Tanja Grubnic
@tanjagrubnic.com
Currently doing a postdoc @ Duke. Interested in contemp and digital literary culture! Lover of emojis in emails. Learn more about me at tanjagrubnic.com.
Speaking of @dlcplus.org ... we're crowdsourcing keywords for our upcoming mini-conferences! What keywords should we add next? 👀
DLC keyword suggestions - Mentimeter
Create, interact, and analyze — engage audiences and spark real conversations in meetings and classes.
mentimeter.com
If you're at ELO, come to our panel tomorrow organized by @kieraobbard.bsky.social for @dlcplus.org: "On the Peripheries of E-lit: Studying Digital Literary Cultures (Plus)"! Ft. us, @supercamilla.bsky.social. @magdalenakorecka.bsky.social + adv. board members @antimony27.bsky.social + Tess McNulty
"'All of these terms, 'hot girls read' included, were pieces of a collective language built by thousands of readers interacting in the bookish spaces.'" lithub.com/a-content-cr...
A content creator tried to trademark “Hot Girls Read.” BookTok clapped back.
In a bit of unhinged book news, an influencer has come under fire this week after attempting to trademark the slogan “Hot Girls Read.” Allie Mitrovich, the content creator behind Allie …
lithub.com
In which Jill Lepore calls Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort's edited collection "OUTPUT: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023" an "engrossing collection":
The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.
newyorker.com
Wrote a Very Brief Essay about AO3, Wattpad, KDP, Chuck Tingle, and a type of novel I'm calling Gay Fantasia sinykin.substack.com/p/gay-fantasia
Gay Fantasia
On Ms. KingBean89 and other auteurs
sinykin.substack.com
Now that I've touched grass I can report it was a wonderful day! Loved learning from @drtlwagner.bsky.social @tegan.online @ryancordell.org @sselisker.bsky.social + a few others not on bsky. And thanks to our amazing respondents @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social and Tess McNulty for weaving it all together
DLC+@dlcplus.org · 3mo agoThat's a wrap! Thank you to our incredible presenters. Every paper reminded us that slop and nostalgia define the present moment. And thank you to our respondents for bringing it all together: if slop slips right through our hands, the texture of nostalgia gives us something to hold onto.
It's going to be a wonderful day reading and thinking together. We look forward to all of the presentations. This event is free and open to the public. You can register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Mini-Conference Registration
Our Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture mini-conference on "slop" and "nostalgia" will be held online on May 14th, 2026, with a morning panel on one keyword and afternoon panel on another. E...
docs.google.com
We'll conclude with responses featuring our great advisory board member Tess McNulty in dialogue with the also great Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social as respondents.
After a short break, we'll turn to our NOSTALGIA panel. Presenters include Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org, Sabina Fazli, Tegan Pyke @tegan.online, Justine Provino, and Travis L. Wager @drtlwagner.bsky.social
We'll begin at 10:30 am EST with our SLOP panel featuring papers by Tina Kendall, Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social, Gustavo Daudt Fischer, and a joint presentation by Kyla Yein and Thomas Noya.
Looking forward to this incredible lineup on Thursday! SLOP and NOSTALGIA have received a lot of viral attention lately but less scholarly discussion in the context of digital literary culture. I'm excited to spend the day thinking deeply about them
DLC+@dlcplus.org · 3mo agoWe are excited to share the program for our mini-conference on May 14th! Our panels on SLOP and NOSTALGIA feature papers from established and emerging scholars alike across four different time zones. Read below or check out the full schedule here: dlcplus.org/spring-2026-...
So excited for all of the papers!
Scott Selisker@sselisker.bsky.social · 3mo agoVirtual symposium schedule, with abstracts, is stacked, and up for the DLC+ Slop/Nostalgia Keywords conversation on May 14. Join us! (I'll be offering a rejoinder to the short multi-author paper on studying slop that made the rounds this spring) dlcplus.org/spring-2026-...
Our MasterClass series is back! Come hang out and talk about Ryan Heuser’s “Generative Aesthetics“ with us. Apr. 30th at 10am est
Kiera Obbard@kieraobbard.bsky.social · 4mo ago1/2 @dlcplus.org is hosting a MasterClass Pop-up ahead of our mini-conference on slop and nostalgia to discuss Ryan Heuser's article "Generative Aesthetics: On Formal Stuckness in AI Verse." It will take place on Thursday, April 30th at 10 a.m. EST. culturalanalytics.org/article/id/1...
"Tsundoku" The habit of collecting books and letting them pile up, unread, while still cherishing the possibility of reading them one day. #booksky
This book is going to be incredible + open up an entire new field of research/inquiry for the literary & cultural studies discipline (grad students take note!). It models an entire new form of cultural criticism that combines close reading + historicism + theory + platform studies. Read her thread!
Aarthi Vadde@aarthivadde.bsky.social · 4mo agoWe the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:
I haven't read it yet but some people I know have and they say CONTENT MACHINES rules, and I have read this great article on Wattpad, platform capitalism + bibliotherapy, which is truly insightful so I'm pretty sure the book will indeed rule. @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social post45.org/2022/07/watt...
Wattpad’s Fictions of Care – Post45
Sarah Brouillette
post45.org
In addition to @aarthivadde.bsky.social's WE THE PLATFORM, I'm excited about this forthcoming book f/ @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social CONTENT MACHINES (dropping around the same time Fall 2026), which with Vadde's is going to open up lit studies to a lot of cool new questions about culture & platforms.
Sarah Brouillette@sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 5mo agosharing the cover designed by Courtney Baker 😍 www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach...
You can get the DL from last week's Duke symposium on books today, featuring: "Dan Sinykin. A skinny man with a floral print shirt tucked into tweed pants. He seemed to be a man shrouded in mystery. One unknown was how long his hair actually was." substack.com/home/post/p-...
DISPATCH: A Gathering of Disparate Minds at The Life of The Novel in a Post-Text World (Durham, NC)
James Jacob Hatfield attends a Symposium on the State of the Literary Ecosystem and tells all (including musings on Chuck Tingles's Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card)
substack.com
The photographs in this series are too good. “The shoot was inspired by the increasing number of people who have been bidding goodbye to the pallor-inducing glow of the blue screen in favor of tangible ink and paper.” www.vogue.com/article/book...
part of that's trad authors getting on substack, even publishing fiction there (junot diaz, sherman alexie), part of that's trad publishing getting more serious about self-published fiction and fanfic
I enjoyed this review by @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social (thanks @aarthivadde.bsky.social for the rec!). It got me thinking about how fickle social media is. It's less "cool" to post now and many who established themselves online in the 2010s have the luxury to adopt a traditional celebrity privacy
Sarah Brouillette@sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 6mo agoI find Sophie Bishop's research on "influencer creep" very generative and have been turning to it a lot. So I was pleased to be able to write a review of her book here!
Very impressed that someone else's inane annotations in a used book have historically led me to think "ugh I can't believe I paid $3 for this," but on BookTok/Etsy people are paying $100+ for the experience.
New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!
The Creep’s Dilemma: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism | PMLA | Cambridge Core
The Creep’s Dilemma: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Volume 140 Issue 5
cambridge.org
Submissions to this year's virtual Electronic Literature Organization conference close at the end of the day (AOE) on the 28th! This includes submissions for performances and exhibitions of experimental work engaging the future of narrative as well as our academic track with papers and workshops.
Anastasia Salter@anasalter.bsky.social · 6mo agoSubmissions for this year's fully online @eliterature.bsky.social conference are open through February 28th! We've added more information on the logistics, registration (free with ELO membership!), AI, membership waivers for financial needs, and awards nominations: stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/
