I wrote a little thing about "Fairytale of New York" and about hope for a better year, but mostly I wanted to share the rendition of the song played at Shane MacGowan's funeral in 2023 because it's so beautiful. Happy Christmas, I love ya baby. dansinker.com/posts/2025-1...

A brilliant article, and one that is going to have a big impact on what I want to be doing next year.

"Moby Dick is about whales" + hi from yr 🐳 friend: printed a quote from @heatherfro.bsky.social using the 1568 whale image (bsky.app/profile/woke...) I lasercut into a bamboo printing block (bsky.app/profile/lite...):

Do you enjoy my periodic rantings on Isaac Newton's alchemical citations? If so, take a look at my shiny new article on our improved #TEI encoding system of Newton's citations & what we can learn from some preliminary analyses of the data! #BookHistory #histsci (tldr in 🧵) doi.org/10.14434/tc....

AI slop is getting worse. Asked an LLM to sing a Christmas song for me and after one verse about Christmas it descended into increasingly threatening demands for figgy pudding

i am actually working on an article right now about how the vast majority of the world's information - and so many current events - are not at all legible to LLMs, a fact that a startling number of people never seem to think about

I take it all back we should absolutely let AI run the vending machines

I served on a committee with Paul, a wonderful and fierce advocate for the modern university library. I learned tons from him about effective advocacy. A tremendous loss to UCL and all in his orbit. www.leru.org/news/in-memo...

A really nice intro to language models, with visualizations and links to other resources.

Facing Major Funding Loss? Educopia’s New Workshop Series Offers Tools, Structure, and Support educopia.org/blog/loss-of...

i see we are talking about academic hiring again, and its almost time for zoom interviews (if they haven't already started) so here's my long form discussion about what to expect if you're on the market www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bjcpr...

What does one wear in San Francisco in February, asking for a friend who thought 60F was chilly this morning* *the move from the northeast to the southwest is a whole-body overhaul

The good thing for me is that I accepted long ago that I don’t really fit anywhere and don’t really do anything. And I wouldn’t change that to be a Real Scholar™️ But I see the toll it’s taking on people who do good work and do NOT deserve misdirected anger here or other spaces.

i feel really conflicted about the people who insist that the Humanities needs to be a 100% technology free space. I get you - I am very analog in my daily life, with my piles of paper and pens - but AI is also doing a lot of things you actually like and enjoy having. R's thread is right on

YES! So many structures and words that have been classed as AI giveaways are what speakers of English as a second language have been taught and encouraged to do.

I always learn so much from @mariaa.bsky.social. She's really helped me think more deeply about AI models and privacy, which sometimes doesn't get enough attention. It's like social media all over again, but now the data is even more sensitive. This clip is worth a listen!

did you know: the American Dialect Society is the oldest "word of the year" event in the States, and the words are chosen by several hundred linguists who get raucous in a big meeting room in January. you can submit nominations for us to consider! great activity for classrooms!

Carnegie Mellon’s literature PhD is being liquidated in favor of “computation,” casualized labor, and AI. That has profound ramifications for, students, faculty, and program alums like myself. I wrote it about it (w/ Catherine Evans, a current PhD student). www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

The NLM Data Science & Informatics (DSI) Scholars Program is now accepting applications! This summer internship supports and engages undergraduate and graduate students who have an interest in careers in computational biology and biomedical informatics. www.nlm.nih.gov/news/NLMData...

The Library Company of Philadelphia will become part of Temple Libraries now.temple.edu/news/2025-12...

I loved my time in the UK as a grad student + I am so crushed by what is happening to the higher ed sector over there. So many schools are seeing cuts like this. And, broken record, but we are staring at the canary in the coal mine as we keep seeing similar decimations in the US as well

I had Covid, and now I have post-Covid exhaustion, and the thing my brain has had energy for is reading all the Wikipedia articles about the people of the British East India company in the Pacific. this week I read all about Stamford Raffles & William Farquhar in Java and Singapore?

the original masking objective, or: filling in the black d•t in EEBO-TCP transcriptions, presented at #CHR2025 by Kiara M.H. Liu, Martin Mueller and @mattwilkens.bsky.social

Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why? To find out, we analyzed library borrowing patterns for every author in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1945 to the Present). Excited to share this new CHR paper & data! anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... #CHR2025

‘A sound archivist told me he and his colleagues could earn more in the private sector but they work here for less pay because “we believe in what we do.”’ Anna Aslanyan on the picket line at the British Library, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

"Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web" by Michael O'Malley, Roy Rosenzweig The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jun., 1997, pg 134) doi.org/10.2307/2952...

For folks who are interested in this job: tomorrow at 10am Mountain time / 9am Pacific / Noon Eastern, we are hosting an open webinar to answer questions, discuss role, etc. Zoom link is in the posting, no attendance taken, hope to see some of you there.

I owe @heatherfro.bsky.social a print for making me aware of this 1568 whale friend, which I have now lasercut into a printing block #DHmakes

this is one of my very favourite eebo pages, and I will never forget the shock of "discovering it" in the collection. (there is also a very good description of what turns out to be an octopus arriving near cornwall, I believe, in there too)

We have talked about this before but I spent my K-12 being Bad at Math and Not Getting It. I failed or nearly failed every math class from 6th grade onwards (geometry esp was a NIGHTMARE). I remember longing for the day I would never take another math class again.

I do think that some people who didn’t experience being Bad at Math in the 2000s and 2010s are probably really underrating how demeaning that experience was at the time

🚨 Applications are open! UConn Archives & Special Collections is offering $4,000 research fellowships + $1,500 travel grants for onsite archival work. The application is quick and requires NO letters of reference. library.uconn.edu/location/asc...

CFP: The 25th annual SLAT Roundtable will be held on Feb 13-14, 2026, in-person in Tucson. The theme of this year’s Roundtable is Language Education in a Changing World. Proposals due 15th Dec 2025 sites.google.com/email.arizon...

This has me reflecting on born digital history projects. In recent weeks, I tried to access a few fantastic ones—all less than a decade old—and was met with dead links. With the death of the open internet and humanities funding more generally, what is going to happen to these projects?

Announcing a workshop on women and the sea, taking place in St. John's, Newfoundland, April 29th-May 1st, 2026! www.swaan.org Supported by a Lloyd's Heritage Foundation grant, the SWAAN project focuses on women in ocean industries in history and today. The workshop is the first of 2 gatherings...

Very interesting. there is a BERT model for specifically working with content about/around violence + political conflicts aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-m...

Job: the University of Arizona Libraries is hiring a Librarian with focus on Instructional Strategies and STEM (assistant/associate) to join our new cohort model of liaisons arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

This Thursday (Dec 11) from 10-11 MST (9am Pacific, noon Eastern) join us for an informational webinar about this position. Attendance won't be taken + info is in the link below

At a party with a Moby Donut 🍩 🐋 and this is true literary goals of it weren’t to celebrate a new stout.

If a search engine is not doing lexical search but "semantic search" (dense embedding matching) to create a ranking list of hits. Is that "ai"? Many would say ok even though embeddings are transformer based & trained using "fill in blank" cloze test, cousin of GPT style autocomplete training (2)

Libraries and CIRES partner to transform 19th-Century tsunami records into open data | University Libraries | University of Colorado Boulder https://libraries.colorado.edu/2025/12/03/libraries-and-cires-partner-transform-19th-century-tsunami-records-open-data

This is unreal. The 2026 code4lib conference has been cancelled unilaterally by Carnegie Mellon University because the Department of Education raised issues with the diversity scholarships: > An applicant must be a member of a group not well-represented within the code4lib community, including […]

COMPREHENSIVE and excellent set of slides here - explaining why WoS and Scopus are no longer fit for purpose, describing the changing nature of publishing globally. Relevant for OJS work and diamond OA as well. From @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Super happy to announce that our open access edited handbook for language educators has been published! opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/handbookappl... Ten chapters from wonderful contributors, with exercises in a number of languages. Take a look!

I bet this will be the opening of the dam and >$500k direct will be increasingly common. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Some great books and articles on archives and libraries that came out in 2025. In no specific order. 🧵

See you all in a couple hours!

Yes our Christmas tree DOES have a mini Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition and yours could too www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:a46f...

One of my collaborators, Jacqueline Barrios, does a ton of amazing work with the Sunnyside Foundation in Tucson (sample of her work here www.sunnysidefoundation.org/elpueblo50), but I especially loved this piece she and her students put together: "Stories South of 22nd St" ss22.st/home