Kathryn
@fivefteditrix.bsky.social
Freelance editor, mostly of scholarly things; v. occasional feral Victorianist. Focusing on the mournful signage.
I'm sure many of you have already seen this newish preprint on the deleterious cognitive effects of using AI for writing tasks, but just in case: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088.... If you've been paying attention, you know/can intuit a lot of it, but it's something tangible w/ which to counter enthusiasts.
arxiv.org
Are they, like, holding out for E. Gordon Gee, or what?
David Jesse@reporterdavidj.bsky.social · last yr.BREAKING: The Florida higher education system Board of Governors rejects the hiring of Santa Ono as University of Florida president. Vote was 6 yes, 10 no.
Speaking of which: We at Fortress Press are eager to read (with human eyes 👀) proposals including but not limited to: late antique and medieval Christian history; Jewish Studies; Islamic Studies; and Religious Studies broadly conceived. Please reach out if you’re working on a project!
Kathryn@fivefteditrix.bsky.social · last yr.Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.
OUP, btw, was the first of the large UK UPs to cut its in-house copy editors. This was and remains a strong signal of its general attitude to quality assurance, imo. People need to understand that as publishing labour goes, so go their own publishing processes, and choose their options accordingly.
Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.
Simon Davies@simonfd.bsky.social · last yr.Publish your monograph or scholarly edition or journal article with @themhra.bsky.social! Human copy-editors and typesetters only.
When I say "please don't publish with the big British houses if you can help it, because they're going hard for LLM nonsense that disrespects everyone's labour and expertise," this is the kind of nonsense I mean (h/t @shannanclark.bsky.social): www.alpsp.org/news-publica...
Oxford University Press and Hum sign agreement to pilot Alchemist Review
Oxford University Press partners with Hum to pilot Alchemist Review, an AI-based editorial assistant that will enhance manuscript assessment while reducing a...
alpsp.org
Co-signing! That people commonly make this claim is, of course, partly the fault of institutions that pressure scholars to frame every bit of writing they do as high stakes, a novel "intervention," instead of treating scholarship as the accretive process it is. But it's still a silly tack to take.
Brian Connolly@brianconnolly.bsky.social · last yr.If I was to give one piece of advice gleaned from editing a journal for 15 years it would be to stop claiming what you are doing has never been done. It’s almost never an accurate statement and just shows you haven’t read all that much 🤷♀️
Among other things, this thread is useful for dispelling the persistent assumption that university presses are out here making a killing because they're pricing paperbacks ten dollars higher than folks might like. . . . Please do read for a view of the actual economics.
Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · last yr.Here's a long thread on an issue dear to my heart. This Tuesday evening I’m doing an Intellectual Publics with Macarena Gomez-Barris on publishing. Like last year’s conversation with Denise Cruz, or the prior year’s with Racquel Gates, we will talk about how to find a publisher, turn a thesis... 1/
It's rough being a humanities editor rn. At a conference last weekend, someone asked if, that being so, I was thinking of diversifying into business. I said no: for one thing I'd spent 10 yrs on it. For another, it feels vital now to support humanist scholarship people can teach & read & learn from.
The hist and lit depts at my alma mater have retained unfashionable bib & methods course requirements at honours undergrad and MA levels partly for this reason. As Dr. Gower says downthread, that doesn't solve the AI problem, but it does mean those depts deal w/ fewer AI misconduct cases than others
WOR$T GIRL IN ACADEMIA@medievaliste.bsky.social · last yr.One suggestion for professors concerned about AI usage aside from in-class, handwritten writing assignments is that you work with your colleagues to propose curricular changes. A good start would be bringing back required library and research skills courses as a cornerstone of your major reqs
One reason the "oh, but we need to make our work accessible to the public" line often taken by institutional humanists annoys me is that it presumes "the public" needs things streamlined when in fact there are plenty like Mom who actually enjoy meeting this work in its original form & terminology.*
Kathryn@fivefteditrix.bsky.social · last yr.Early reviews of @nathankhensley.bsky.social's latest are in: my mother calls it "brain-straining" (complimentary) on a level w/ A Thousand Plateaus
Trying to find a suitably gentle way of explaining to an author that they might be able to fight me on suggested stylistic adjustments, but they cannot really fight The Chicago Manual of Style.
Early reviews of @nathankhensley.bsky.social's latest are in: my mother calls it "brain-straining" (complimentary) on a level w/ A Thousand Plateaus
It's time for me to embarrass myself by putting this out there: if your college or university in the greater Los Angeles area needs an instructor for anything to do with music history or medieval studies, I'm available to teach this fall.
The annual University of Illinois Press Summer Sale starts now! 🎉 Enjoy 50% off *ALL* books until June 16 when you use code SUMMER25 on our website! www.press.uillinois.edu
The face of a little criminal who hooked a paw into the savoury pastry I was eating *as it was on its way to my mouth* and swallowed a chunk before I could get it away from her. She had just had her own breakfast, natch. (I: Maisie, no! Onions are bad for your liver. She: [insolent snarfling])
Interested in writing for American Gothic Studies journal? See the following call for Provocations pieces. We're looking for essays that revisit and update terms/concepts pertinent to the field of study! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
UPDATED CFP: “Provocations” for American Gothic Studies
UPDATED CFP: “Provocations” for American Gothic Studies American Gothic Studies is seeking short essays for its “Provocations” section. These pieces (2,000 words) are meant to question conventional wi...
docs.google.com
Not watching the video from your "go ahead and croak, peasants" senator no matter how many times you all angrily QT it, sorry. I encounter enough eugenicist bs as it is. (You don't have to give these people added airtime.)
One could argue that by promoting incel ideology through its platform, OpenAI is openly recruiting domestic terrorists.
Molly White@molly.wiki · last yr.OpenAI is featuring a "Looksmaxxing GPT" that provides "PSL ratings" for photos. It will rate people as "subhuman", and advise men to get invasive procedures like jaw surgery to "increase their sexual market value" among women, who it describes as "hypergamous by nature".
ok ok ok real talk TRADE HISTORY is when your book is called ‘the untold story of [a subject that is absolutely very much a story lots of people have already told’
A collection of the Letterform Archive's ephemera — from chopstick wrappers to transit tickets to product labels to punk flyers to calendars
Ephemera
Letterform Archive’s collection of ephemera aims to outlast its impermanent nature and provide endless design inspiration.
letterformarchive.org
Okay: if you have a quantity of something with countable components (apples, dollars), you have a *number *of those components. If you have a quantity that is not countable (love, guilt), you have an *amount* of it. You can have more or fewer countable things, more or less of an uncountable thing.
The thing about Zoom conference is that they don't seem entirely real, so a person can easily do things like agree to present at one, then book a trip to the US, for which she will, on the advice of her government, not be bringing her laptop, during the same period.
Haunted by a chat I had w/ a publisher of scholarly editions this past weekend in which he mentioned that, where he might once have sold 2,000 copies of Jane Eyre in an AY, he now sells about 500, b/c profs are finding students struggle too much with it. JE is not difficult, as 19th c. novels go!
Though in many individual cases one could argue they've done it to themselves, I'm increasingly sorry for/offended on behalf of men that they get marketed to like this. Such a sad, limited, fundamentally stupid conception of what masculinity and manhood are about. Like a GI Joe cartoon.
Tara@theblueststar.bsky.social · last yr.What in the Betty's Tea Room is this?
Well, I guess now I really will have to see if I can get across the border in November without being delayed or detained! Fun times to be a non-US member of the North American Victorian Studies Association, let me tell you
It sounds very "naïve humanist" of me, I know, but: Why is the notion that a healthy society needs philosophers *and* plumbers, historians *and* home care workers, so difficult for so many to grasp? There's such a wide range of human skills and talents, and almost every one of them has a place.
