FWIW, I posted my slides and text for this talk:

Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog

Words in Space is the work of Shannon Mattern.

wordsinspace.net

Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · 5mo ago

If you're free on Friday at noon, I'm sharing "Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog" at the CUNY Grad Center's spring Friends of the Library lecture 👉🏽☁️ gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2026/03/05/d...

Read my new preprint "Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles." I argue that we should not only look at the depth behind LLMs, but also take the surfaces seriously with which they present us: as the principal plane on which we encounter them in the life-world.

Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles

Despite a potential plateau in ML advancement, the societal impact of large language models lies not in approaching superintelligence but in generating text surfaces indistinguishable from human writi...

arxiv.org

More than 30 years worth of data on UK literary prizes (and their winners) goes live today @post45data.bsky.social! Bravo to researchers Katherine Binhammer, Kanika Batra, Theo Gray, and Maryse Jayasuriya for compiling and publishing this incredible resource! data.post45.org/posts/britis...

Selected British Literary Prizes (1990-2022) – Post45 Data Collective

The Selected British Literary Prizes (SBLP) dataset contains information on nine major literary prizes in the U.K. from 1990 to 2022 and demographic information on 682 prize winners and shortlisted au...

data.post45.org

I wrote about close reading. What it is, why it matters, and what John Guillory gets right and wrong in his recent On Close Reading. Offers a sneak peek of a little of what @johannawinant.bsky.social and I are up to in our forthcoming Close Reading for the 21C www.thenation.com/article/soci...

What is Close Reading?

By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to transform postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art form?

thenation.com

These bodies of work rhyme so beautifully. Lots to learn from artists engaging with the refusal of transparency and intelligibility :) Show closes on April 13.

Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · last yr.

"...through Gladman and Jemison’s work, Wayward Signs aims to illuminate how black commitments to improvisation, errantry, and indeterminacy erupt and interrupt the regulative constraints of linguistics, grammar, and sense-making." (cc @sjcerv.bsky.social) wallach.columbia.edu/content/wayw...

"Dickinson seemed to revel in the formal opportunities presented by letters, wrappers, envelopes, folds, adhesives, and their related paraphernalia.... When working with containers and enclosures, what possibilities does a poet have to explore interiority, concealment, revelation...?"

Emily Dickinson’s Playful Letterlocking

Emily Dickinson used envelopes and seals to turn letters into poetry, layering hidden messages and playful forms.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

OK, every year I try to explain to my students how LLMs work, and every year I have to do a big trawl for good resources and activities. Here's this year's haul of *introductory* materials. (In-class activities + visualizations, not so much readings.)

For more on library funding: static1.squarespace.com/static/64063...

CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY now has a website at @princetonupress.bsky.social, complete with very generous blurbs from David James, @rbuurma.bsky.social & @laheffernan.bsky.social , and Andrew DuBois. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social

Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century

A user’s guide to the fundamental practice of literary studies, providing context, examples, and practical exercises

press.princeton.edu

The Video Game History Foundation opens its digital archives to the public next week

The Video Game History Foundation opens its digital archives to the public next week

The online archive will include over 1,500 magazine issues and other gaming artifacts at launch.

buff.ly

For this excellent @atpost45.bsky.social cluster, I wrote about The Leftovers as a case study in how (not) to watch television

Contemporaries at Post45@atpost45.bsky.social · 2y ago

To @elizabethalsop.bsky.social, "the show’s elevation of the experiential over the explanatory is not so much a single methodology — post-critique versus paranoia, textual erotics versus forensics — as an orientation that allows for experiencing and explicating" post45.org/2024/12/let-...

Good news for feminist book history! A team led by Julie R. Enszer has built a dataset with metadata for all articles and issues of Feminist Bookstore News (FBN) from 1976 to 2000, published open access at the Post45 Data Collective data.post45.org/posts/femini...

Feminist Bookstore News Issues and Articles (1976-2000) – Post45 Data Collective

This dataset contains metadata for all articles and issues of Feminist Bookstore News from 1976 to 2000.

data.post45.org

Just want to add my shout out for Scott Newstok's annotated bibliographic resource, www.closereadingarchive.org, which he "compiled in conjunction with John Guillory’s [forthcoming' book _On Close Reading_" (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...)

Johanna Winant@johannawinant.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Close Reading Archive is a tremendous gift to our discipline -- thank you to Scott Newstok for this incredible work. www.closereadingarchive.org Alongside other varieties of wonder, it's a thrill to see @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and my forthcoming book here.

🌱🌿🌱 The writer + editor Willa Koerner interviewed me for Dark Properties as part of Ecologies of Entanglement (Are na) Editorial) about moss, repatriation + colonial institutions. Subscribe to her for more! 🌱🌿🌱 dark.properties/becoming-mos...

Becoming mossy 𓇢

Historian and Yale professor Elaine Ayers on dismantling colonial institutions from the inside out.

dark.properties

Lavater was the OG physiogyomist, and his collection of 21,000 prints has been digitized and its metadata made available for download by the Austrian National Library. Interesting project possibility! labs.onb.ac.at/datasets/lav...

Materials of Solidarity: posters, flyers, zines, and pamphlets of the 🇵🇸 solidarity movement — curated by Nadine Fattaleh at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. So many recent exhibitions have incorporated small libraries - in the exhibition space, rather than as an addendum!

Applications are now open for 2025-26 fellowships at @scihistoryorg.bsky.social! We offer postdoc, dissertation, distinguished & short-term fellowships for researchers from anywhere in any fields w/ projects that can make use of our collections. Questions? Ask here!

Science History Institute Fellowships

The Institute is home to the largest private fellowship program in the historical study of science, medicine, and technology in the United States.

sciencehistory.org

Okay! We've got a website for our grad Cinema + Media Studies Theory + Methods class! I'm especially looking forward to our "What Values Animate Your Research?," "Methods Toolkits," and "Bespoke Methods" classes :) cimsmethods.wordsinspace.net/2024/

For the Syllabus Project, I created a speculative syllabus exploring the connections between libraries 📚and landscapes 🌱. I hoped to sketch some of the potential conceptual and creative terrain for our new Library Field project at the Metro New York Library Council :)

Syllabus

Visit the post for more.

syllabusproject.org

I’ve also created open-access websites for about 40 classes since 2002 — all free for use (with credit :) wordsinspace.net/classes/

good afternoon new issue of POLYGRAPH "narrative and crisis" polygraphjournal.com/issue-29-nar...

Issue 29: Narrative and Crisis

László Moholy-Nagy, “Abstufungen” (1924) Front Matter Table of Contents Introduction (Benjamin Crais, Veronica Davis and Carson Welch) Articles: A Conversation with Sianne Ngai and Joshua Clover (Poly...

polygraphjournal.com

i watched this 86 minute long youtube documentary about the creation of the video game OREGON TRAIL and enjoyed it a lot - a reminder that a documentary that isn't trying to be dramatic or suspenseful can still be valuable and entertaining www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qbj...

The Story of The Oregon Trail

In 1971, three student teachers in Minneapolis, MN created a little computer game about westward expansion in the United States. Over 50 years later, The Ore...

youtube.com

another MLA CFP from the Forum on Literary Criticism! Genres of/in Criticism: The critical form today the genres that shape criticism today. We seek a reflection on the aesthetic and intellectual forms of criticism in the tension between the academic and the public mla.confex.com/mla/2025/web...

Good news, friends! @hartmann-villalta.bsky.social and I are once again collecting a list of *literary studies* publications by contingent (and indie) scholars pub’d in 2023. Thank you @contingent-mag.bsky.social & @erinbartram.bsky.social for this great opp! Reply here with your pub deets or email.

Contingent Magazine@contingent-mag.bsky.social · 3y ago

A reminder that we're collecting submissions for our 2023 lists of monographs, journal articles, and book chapters written by historians working off the tenure track. Submit your own, or add a friend's work. Journal and UP editors should submit their press/journal's work too!

In my latest newsletter, I lay out how I start the process of writing a book. There's also the usual bird photography, and reading recommendations buttondown.email/edyong209/ar...

The Ed's Up - How to Start a Book

Only when books are completed do we really talk about how they began. During book talks, I often get asked about where the idea came from. Once I had it,...

buttondown.email

Ben Zotto, "A Byte Sized History of Computer Typography," at Letterform Archive [video]

A Byte Sized History of Computer Typography - Letterform Archive

This Letterform Lecture will take you on a whirlwind tour of bitmaps, cathode rays, and how type and computer technology have evolved together. This talk is part how-it-works and where-it-came-from,.....

letterformarchive.org

I wrote an op-ed for the NYT about what reporting on long COVID has meant to me—how I approached it, the impact it had, and how it taught me to be a better journalist. This piece is sort of a manifesto for a journalism grounded in compassion, rigor, and care. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/o...

Opinion | Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist

Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force that it is often caricatured to be.

nytimes.com