in the humanities is one way we've reached the current moment. Double the budget instead. Triple it.

This is a fascinating read. I'm not sure I understand everything, but the gist I do get is inspired engineering. I'm taking notes for my minicomping day dreams. venturebeat.com/ai/claude-co...

Ooo, I just realized that apple's embedding viz package can be used for even tabular data. The more you know!

In our dept we're reviving the art of sharing dissertations in progress as a collective. We're aiming for 4 rituals to mark and celebrate a grad's progress together: a) A collective bibliography for their orals/prospectus; b) A chapter slam; c) An open defense; d) An invite back after they leave.

Finished preparing the initial materials for the "DH Programming in the Age of AI" course @lucidbard.bsky.social and I are teaching this summer at DHSI: anastasiasalter.net/DHSI_DH_AI_2.... Details will no doubt change by June, but we're planning on working with Claude Code + Ollama primarily.

Full run of Computers and the Humanities at Yale. Maybe a honeypot for @scottbot.bsky.social