This looks like an amazing issue--congrats, can't wait to read!

A single daffodil blooming from George Eliot's grave in Highgate Cemetery

single daffodil on George Eliot's grave today 💛

What a wonderful day at the V&A / National Art Library talking about Dickens's Compostional Process and ways of engaging wide audiences with his material archive. @dickensnotes.bsky.social is on Bluesky now too 😀

A slide of imperative verbs (addressed to himself? Or to the narrative?) gleaned from Dickens’s memoranda and notes as part of www.dickensnotes.com project and a session with the manuscripts themselves in the V&A National Art Library. Thanks to Anna Gibson and Adam Grener for a great workshop!

Is this the Ohio one? I might have to watch 🫣

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

You’d think that teaching and writing about books wouldn’t be that high risk a profession… and yet!!

Pretty much every winter Olympic sport--including curling--feels like a death sport to me

By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol

I used to teach an autobiography of an AI engineer in my robots in literature class where he supposed that all medieval monks could imagine as progress would be a bigger pen and parchment, but we know that the monks were conceiving of worlds insane enough to melt your eyeballs out of your head

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case.

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

I’d just like to remind everyone that the first iRex ferry would have just entered service had the coalition not cancelled them purely out of spite for the opposition, Wellington and the South Island.

The rise of AI denialism Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” ignores the tectonic technological shift now unfolding.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay.

A few comments, in a short 🧵>>

bigthink.com/the-present/...

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

When I went to college a hundred years ago (2000-4), my school was actively recruiting humanities majors, w scholarships etc. Institutions incentivize areas of study in order to grow them. And they underfund them intentionally to strangle them. It’s not a random natural phenomenon.

Turns out you can also read a book more than once, and somehow you are a different person each time even though the same 'book' is in your hands 🤯

My love for em dashes is as old as the hills and as mighty as my inability to make a transition between thoughts literally any other way and I will be damned if I let the clankers take that from me

Rotting ship timbers at low tide on marshes North Kent coast

In the Great Expectations country last Sunday, how’s this for a Dickensian scene @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social

For my book I thought a lot about this position, which really does rest on a presumption, nurtured by first world, usually male perspectives that have been shaped by habituation to empowerment, that for something to count as victory it has to be total & complete; anything else is “failure.” +

But can confirm that students in particular are Not Satisfied by the conclusion of Bleak House 😅

I mean, it depends what you mean by 'satisfying', but all the early-ish messy ones end with all the justice (Nickleby, Chuzzlewit, even Barnaby Rudge)?

some days you just feel so lucky — this was one of them — i can’t believe i got the chance to share new work with such a generous, thoughtful audience — the very best version of academia — the whole conference was warm and sincere, a testament the kind of community-building nikki does 🤎

“But the most absurd & preposterous of all… was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’”
—Charles Mackay (1814–1889) on the South Sea Bubble, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

Adjuncts, indie scholars, publishers, journal eds: please spread the word about this and help me do recon! It's so hard w/ social media being so fragmented to learn about all the great lit studies articles and books pub'd this year by contingent/indie folx. I know there's lots! Deadline: end of Nov.

This - the Wheatley Census - has been at the center of my research life for the last year (and a half, honestly)! Proud to finally share the first iteration of it publicly. Take a look. Poke around. And send me your info about copies you work with!

One of the biggest issues with the synthetic text extruding machines is that we have well-formed linguistic output with no accountability. Solution: OpenAI should be accountable for everything that comes out of ChatGPT, period. (And likewise for Google with Gemini, etc.)

Scholarship opportunity for MA with the wonderful @nikkihessell.bsky.social

We have MA scholarships available for theses on 18th-century/Romantic poetry and/or settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty in poetry and other literary forms ... details here!

www.wgtn.ac.nz/scholarships...