How many people named Al are going to have their work attributed to AI, just because the description was set in a sans serif font?

We finally got some snow last night, and now we're getting that late-afternoon soft pale pink winter sunshine on the snow, and it's nice, since I worked at home today

Ah Cleveland! "As late as 1952, Herbert Gold could write to Allen Ginsberg without any sense of self-parody, “Come to Cleveland and we can do a job together. I’ve been casing Lindsay’s Skybar . . . where Art Tatum and Muggy sic] Spanier alight, and where every other drinker hopes to submit a […]

I don't have an enchanted oak with a hole to whisper my findings into, but I have a blog, which is basically the same thing https://myjetpack.tumblr.com/post/134283180448/a-recent-cartoon-for-new-scientist

New word (for me): dedatafication - used by Gwen Shaffer in discussion at Responsible AI conference just now - they want us to treat datafication as a natural good, but it really isn't and often needs to be fought - let the Dedatafication Wars begin!

Hey #digipres folks, over on the #ApplesauceFDC discord, someone's been working through how to archive punch cards (since they've got a large stack of them), and put together a documented #format for #punchcards […]

I mean ... I mean ... https://www.library20.com/guns-in-our-libraries

When will the era of digital preservation produce an article title to compare with "Dumped from a Wharf into Casco Bay: The Historical Records Survey Revisited"? Or has it already done so?

Mathematics is a language. But innumeracy is also a language and our president is fluent. It's not just that he exaggerates, lies, and says things that make no sense when talking about numbers "often" no this is something deeper. He is deeply committed to *never* speaking about any statistic […]

Did we ever get insider confirmation of how Four Seasons Total Landscaping happened?

"The [museum] has just recently put their collection online and there are some amazing pieces. Their database does not have permalinks to individual artifacts, so you will need to search via the Object Number for more details on each piece." Can this be true of a museum website? In 2025???

I always get activists and archivists mixed up

I have always carried Donald Barthelme's line about writing around with me ("Endings are elusive and middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to being.") - but you know, that's only true until you've begun. After that, worst of all is to middle, to middle, to middle.

Toby yesterday, trying to decide whether he should tell us how game 7 was going to end

"Like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the report’s authors seem to be following the lead of MAGA Republicans in the United States. They argue that all universities in the province should curb EDI initiatives and remain silent on pressing political issues. The report even uses the American phrase […]

"as ML hardware and capable storage trend towards being standard in consumer-accessible hardware, curated local tooling will outcompete data-warehouse LLM-SAAS, and data provenance and process transparency will become more and more important. ... librarians are going to be way, way more […]

We've had an Images of Research competition for a few years now but this year we're also doing Sounds of Research: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/graduate-studies/training-events/research-showcases/sounds-of-research.html

trying to focus on making a nice slide; mesmerized by the lorem ipsum

Gil McGowan - head of the Alberta Federation for Labour and the Common Front has said - “I just want to make it really clear that if the government puts a gun to the head of the teachers and they’re not able to continue their strike, then we in the broader labour movement will stand where […]

I'm rather happy with the fact that I didn't notice the AWS outage at all

I have mostly kept my two twitter accounts alive out of some kind of morbid curiosity; watching something that belonged to all of us dismantled and destroyed by ONE idiotic male. But these new changes break the model completely. ➡️ Fediverse, brace for another migration.

Another letter-burning experience, from *Dear Lindy*, about the Australian woman whose baby was taken by a dingo. It starts a few weeks after she was released from prison. She had received a lot of letters about the case (p.3): > I was in the backyard. Apparently they'd knocked on the front […]

I predict that within the next few months Alberta premiere Danielle Smith will visit Washington, and the next day Trump will tweet that he's invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to override some inconvenient constitutional right.

funny how I got through decades and decades of my life carrying fingerprints around on my fingers and getting zero benefit from them, and suddenly now they're part of my daily routine for just about everything

From one of my grandfather's letters saved from burning: he and his friend Bill Adams (son of historian E.D. Adams), as grad students, have been discussing how to deal with family expectations: "Specialization leads with grim certainty to a kind of fame and a kind of usefulness which are […]

hmmm ... I think I have something for the CJAL call for proposals https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/announcement/view/1015 . The problem is I'm not a theory guy, I'm a philology guy. Theory folks love to humiliate philology folks like we're all 12 on the playground at recess. Or at least they used […]

Thinking about letter-burning in the 30s. In my grandfather's circle I know of two joint read-and-burn sessions: one where the author of the letters got hold of them and burned them (to the recipient's horror), one where the recipient did it, in both cases allowing the other to keep a few. Has […]

Despite trying I really haven't read much Otlet, which makes me grateful for Rayward's characterization of his writing: "a thick encyclopaedism which has an almost imperceptible pulse of argument"

Short Circuit Jack had it all figured out https://archive.org/details/1921Prattonia/page/61/mode/1up

University of Alberta Library Digital Scholarship Graduate Student Fellowship Program - Call for Applications https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kjqfCgfEEY7_WEcOH6xD7eV8fByXBYHMWQxxWc0Zo0I/edit This will be our third year offering these fellowships - digital scholarship is so broad that it […]

As terrible as all the pollution from reentries is, I have to say that it's REALLY FREAKING COOL that I now know all the right people to ask to find out what exactly reentered when a journalist sends me a reddit video from a random Canadian city. I don't know the answer yet, but I know who to […]

One more: Robert C. Binkley on scholarly communication, 1938: "There are indeed some property tenures vested at different points along these channels of communication. They are like the tolls along the river, some of them necessary to keep the channel open, some of them functionally piratical." […]

It's maple syrup, right? It's gotta be maple syrup Canada 'has what the world wants', Prime Minister Carney says https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/video-canada-has-what-the-world-wants-prime-minister-carney-says/

How American library collection policy looked in 1939: "As Europe falls, state by state, under the control of regimes that deny free inquiry to scholars, America becomes more and more the last place in which free scholarship can live. Hence the importance of avoiding wasteful duplication in […]

'morning

"The fascist cultures, however rugged they may be in some aspects, are delicate in respect to their historical digestions. Only the most carefully prepared history, put together according to prescription, will nourish them." - Robert C. Binkley, "History for a Democracy" (1937)

I've finally wrapped up a post about my grandfather's work in the 1930s on typescript books (lithographed from a typed master, allowing academic publishing to bypass some commercial services and reduce costs, at the expense of less slickness and more homework), tracing parallels with open […]

Thing I still wonder about: why did the medieval western canon law faculties produce tons of mnemonic verse, and the civil law faculties hardly any? #medieval

boy, git stashes can hang around for a long time

This is great: I had read about these Swedish #medievalmanuscripts that were cut up and used to wrap accounts in the 16th century, but hadn't seen one. Here's Matthias of Linköping (confessor to St. Birgitta), Alphabetum disctinctionum: https://www.manuscripta.se/ms/101701 - some pages with […]

Wonderful, wonderful video of the building of a wooden mechanical calculator, with reflections on the process and the history https://youtu.be/E0pJST5mL3A

Margaret Atwood claps back to having The Handmaid’s Tale banned from Alberta schools by the UCP. It’s so good. #ableg #abpoli #abed

"I thought of us in the worded world." #SundaySentence is from Gliff by Ali Smith https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/38351476-3985-4969-b3a1-6a6914f1190d

By this time next year there'll be a remake of Attorney Woo where Woo is AI

"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees." […]

Absolutely splendid - a few typos, but given the source, it's great ... until the hallucinated ending: "I belief at least two weeks should be allowed" becomes "it will be best to wait until the report is finished." Plausibility: the bane of AI output. [/end]

Rather amazing OCR from olmocr - source: https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-finding-aids-public/library/findaids/00794/pdfa/00794-00189.pdf?page=104 (image 104 in that pdf) - dark scan of handwritten page. output: Nov., 1931 Joint Comm. Survey Activities The report as it now stands, Nov. 17 […]

"The trains in San Francisco's Muni Metro light railway, for example, won't start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS)." […]

Canada finds itself in uncharted territory