compiling a dataset. I don't suppose any ex Small Press Distribution subscribers have an email cache of their old "SPD RECOMMENDS!" newsletters?? such as this one

4yo: A giant is a monster that is so giant. That’s a giant.

My feeling is that it should be part of digital citizenship instruction

Our class discussion in Info Org today turned to how AI has revealed the need for mass data governance training that has actually long been missing since the Software As a Service cloud computing shift

This reminds me of when I had my thesis meeting with my MFA supervisor who clearly did not read my thesis. “Well, I read it,” he said. “See? The paper is wrinkled.”

What are the worst ethical disasters in NLP history?

(I'm teaching "ethics of NLP" tomorrow and history is good for teaching this topic.)

Most are data breaches/releases (AOL search logs, OKCupid profiles, Finnish therapy records...) but what others?

I'll put some other examples in thread --> 1/n

Mum, dad, I'd like you to meet the chatbot that likes my book ideas

American Library Association releases 2025 Most Challenged Books List as National Library Week Begins State of America’s Libraries Report reveals 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, marking the second-highest total on record

"In 2025, 92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024. Less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents." 📚

www.ala.org/news/2026/04...

Follow @censorship.bots.law for realtime updates

Yeah, this is the wrinkle. Ecocrit is not a former "conservative" idiom but IS, I think, still a post facto defensive reaction. Most "but the water!" people I've seen are still on Instagram and Netflix. So it's been less -- water activists against AI -- and more -- AI haters saying "but the water!"

Now I'm thinking that even within lit crit we've already had "restorative backlash" moments. One would be the Tompkins debates/canon wars -- expansion of canon into mass media objects meets conservative backlash doubling down on New Crit evaluation criteria -- "is it any good?"

Other historical examples:
Doubling down on painterly genius in the early photography age

Live performance as sacred in the early phonograph age

A part of Pressman's "bookishness" -- print media nostalgia in the digital age

People who have previously taught the exquisite corpse writing exercise and/or the Cyborg Manifesto have to throw those out the window for a while in the face of a rapid acceleration of their paradigms

The algorithmic erosion of authorial aura creates a nostalgic insistence on the "solitary singer" as reaction formation.

This is not meant to explain/describe the full backlash, but a large part of the backlash as affective dread/fear followed by a rhetorical fight or flight that scrambles for previous defensive positions -- some of which are dispelled/bygone/conservative

Under conditions in which generative systems are apprehended as technological leviathans, authorship moves from a distributed model to a kind of reactive sacralization, as if the Romantic figure of the originary creator—long treated as a critical fiction—could be restored to ontological necessity.

Fields that have dispelled the myth of the Romantic genius and also gone posthuman fall back into earlier postures to stabilize norms and values.

If Benjamin understood mechanical reproduction to precipitate the decay of aura, the present moment suggests a complementary dynamic...

Ex.: Arts and humanities encounter new generative AI products as leviathans that challenge writerly norms and autonomies. The rhetoric against AI often retreats back into the residual forms of the myth of the singular/original Romantic genius as well as the fiction of the autonomous human subject

Help me stress-test something I'm working on:

“The Technological Leviathan and the Logic of Restorative Backlash"

Technological leviathan = dreadful quasi-sovereign new, disruptive tech object

Restorative backlash = defensive posture calling on prior-era conservatisms as stabilizing mechanisms

It’s always “this meeting could’ve been an email” and never “this email could’ve been a fine cask of delectable amontillado wine”

feels v. Not All Dead White Men

If you're an LIS instructor, feel free to invite me to your class and I'll tell them this stuff (and talk about cataloging stuff too, I guess). Some librarians are talking to classes & telling students what worked for them in their job search 20 years ago, but it's a different world now. 📚

Who Gets Guggenheims? - Public Books Unfortunately, 100 years of data show that those whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—that is, those not at elite institutions—are least likely…

“The historical trends show that the longstanding methods of selection, which often overlook the cumulative advantages provided by prestigious institutional affiliation, tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year.”

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) seeks a new Editor in Chief as well as an institutional host for @dhquarterly.bsky.social (DHQ). Initial expressions of interest are due by August 30th. See the CFP for more details: buff.ly/qpiypXq

oh, to be (analog) again

It's a great policy to keep prioritizing. Probably vexes the occasional multimedia poet, but I recall using the paper-based constraint to look cool putting in weirdly xeroxable media objects. Anyway it also means that everyone has to see each other at the water cooler (cubbies).

One great thing about my MFA program that they still do today: no digital anything. Paper-based everything. No ed tech, no learning management systems. Just a xerox machine and staples and cubbies. Annotations and printed responses. In 2026. There's no overstating how culturally great that is/was.

this academic year needs to die already

"You should have been with us that day round the chatter-kettle."

I know what I'd fuel the fire with fs.

Three phenomenal media forms that have just utterly passed me by: TikTok, podcasts, Substack. Absolutely zero interest in being audience or creator. Got an idea? Give it to me in 200 characters or 9,000 words. & any time-based messaging is the equivalent experience to me of getting a long voicemail