i had actual work to be doing. whatever. read this instead. ill do alt text in the morning on a better version of this post.

"Texts were collected by scraping and parsing freely available digital sources" is no longer an adequate methodology statement, if it ever has been.

i'm sure the combination rising high diesel prices, paired with the immigration actions, and the weird new rules for CDLs in an already tight trucker labor market. are going to do great things to food prices, especially refrigerated foods.

כ׳האָב זיך דערװוּסט אַז דאָס װאָרט ״קײסעך״ (דאָס הײסט, די חגא מיט די אײער) איז אַ געמיש פֿון ״קריסטלעכער פּסח״ װאָס האָט גרױסע ״ניט געשטױגן ניט געפֿלױגן״ ענערגיע

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

If only more people understood this

Homelessness is a policy choice, not an individual failure.

This is your reminder that if you are a class member and have NOT yet filed a claim in Anthropic v. Bartz, the AI copyright lawsuit, you have 9 days to do so.

Especially true if you can use anchors and negative look-arounds to cut down on false positives. Like /\blogical/ so that you only pick up "logical" and not "biological," "geological", etc. Or /\beco(?!nom)/ to find uses of the prefix "eco-" but exclude "economy", "economics", etc. #RegEx

Every person I've mentioned this to immediately asks "like in a dating app photo?" and the answer is no, they're on a line and he's swinging them back and forth. However! The fact that so many people asked this question is making me want to create a dating simulator called Dream Deans.

this disease took two of my childhood friends before they turned 25. i hope this is fast tracked. i wish it had come much sooner.

I describe it as such as a historian of disability because I want to remind scientists and the world that the history of science IS the history of eugenics, scientific racism and medical racism, and more. I’m not comforting them with the idea that it was a ‘pseudoscience.’ This is your history.

For all of the professional theory and practice of preserving archives, from environmental set points to housing standards to disaster plans, the biggest risk of loss comes from institutional decision-making.

this is completely insane: since when is it acceptable for a tech company to rewrite news outlets' headlines without their consent? especially at a time when audiences are sensitive to how stories are framed in headlines? (ie Israel/Palestine, the Trump admin, ICE) www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

Editorial from our student newspaper: "In its tireless support for AI, the University has essentially endorsed shortcuts and the outsourcing of academic thinking"

One of the many reasons I miss theDC metro 🌸

If you weren't aware, libraries currently pay significantly more for digital resources than the average consumer, which devastates the budgets of libraries trying to meet their community's needs. Sign a witness slip in support of the Digital Library Protection Act (House Bill 5236). More info:

It’s AI adjacent but one of my favourite books/covers is Schantz’ History of OCR, written in 1982. (1982!!) He starts with Napoleon’s fax machines.

with each new piece by students saying "we don't want AI" it becomes a lot grosser that a contingent of our field thinks our response should be "too bad, you have to have it"

I care deeply, DEEPLY, about archival silences. I think reliance on automated crawling of web resources is only shifting the hegemony instead of addressing the frameworks. Who's not online? What's not online? What never will be and/or never should be?

Here is the change I'm seeing most vividly in our institutional contexts (not necessarily mine right now, but plenty of examples to point to): we're no longer trusted as experts to decide when automation is appropriate and when it isn't. Our leaders are outsourcing that to our system vendors.

🧵My values are always growing and therefore changing, and so I try not to speak in absolutes unless I'm really sure. That being said, I am totally uninterested in techno-optimist visions of "AI in archives" that eliminate the social relationships between creators, collectors, GLAMs, and researchers.

I worked on this on the Library of Congress project for about five years, and CBS was not interested in preserving their history!

Link: petapixel.com/2026/03/16/p...

Seen tacked to a community board on my walk

For the record, the Nazis are spreading terms like “zio” and “zog” into leftist spaces intentionally as an on-ramp to fascism. This is what cryptofascism means. They explicitly talk about doing this on their forums and telegram channels. You’re being played.

(whispers) most-all of us are going to have to let them expire eventually, everything is entropy, might as well do it when it's an intentional choice

I think it's simultaneously this and the fact that many enthusiasts seem to have a narrow sense of what job tasks are/can look like. There's a lot of "you don't understand what AI can do" coming at some of us and a legitimate response is "you don't understand what I can do, and need to, in my job."

data center project claims it will bring in $2b in tax revenue over 30 years, but in order to get those daily 150k gallons of water, aquifer replacement costs $1.44b residents would see a maybe $18m/yr within a $695m/yr budget. a relative drop in the bucket & at the cost of their water supply

Just in case you need some good news today: researchers at U of W have figured out how to turn plastic waste into acetic acid (primary ingredient in vinegar) using the sun. This has the potential to really help us reduce plastic waste. uwaterloo.ca/news/media/w...

Our welfare is inextricably intertwined, my neighbor's and mine. I chose (and choose) to do what I do out of love for others and for myself. I see compassion before courage, personally, but I also think that compassion is far more powerful and threatening to fascism than courage. (4 of ?)

I remember when everything started moving to apps and I was morally offended at the idea of having to download all these little programs to access services when the Internet was right there and you know what, I was right

Another opportunity to share Douglas Adams' description of the Kakapo! (He also makes this observation on people: "On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.")

BRB, calculating the sizes of the epicycle and deferent

truly incredible that strava leaks are still happening after all this time

Or the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1,000 years.

I taught a session in my digital manuscripts class yesterday on the BL ransomware attack, and it yielded probably the most engaged discussion we’ve had so far, about cultural heritage, remediation, labor, and access. The word “ontology” was used correctly, and not by me!

I have an XML joke, but neither my human readers nor my machine readers understood it the way they were supposed to

{ “first_name": "Laura", "is_alive": true, “joke”: { “type”: “json”, “value”: null } }

Things that have landed hard with the youths in my audience lately: -showing them openly available archived copies of my deleted tumblr -tracking changes to licensing agreements for edtech -AI as an web infrastructure burden so all the stuff people who exploit them claim they don’t care about

Hey, #digipres folks, what algorithms do you use for periodic fixity checks on data at rest (esp. if stored in the cloud)?

Well drat, it looks like YouTube has fully gotten rid of the chronological subscriptions page? Now it's just offering me "Latest: Most relevant", including items from 10, 3, and 5 days ago Bring back chronological lists!

I have an archivist joke, but a historian who found it in the collection I processed and using the finding aid I wrote will say it was lost and he discovered it.

i love how so much of digital accessibility is just reaffirming what librarians have been trying to tell you for 1000 years: METADATA IS IMPORTANT, ACTUALLY

Remember Google Search? Damn. That was actually pretty useful.

Thinking this morning about how my personal Roman Empire is Lomi Kriel breaking the news of the El Paso pilot of the family separation policy in late 2017, for the Houston Chronicle, and it not getting national attention at the time or credit once family separation did get national attention in ‘18.

one of the really gross aspects of the AI zombie resurrection thing we should (carefully!!!!!) discuss more is the fact that this is not what Val Kilmer looked like when he died. they don’t want the human Val Kilmer. they want a simulacrum of the idealized memory of him you have in your mind

Not reposting that ridiculous link but NO, you do not need to spend $25K to query agents and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise sees you as a mark

People keep saying “oh so you want OPEN BORDERS” as some kind of gotcha and like. Yeah. When I was a kid you could just drive into Canada. On accident, even. It was great, and I think we should do that instead of kidnapping children. Normalize being normal instead of being kidnapping weirdos

And to all who still have the former opinion, may I recommend the first 3 sections of this paper by Greg Wiedeman? (Intro, Archival vs. Bibliographic Description, & Archival Description in Practice) journal.code4lib.org/articles/16963