Listen, hear me out: What if we just declared one more month of summer? Just decided it’s longer this year? Students would be happy. Teachers would be happy. I bet even administrators would be happy. We can even extend winter break to balance the semesters. What d’ya say?

Happy to announce that my personal favorite article to date is out! If you are interested in understanding how the precarity of born-digital media artifacts, the imagination of queer folks, and Furby tell us something about information worldbuilding, then you should read this! tinyurl.com/4afvv7sm

sidenote but “the corporate mainmast” is now the canonical term for business hierarchies Ladders are out. Mainmasts are in.

McSweeney's@mcsweeneys.net · 4d ago

"Look, I’ve got nothing against Queequeg. He’s a nice guy. And he can spy a whale spout in a hurricane. And hit a nickel-sized moving target in open water in one steel stroke. But all those 'biggee' tattoos? Tell me they don’t scream 'diversity hire.'"

Oh, I only today realized that my Information Science & English courses this fall share the exact same course number, just a different prefix. This is absolutely going to cause a mix-up (for me) at some point this semester

Ok, I think I’ve got one syllabus mapped out—Intro to DH—though if anyone here has a must-read digital humanities article from the past year(ish), I’m all ears for new suggestions. Glad to have the newest Debates in DH volumes available—they are such rich resources for the intro course in particular

Debates in the Digital Humanities

Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

I finally succumbed to the reality that I need reading glasses for books & screens, but now I keep giving myself flash headaches by forgetting I’m wearing them & standing up and trying to do normal business I guess this is just life now?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful my institution continues to do this, but can we not lose sight of how *cuckoo bonkers* it is that my school sends out a regular newsletter that’s basically “here’s how we’re dealing with the federal government actively attacking us this week!”

No one would buy it unless it’s revealed to be a simulation running on a forgotten server in a leaky university basement somewhere

Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 2d ago

New science fiction franchise that's just a school of Arts & Sciences that is fully staffed

Is there a term in rhetoric for when someone frames an idea as radical or fringe when it is in fact quite mainstream? I see this everywhere online, from politics—cf. Fox News decrying “mainstream media” when they’re the largest news outlet in the US—to “hot takes” about fandoms, hobbies, etc.+

Reason number 19,208,138 we love librarians:

Lisa Rabey@pookiebear.net · 2d ago

OK. Since I'm a librarian and I must ORGANIZE ALL THE THINGS, I took all the titles mentioned by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, @ali-alkhatib.com, and the Library Freedom Project and put them in a single list on bookshop.org: bookshop.org/wishlists/53.... (I did not coin "data politics," Tressie did.)

This years’ vintage tattoo Newport Folk poster is one of my favorites in recent memory. Got it up with the collection on the wall this afternoon! Next year will require a more thorough overhaul I think…

Planning to move twins to college is wild, y’all. Two of everything: two dorm fridges, two mattress toppers, etc. etc. At least we’re only going to one campus, I suppose—could be more complicated still

I’m finally looking at the qualifying paper @bibliowingate.bsky.social sent me in response to this request & we need to get some version of this published ASAP—Appendix B alone is an alphabetical list of scholarly models for everything from 17th century books to webcomics to scientific communication

Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · 3w ago

Book history/bibliography folks—doe anyone know of a bibliography/libguide/anything else where folks have compiled revisions of Robert Darnton’s famous “Communications Circuit" diagram? I’ve seen so many over the years—I kind of want to point students to a whole batch of ‘em for a class exercise

American healthcare is having to spend an hour of my life trying to get a receipt to prove to my health savings account company that the $18 I spent at an urgent care was a valid medical expense what non-valid expense I could have incurred at an urgent care I cannot say but ya know

Roundup of #DH2026 conference #DHmakes creations! Starting with Jan Rybicki's Stylo PCA of 20 English novels. Machine knit then hand embroidered. Spatial reasoning is still a struggle for me so I'm extra proud of having figured out how to fold the linear scarf into X,Y coordinates.

<Bruce Springsteen voice> Got a new job down at the data mine twenty an hour on the cooling line saving for a house maybe fifteen years but the bosses bought up every house near here

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5d ago

Hassett: "Data centers are very good for towns bc they create so many jobs & bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses & stuff like that. So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't seen much in the last 30 years & put a data center there, there are gonna be a bunch of happy residents."

There is nothing funnier in my algorithms these days than companies advertising “cool” pill organizers to my fellow GenXers/Millennials

Deep Thoughts on the Current AI Discourse. 🧵: 1. I don’t think robots are on the verge of going rogue and murdering us all in our digital sleep. My p-doom is low. Note that this is separate from the question of ongoing enshittification, where my e-shit number is pretty well maxed out. +

I can’t quite wrap my head around the @ischoolui.bsky.social welcoming *13 new faculty* members this academic year, with PhDs in everything from computer science to history to education to anthropology—excited to have so many new colleagues!

The level of respect my teens hold for *me* increased about 20 fold when I told them I was buddies with @friede.bsky.social who they’d seen on @dimension20.dropout.tv Amazing work!

Dr. Emily Friedman@friede.bsky.social · 7d ago

I am unbelievably touched that @dropout.tv titled my @dimension20.dropout.tv Adventuring Academy episode “A Duty of Care”

I’m overwhelmed today, but I want to circle back in a while to share the links to everyone & everything I cited. More soon.

Random fb market score today: a late 19th-century scrapbook, mostly blank but with an 1894 almanac & a *Neighborhood Gossip & Dream Book* tucked inside—going straight to the @skeuomorphpress.org teaching collection for whenever we talk about commonplace & scrapbooks

I don’t know what level of Midwestern “signing up for Culver’s custard flavor-of-the-day emails” constitutes, but that’s where I am currently

I know this is a new low, but 32% approval of the current shitshow is a *wild* stat Like, 1/3 of Americans looking around at *all this* & saying “yeah, this is fine”

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · last wk.

Trump down to 32% approval in new Q poll. poll.qu.edu/poll-release...

Hiring a new full-time colleague in the School of Library and Information Science in Iowa. Particularly well-suited (but not limited) to special collections librarians or academic library instruction librarians who want to switch to full-time teaching. 📜 jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view...

Amanda Riggenbach’s “Revising History’s First Drafts: the Press & Racial Violence” begins with the story of a family terrorized in Pierce City, Missouri, but then turns its lens to the newspapers & editors who stoked racial violence in the early 20th century www.vrt.viraltexts.org/index.php/vi...

Abraham Frank’s “Anti-Lynching Laws & the Press” explores how different states negotiated passing laws about lynching, often reusing language from other states’ laws—deep dives into Indiana & Ohio help contextualize what was a national conversation www.vrt.viraltexts.org/index.php/an...

In his “Dataset of US Lynching Reports” exhibit, @matthewkollmer.com outlines his methods for identifying newspaper reports about lynchings in Chronicling America, & presents different interfaces for exploring facets of that data www.vrt.viraltexts.org/index.php/du...

Proud to have 3 exhibits published from our Mellon-sponsored “Virality of Racial Terror” project, which three VRT grad student researchers are presenting about at #dh2026 this week Links to all three at www.vrt.viraltexts.org

Matthew Kollmer@matthewkollmer.com · last wk.

We also have digital exhibits. You can learn more about DUSLR at: www.vrt.viraltexts.org/index.php/du... Or check out my two related short papers at #DH2026 — Friday at 2pm (Daejeon time). More on that soon!

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

We have New England friends (also academics) we meet up with every year for Newport & I do still envy their summer. They don’t start back until after Labor Day, so the festival marks a kind of midpoint for them, while it’s summer’s end for us—things really start picking up moments after we get home