this is almost a caricature of imagined administrative responses to AI in higher ed, where words are spoken and actions are gestured towards but nothing is really happening: www.chronicle.com/article/ai-i...

Opinion | The University Was Made for the Age of AI

Colleges have never been coherent. Their strength lies in managing disagreement and uncertainty.

chronicle.com

new collage

Charlie passed away peacefully today. He was my best bud but it was time to say goodbye. He was 16 1/2 and I was lucky to know him for ten of those years. ❤️

I curated some readings for class on "data tensions" and the list felt worth sharing. Come on a tour of datasets, books, the web, and AI with me... We'll start with this piece on the Google Books project: the hopes, dreams, disasters, and aftermath of building a public library on the internet. 1/n

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

theatlantic.com

"the anti-AI movement isn’t about rejecting technology altogether so much as it is about advocating for more control, agency, and freedom in how people use technology"

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 2w ago

At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.

Terry Belanger would begin his Rare Book School classes by physically destroying/dismantling a (well-chosen) old book. This is NOT the same as what Anthropic is doing! But there is a popular culture of preciousness around books that is belied by the material realities of their circumstances. +

Daniel Bellingradt@dbellingradt.bsky.social · 6d ago

AI companies scanning and shredding old and rare books is bad, but you should be aware that shredding new, old, and used books is an established practice of selling and marketing books. In fact, hundreds of millions of books are shredded every year discretly, and legally, in Europe alone. #booksky

mourning alongside all the other Northeastern grad students I know who lived off Huntington Ave Boloco sustenance for years

Boston.com@boston.com · last wk.

The final Boloco location on Congress Street will close Sept. 25, ending the decades-long run of the local burrito chain. trib.al/6SIAP9m

This is the remarkable thinker & teacher whose Harvard role was just terminated--profiled in Harvard Magazine only 18 months ago. What is happening at the College this summer is awful (as with last summer, when the Women's Center was closed out of the blue). 🤯 www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...

Harvard Writing Center’s Jane Rosenzweig on AI and Writing | Harvard Magazine

Harvard Writing Center’s Jane Rosenzweig on AI and writing

harvardmagazine.com

Mary Lewis@profmarylewis.bsky.social · last wk.

It‘s quite possible that with this move, @harvard.edu could become the only Ivy League university without a writing center. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

If you get there quickly, you can get a free PDF of this new book, on an important subject: Berens, Kathi Inman, and Rachel Noorda, How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books, Elements in Publishing and Book Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2026), doi.org/10.1017/9781...

How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books

Cambridge Core - Printing and Publishing History - How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books

doi.org

Ok, I have been MIA on this platform because life has been busy, but I want to remind you Digital Humanities Quarterly invites abstracts for a special issue on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) in relation to digital humanities pedagogy due August 1 dhq.digitalhumanities.org/submissions/...

PIZZA HISTORIAN WATCHING “MYSTIC PIZZA”: I don’t even know where to begin. I would be ashamed to serve these pizzas.

last night I didn’t sleep very well and then this morning I read Emily Wilson’s description of Odysseus rolling around restlessly like a hot dog cooking in a 7-11

this news about CCCC (and the manner in which these plans were made) is unbelievable. My first experience at an academic conference was at C's (as an undergrad attendee in 2003!) and this network has been an invaluable resource for myself and many friends and colleagues over the years.

Megan McIntyre@rcmeg.bsky.social · 2w ago

The CCCC Exec Committee released a brief statement on the NCTE’s intention to dissolve CCCC. "CCCC is the professional home for thousands of scholars, teachers, and researchers...with a decades-long record of shaping how writing is taught, studied, and understood."

I am excited to read this! Sarah Ciston et al., Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, Software Studies (MIT Press, 2026), doi.org/10.7551/mitp... It has always interested me that the context for this early chatbot, in the 1960s, was health: of therapy and counseling.

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI

How the original ELIZA chatbot transformed ideas about AI and society’s response to them.As we reach the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut, Inventin

doi.org

Some faculty at my institution are looking for readings on AI implications for academic research workflows, particularly reflections from educators who have experimented, adopted, or critiqued these particular contexts. I have some links but if anyone has anything top-of-mind, I'd appreciate more!

"Institutions stop exactly where the cost to them would begin." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/o...

Opinion | I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgments Are Infuriating. (Gift Article)

Conservatives who critique land acknowledgments aren’t acting in good faith, but they do have a point.

nytimes.com

excited to find some time to dig into @roopikarisam.bsky.social’s new book, Data Empire! Just wrapping up a week in my Digital Studies summer course on Text As Data so it is apparently The Summer of Data over here.

I don't love any of these ideas but agree that we are in the midst of an "assessment crisis" in higher ed due to AI. Some of the proposals here favor investments in surveillance, misguided perceptions of "academic rigor," and inattentiveness to contexts like, say required courses outside of majors.

Neil Mosley@neilmosley.bsky.social · 2w ago

"In the past few years, the same things come up, such as the need to move to viva-style or in-person assessment, or authentic assessment..so far higher education has few genuine answers to the challenges that generative AI has presented."

Goddamn Appiah majorly screwed up. This is extremely embarrassing, he was way out of his depth and didn’t even know it. Analytic philosophers, come get your man

Gabriel Hankins@gabrielh.bsky.social · 3w ago

My response to Appiah's "field report" is up: please repost www.chronicle.com/article/kwam...

It's great that a top City of Boston official is personally intervening to try and defend people who block bike lanes

StreetsblogMASS@mass.streetsblog.org · 2w ago

A public records request reveals how @mayorwu.boston.gov's election-year "review" of transportation projects created a duplicate layer of authority inside City Hall that fomented confusion and stalled urgent safety initiatives: mass.streetsblog.org/2026/07/22/f...

"My book finds literary value in spaces where writing, reading and public conversation are all unfolding together." Aarthi Vadde discusses her new book, WE THE PLATFORM: HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE. bit.ly/4whG1j9 @aarthivadde.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

What Happens When Everyone Can Be a Writer? Aarthi Vadde’s New Book Asks Just That

From early social media experiments to contemporary AI usage, “We the Platform" examines how digital platforms reshaped the very idea of what literature is.

bit.ly

The coverage on this OpenAI incident is abysmal. Use of the terms "rogue" and "loss of human control" lead to groupthink as people lack the critical skills to understand the difference between "autonomy" and faulty reward functions in AI on a task it was directed and given access to do.

hired a summer intern. we are business casual over the summer by the way

the trick with reading Chronicle of Higher Ed pieces is to scroll down to the author info first and then decide whether you need to waste time getting mad about this person's perspective

Folks who may be teaching digital studies / digital humanities courses this summer: Voyant is changing servers but they have generously shared links to some alternatives like mirror sites / guidance for running Voyant locally: voyant-tools.org

"food for thought": vague, unappealing "spaghetti for thought": specific, appetizing

Delighted to share that Binding Media has won the 2026 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature! So honored to received this particular award because Hayles' work taught me to think about the weird literary works I've always been interested in. @stanfordpress.bsky.social

On the language of Homeric Greek, and the language of a certain forthcoming film: here are a few simple observations.

got some cubicle art on vacation

on this day in 1995, scientists discovered bisexuality. happy 31st birthday to all my fellow bs