New critical minerals projects just dropped, ty Jessica for doing a thread

People have way over-indexed on the 2023-era view that AI companies want to “train on your data” because human authenticity is scarce and precious. I promise I’m not saying corps are beneficent when I say that a random collection of files and social media posts has at this point small value.

A lot of the new tools and processes appear to work best when an expert in the process being completed supervises or partners with one of these generative tools. That is not a useful classroom tool for most early or intermediate learners.

How not to display art, by Michael Govan

i like most of the photography youtubers but i've found someone i do not like.

After four awesome years at ITHAKA / JSTOR, I’m taking a needed two week staycation before starting an exciting new gig. The last two days were about household chores, but today is being spent enjoying this stunning Nancy Graves at the @bampfa.bsky.social

The Library of Virginia in Richmond seeks a data engineer ($100k-$125k) to transform data practices at a 200-year-old cultural heritage org with an eye towards the future. Looking for someone to imagine & collaboratively implement tomorrow's data infrastructure. Apply by May 1! Tell your friends!

If you’re teaching DH right now, how are you thinking about your students’ relationship to generative AI? Are you ignoring it? Banning it? Discussing a policy with them first? Encouraging vibe coding? Interested to see how educators across the continuum of opinions are managing it.

nyx says welcome home

Imagine being in space 30 min ago and now you’re about an hour from In n Out

NASA failed to predict the real splashdown risk.

If anyone knows any excellent and experienced data engineers who would be excited by a Richmond-based job in the cultural heritage sector, have them get in touch.

this is something which, plainly, AI cannot do. journalism is by definition out-of-distribution, and even if you presumed that everyone wanted to read more Claudeprose than people already do, "writing up one's findings" is not the primary job a journalist performs!

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Coding interviews of technologists who were purged from government under DOGE, and the sense of trauma is really palpable. Compared to the private sector orgs like Amazon, the jobs meant more and the way they were treated was way worse. It "felt like our leadership hated us just for existing."

losing a war feels way better than i always imagined it would

Welcome back to earth! Here’s what you missed:

Spaceflight is inherently interesting of course but they can't keep doing the same thing if they expect to grow viewership. There should be a betrayal arc. At a pivotal moment one of the astronauts should be revealed to be evil

If you like data, or making things with textile crafts (sewing, knitting, crochet, weaving, etc.), I've finally written something up about data visualization with textiles. More words coming over the next few months! #DHmakes

He’s such a perplexing figure. “We had a president born in California who was a Quaker, wrote the report that literally defined affirmative action, created the EPA, took us off the volatile gold standard, and normalized relations with China” “Wow sounds like a pretty cool guy” “Absolutely not.”

Each April, JSTOR Access in Prison shares the intellectual work of people inside. This year marks the introduction of #FairOpportunityMonth. The series features writing, research, & creative work published as it was submitted. Read the opening post: https://bit.ly/4dR3ktS

new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...

I’m gonzo for AI and this is a good idea. Wikipedia belongs to a deeper pace layer. Critical infrastructure. Move slow, edit things.

New, from me.

you will have to pry the sushirritos from our cold dead hands. hash tag california strong

Yussss 🚚🚛🚚

finally, an explanation why an extremely heavy AI user and AI optimist like myself also cannot stand reading AI writing in public and/or under a specific person's name. i don't care what Claude thinks, not because Claude is dumb, but because Claude is not a social agent. *you* are.

IR people who decry gender studies or arguments are fish refusing to believe the study of water is important.

My Ides of March fun fact is that the place where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary, and I think it’s beautiful that creatures with tiny knives on their feet live there

Yes, that’s the issue. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate this: to the extent that LLMs serve a purpose in education, it’s an indictment of the education system, not a praiseworthy feature of LLMs.

LLMs can automate writing, but they didn’t produce an ideology in which writing was something to be viewed as a mechanism to be judged in terms of speed and efficiency

Job opening here at ITHAKA's JSTOR: Digital Collections Curator, Reveal Digital, focusing on important cultural, social, and political histories, especially those that have been dispersed, under-described, or difficult to access at scale. Full job description: www.ithaka.org/job/46724530...

arts administrators like Gelb are trying to treat the current class of ultra-wealthy like they are all Andrew Carnegie-wannabes who haven't gotten a good pitch yet, and they just simply aren't

Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman

A machine will never write a series of plays about monarchs during a period when exile and/or death was a very real possibility for anyone writing the wrong thing about monarchs. A machine will never be a troupe navigating theater bans and pandemic closures into the subtext of each play

Good blog that I think makes two important points: 1) All of these AI companies are not the exact same and you are intentionally not learning much if you flatten them into one thing 2) Don't get carried away lol

Congress better wake up before nobody notices it's gone.

A lesson about networks that I’m kind of proud of: at the beginning of the year, I gave my 200 students a dumb survey: fav books, foods, etc. I told them they could use pseudonyms and that I’d share their responses with the class. We’ve been using that data in various ways: to make points about +

I understand why prison abolition is controversial but I don’t think you can get away from the fact that the most passionate prison abolitionists work closely with incarcerated people or were incarcerated themselves. The more you know about the logistics of incarceration the more you hate it.

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

i have been made aware that an Olympic figure skater for Kazakhstan does a Dune themed routine in a full stillsuit and he is now my personal hero

mom all my friends in new york have one can we get one too

It’s really difficult & disorienting but the feds hit LA extremely hard today. There were kidnappings all over & reported cluster raids in Chinatown, East LA, Ktown. This list shows to 1130 AM but they haven’t stopped all day Just because the media attention stopped doesn’t mean the abductions have

recently learned about “dek bass”, a sound system culture in rural West Bengal, using cassette decks and homemade systems, and it’s remarkable because 1) the music and equipment are sick and 2) the DJ always looks like he’s being briefed on a national security issue

they're executing moms and nurses in the street. they're using preschoolers as bait. they're stealing people's dads and grandmas and children. they're tear gassing babies. they're staking out schools. there is no remedy but abolition. any proposal that doesn't start there is an act of violence.