I went to the library to get a book on Pavlov's dog and Schrodinger's cat. The librarian said that she thought it rang a bell but wasn't sure if it was there or not!

I still chuckle about the scale of our current Viral Texts data—chatting about our migration to a new server, @djevans.bsky.social said “right now there only 200 million records so we’re waiting for another 100 million or so to load”—I could never have conceived this when we started a decade ago

#iSchoolUI MSLIS student Christine Nguyen has been awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Japanese this summer 🇯🇵   She’ll study at Okayama University to advance her language skills and expand access to archival resources.   Congrats, Christine! ▶️ bit.ly/4ta4hSP

One year ago, @cni Cliff Lynch passed away. In remembrance, I’m going to re-read the tribute I co-authored with @phonedudemln.bsky.social “Cliff Lynch: The Invisible Influencer in Information Infrastructure” https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/04/cliff-lynch-invisible-influencer-in.html

#iSchoolUI Associate Professor Masooda Bashir’s study on gaps between privacy law and real-world enforcement became a key authority in Lopez v. Apple Inc., a landmark case involving Siri and intrusive recordings that resulted in a $95M settlement. ▶️ bit.ly/4sZbPb5

#iSchoolUI researchers joined Global Education and Training (GET) and Bolashak fellows for the #Nauryz Celebration, a holiday that welcomes not only the spring equinox but also the renewal of nature. Welcome, Spring! 🌷

The deadline for nominations for the 2025 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award has been extended to April 20. If you know someone who has furthered the cause of intellectual freedom, consider nominating them here ▶️ bit.ly/405D9Yb

Thank you!

Interesting opportunity at the intersection of Digital Humanities, AI, and data infrastructure: A postdoc at the University of São Paulo focuses on AI-driven design, visualization, and exploration of digital collections—with a strong emphasis on access, transparency, and metadata systems […]

Edinburgh, and the doctrine of dual intent.

Director of IT Brynnen Owen will be officially retiring on April 1. What started as a “part-time gig” turned into 26 years of service to the #iSchoolUI. Congratulations on your retirement, Brynnen, and we thank you for your service! 🤝

Y’all printing on this press is so immensely satisfying—I may never want to stop

Excited to give a keynote talk on "Surprise Machines: Creativity, History and AI's Generative Failures" for the Central New York Global DH Working Group's AI & Creativity workshop this Sat 3/28 (tomorrow)! If you're in the Syracuse-Ithaca-Geneva area, come by! www.cnycorridor.net/calendar/cre...

#DHmakes 🤍 🖤

How to move a printing press (expert edition)

Janet Swatscheno has been sharing this link and additional details on listservs: HT are offering a workshop to be held on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 3pm-4pm Eastern to describe next steps. Register for the workshop here: forms.gle/8vQ9DbYepbtj....

When the closure of HTRC was announced, more than two years ago, Hathi said it was going to develop a plan for continued research access to their collections. I hope that plan has been developed and is close to being released.

Trinity achieved Auckland style!

About to give my talk at the University of Waikato's Computer Science department!

I’ve been dying to test out the chonky new wood type & borders we brought to @skeuomorphpress.org & tomorrow we have admitted @ischoolui.bsky.social LIS students visiting @skeuomorphpress.org, so it seemed fortuitous Made the most dramatic C19-style poster I could manage—look at those wild fonts!!!

Ok, starting off a thread to document the unloading. For those who have visited @skeuomorphpress.org & were wondering, “where on earth earth will you put that type?” here’s the main answer: the bases of our central tables will be replaced by type cabinets—tabletops will go back on the cabinets

The Straits Times did a nice piece on our centre (@cssh-nus.bsky.social), which will be officially launched this coming Wednesday, with @mmvty.bsky.social as our keynote speaker. Looking forward! www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pa...

All are welcome to attend tomorrow’s “The AI Disruption” talk! Jonathan Chen, associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, will present “AI in Medicine - Integrated Intelligence or Illusory Imitations?" ▶️ bit.ly/4tUGbMM

A HAVI award from Schmidt Sciences will support a multi-institutional collaboration, “AI for Cultural and Historical Reasoning.” At #ILLINOIS, #iSchoolUI Professor and PI @tedunderwood.com will help build models that better represent past historical periods. ▶️ bit.ly/4qYwmuz

#iSchoolUI Professor Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (#WSDM26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. ▶️ bit.ly/40smWMV

Hey, look at that—you can embed Bandcamp songs right in Bluesky now I’ll try not to be too annoying about that but hey, listen to our song "Dive"!!

A new NSF award supports “REDTEAM,” a project led by #iSchoolUI Director of Research & Technology Innovation Anita Nikolich & Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin that uses structured role-playing games to model threats to academic research. ▶️ bit.ly/46jefrU

We are pleased to provide open access to the latest issue of Library Trends 74 (3), which examines the intersection of technological hype and practical reality in librarianship through the lens of data literacy. ▶️ bit.ly/3OjePjd

The most wonderfully chaotic day in BookLab is printing day @skeuomorphpress.org, but we did it! We printed an octavo on the hand press & a half-sheet quarto on the jobbing press—every student got to ink, manage paper, pull the hand press, & run the jobber—made 1 copy for everyone plus a few extras

Digitalhumanities, #librarylife and #NLP friends: has anyone bought a large historical dataset (books, newspapers, maps etc, images or ocr) from a publisher/digitiser to data mine? I’d like to compare notes… either on here or DM me 🙏

Nice to be out on the bike on Sunday afternoon! Bit chilly here in East Central Illinois but otherwise spiffy.

Today is the wonderful, buzzy, barely contained chaos that is typesetting day in BookLab

Sponsored by the #iSchoolUI & @sagepub.com, the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award acknowledges those who have furthered the cause of intellectual freedom. If you know someone who would be a good candidate, nominate them by April 14! ▶️ bit.ly/405D9Yb

Association of Canadian Archivists workshop: Introduction to Archival Description in Canada Thursday, March 5, 2:00pm EST This workshop will provide participants with a solid introduction to archival arrangement and description. More info here: archivists.ca/event-6528080

Students showed me this morning that UIUC has a service where they can run a Jupyter notebook on an H200 backed by 141GB VRAM. Free (for our students). My jaw dropped enough to communicate, I think, that this is not the norm.

Join us for a Digital Humanities Brown-Bag Lunch Roundtable on “The Virality of Racial Terror in U.S. Newspapers, 1863–1921.” 📅 Friday, Feb. 6 | 🕦 11:30 AM–1 PM
 📍 The Corner, Main Library (Room 220) Open to all. ▶️ bit.ly/4toC5we

From 2021 The top 10 movies to watch if you're a Catherine O'Hara fan www.cbc.ca/comedy/the-t...

Happy birthday to Professor Emerita Linda Smith! 🎉 Learn why she is a 'Renaissance scholar of Library and Information Science' in Library Trends 71 (1): A Festschrift in Honor of Linda C. Smith ▶️ bit.ly/3NzGyvF

The new NSF public access policy adds software to what must be publicly shared, and must be described in the data management and sharing plan (DSMP) www.nsf.gov/policies/doc...

Digital Humanities people -- positionally I feel like I could maybe write something useful/interesting here as someone who moved from running a DH program to CTO-ing an AI startup -- any questions you'd conceivably read if I answered them?

Call for Papers for ISMIR 2026, Nov 8-12 in Abu Dhabi: ismir2026.ismir.net/authors/call.... Also, if your company is interested in being a Sponsor for the conference, talk to me! (ismir2026.ismir.net/about/organi...)

Local friends & colleagues, our 1st first event @skeuomorphpress.org this spring will be a "Making Artist's Books" workshop with printer & artist Ben Blount, from 3-5 on Wed, February 4th. Spots are limited so please register if you're interested! skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu/making-an-ar...

Really looking forward to this roundtable on "Digital Humanities and Contemporary Book Studies"! It's one of the most exciting research areas out there, in my very biased opinion. And I *might* even share a hot take about Heated Rivalry...

Come join us. Western University invites applications from outstanding early career investigators for a full-time probationary faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor in the area of neural circuits in NHPs. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

To say I am excited about this would be an understatement. To say I am a little bit terrified would not! Actually, just really looking forward to it -- and really pleased to see SHARP continuing its accessible practices. eve.gd/2026/01/10/i...

Friends at MLA, my day tomorrow is booked pretty solid but right now the flight’s looking good & I should be in Toronto around dinner time with no plans this evening—let me know if you’d like to catch up over a later dinner, a drink, etc.