🆕 blog! “Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you” I'm sure we have all met a person like this: People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they […]

OK, woah. I did not know this. There is an open digital specification for puzzles (e.g. crosswords)! https://www.puzzazz.com/ipuz There is also an open-source GNOME Crosswords app! https://gitlab.gnome.org/jrb/crosswords

Been reading the history of Portico, starting at Fenton, Eileen Gifford, ‘An Overview of Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service’, Serials Review, 32.2 (2006), pp. 81–86, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2006.03.004 It's important that the histories of these digipres systems are written […]

Just some jottings on qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division https://eve.gd/2026/02/22/structure-and-there-is-no-antimemetics-division/

Writing a commissioned/invited book chapter this morning. Been recounting therein debates about print/digital fixity and preservation, from Eisenstein and Johns, through @kfitz, up to @ianmilligan1.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy. Now, though, Robyn is demanding a cuddle. Who am I to say no?

Hmm. Agree with SOME of this. Reading and understanding code is much harder than writing it in the first place. With machine-generated code, the balance between reading and writing is dangerously tilted. I think *an* answer to this would be that we need to slow down […]

I guess I think 3 things are happening: 1) Ryan's right that quant methods are diffusing, at least in lit. See ex. in Dames, Kornbluh, Manshel. 2) It's not v. clear how, because there's still no curricular foundation for them. 3) The other reason DH has fragmented, which ppl are too polite to say…

Today, I will be speaking at MSU's Ethics Week event, on the Ethics of Open Scholarship panel. I will talk about labour and infrastructure in OA. https://ethics.msu.edu/events/ethics-week

This is what AI scrapers are doing to our platform. Our database capacity is just being ruined every time they initiate a fresh scrape and our tech team has to scramble, taking radical measures, to keep the platform up.

Delighted to hear that /The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions/ - a book in the series I edit ("New Horizons in Contemporary Writing") - has won the BACLS Edited Collection Prize! […]

Digital Scholar Donates $20,000 to Knowledge Commons (and Why that Gift Matters) about.hcommons.org/2026/02/03/d...

We are in the final technical stages of launching our institutional repository, KC Works. The idea is to provide a community-governed, academic-owned repository system with decent, open values. Here's some more info about it! […]

The sad thing is, every time I think about how critical Zotero is to me I remember that most users, even though it's also crucial to them, do not financially support the software (although they also "sell" synchronisation storage plans). We NEED to find a better way to support such infrastructures.

Found Zotero 8 truly excellent in my writing/research period this morning. Working brilliantly and the new citation dialog is SO snappy. Love it. This is a core piece of research infrastructure without which I would be distraught! https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/

An interview/case study with @kfitz about @hello ! In it, she talks about some of the absolute key issues for open infrastructure, such as scholar governance, sustainability, and total openness as an unnegotiable principle. Building the Commons: How Knowledge Commons is navigating challenges […]

Great, innovative use of KC Works: academic podcasts. Just uploaded: The Literary Encyclopedia Podcast, Episode One, De-cosifying Dickens https://works.hcommons.org/records/33yjw-ajb21

So, another cool thing that we make and maintain, here at @hello is the open-source, open-collaborative review platform, Pilcrow. I have been using it, with others, to comment on a document we are working on. It's working really smoothly!

"The last six months of 2025 saw a 419% increase over the same period in 2024, culminating in a single day in mid-November where our traffic spiked to 968% greater than a year earlier, resulting in significant slowdowns" We are experiencing this exact situation at KC […]

If you want a hard copy of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities, I am selling one of my copies at probably the cheapest price you will ever get: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306730312547

Thoughts on institutions shifting away from big tech and what is involved in this "digital independence" https://eve.gd/2026/01/25/institutions-shifting-away-from-big-tech/

Bit of a nostalgia trip selling this on Ebay. It's 10 years, this year, since I began to get some headaches -- but I mean: earth-shattering headaches and light sensitivity -- that landed me in hospital... where they found I had had a stroke. So grateful to still be here, 10 years later.

🆕 blog! “Should HTML's code blocks be translated?” I was recently prompted to test my blog's layout when rendered in right-to-left text. Running a website through an automatic translator into a language like Arabic or Hebrew will show you any weird little layout glitches which might occur. But […]

Here are 8 successful *proposals* for academic books/monographs. I am hoping that these help someone who is starting out trying to write one and wants to see what worked for me. They are provided as examples, rather than exemplars. A lot of it was just finding my own way […]

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

One of my resolutions for the year is to keep in better touch with friends, colleagues, and heroes. Every kidney failure appointment that I attend is a memento mori and nobody can tell me how much time I have left. You can survive quite a while on dialysis, but it is life support. Carpe diem. I […]

How Markdown took over the world https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

This looks a really interesting article. I can't speak to the legal accuracy, but two legal scholars argue that AI scrapers might have a unilateral contract with the sites they are scraping. (Or, at least, have been given notice.) The liabilities of robots.txt […]

The scraping of Spotify by the shadow library, Anna's Archive, has made it into Private Eye, where the hypocrisy of Spotify - which originally was a pirate scraper site - is brought to light.

Had an x-ray recently. It showed multiple healed pelvic and rib fractures and patchy sclerosis throughout the axial skeleton in keeping with a renal osteodystrophy. Kidney failure. The illness that keeps on giving. My bones are withering and fracturing inside me.

The scraping of Spotify by the shadow library, Anna's Archive, has made it into Private Eye, where the hypocrisy of Spotify - which originally was a pirate scraper site - is brought to light.

In a fit of rashness, I bought the domain scriven.ing this morning as an additional access point for my web writing/blog (which turns 20 years old next year!) The only problem is that now I "prefer not to".

A post about pirate book archives, their inevitable demises, and continuity and complexity of catalogues as new sites emerge. (As well as musings on the challenge of resourcing and financing such illegal [in many jurisdictions] operations at the scale that is needed.) […]

Just saw a review of Windows 11 that rated it last of all recent Windows OSes. One of the failing criteria was that it used up much more RAM and this site immediately sprang to mind. Free memory is wasted memory and all modern operating systems pre-cache many things for speed. www.linuxatemyram.com

Also, Home Assistant is so excellent. I've got it hooked up, now, to my Octopus Mini smart meter and it can measure our electricity and gas usage and then look at the local grid to work out low-carbon use.

Great piece by @mpe about shadow libraries like Anna's Archive, their metadata and what it means for creating successors after takedowns: «The Lineages and Inheritances of Shadow Libraries and their Documentation» […]

How much time did I spend on email last year? How much time did I spend reading for pleasure? https://eve.gd/2026/01/02/who-knows-where-the-time-goes/

A post about pirate book archives, their inevitable demises, and continuity and complexity of catalogues as new sites emerge. (As well as musings on the challenge of resourcing and financing such illegal [in many jurisdictions] operations at the scale that is needed.) […]

"we need to conceive of these “publishing beyond the market” enterprises as immanent utopias, spaces that show possibility within a system that they cannot overthrow, but that they can nonetheless structure through critique" Further thoughts on @Samuelmoore 's book […]

Exciting! I have just signed a contract for an Essential Knowledge series book with The MIT Press called "The Dark Web". I'm also making good progress on the Star Trek book revisions. Being most thorough with them and hope it will be much improved as a result.

New DigiPres.org request for feedback: Supporting local practitioner groups https://github.com/orgs/digipres/discussions/62 #digipres

Creative commons licenses and copyright may not stop academic work being used to train AI https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/11/24/creative-commons-licenses-and-copyright-may-not-stop-academic-work-being-used-to-train-ai/

Just appalling. Nurses and teachers do far more valuable jobs than almost anyone earning £125k.

The new features are still in alpha—but @djevans.bsky.social's contextual tools for Viral Texts data are live clusters.viraltexts.org Click "View witness in context" to see a given reprint on the newspaper page, alongside other reprints on that page—click a cluster ID here to see its other reprints

British and Australian chemists have discovered a powerful new antibiotic called pre-methylenomycin C lactone, hiding in a well-known soil bacterium that produces another drug, methylenomycin A. This molecule however, is 100 times more potent than methylenomycin A and kills drug-resistant […]

A lot of my posting is now coming via @eve.gd - because before I was literally copying and pasting to Mastodon. I will still check in here and read the feed, but most new content will be on that acc.

I think this is *the* licensing issue of our time. Whether it's prohibiting fascist uses or stopping AI training, liberal open licenses are falling down. I still like CC BY-SA, forcing to share derivatives, but am not sure a license change is the technical solution to this social problem.