A new blog post from the brilliant @ellenwerner.bsky.social about some of her discoveries in our collections

Watch how swiftly fake quotes get attributed to “S. Drimmer” now.

Thing is, this is exactly what ChatGPT was designed to do. Namely, jackhammer the grounds of truth beneath our feet. Whether the product is “good” or not is irrelevant. Its purpose is to remove people from acts of discernment.

Why the AI backlash has turned violent And why it's probably only going to get worse from here.

Last week, a 20 year-old man threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's mansion; two days later, people fired a gun at it. Earlier that week, someone fired gunshots into an city councilman's house who approved a data center.

Why the AI backlash has turned violent:

Next Wednesday! Georgina Wilson on 'Paper and the Making of #earlymodern Literature' - join us online or in person, book via the link below.

the “combing through and finding weird little details that interest me” part of research is so crucial

Photo of the double spread of an open book of printed music, over which have been trodden cat-sized paw prints in ink. Reference: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, F. 1756 A LP, "Tomus secundus psalmorum selectorum" (Nürnberg, 1539).

Attention #earlyModern #bookHistory and #earlyMusic types!

You have to the end of the week to register for the @dormeme16.bsky.social conference Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe, at KCL. Registration and the brilliant programme are at www.tickettailor.com/events/aheve...

I do think this is true. I'm often guilty myself of underplaying what the work I do looks like or how much time and effort it takes. Research isn't 'just reading' or a question of sucking up summaries others have created. It's knowledge creation.

So let me go through the process with an example 1/

This is a fabulous thread of what research looks like in the humanities.

This week’s horror is our introductory module, which examines the literature, art, music, dialect, film and TV from the region 1500-2025 being forcibly replaced by an entire ‘success in HE’ module featuring two weeks on how to use AI.

I designed my module to incorporate proper study skills…

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

📚 Lost, Found… and stuffed up a chimney?!
In the 1800s, Librarian John Taylor Allen made an astonishing discovery: Humphrey Chetham’s private papers, hidden up his chimney and nearly lost forever.
🔍 Discover our new exhibition on our blog: library.chethams.com/blog/lost-and-found-in-the-library

Fully-funded #PhD opportunity on the early history of the Public Records Office starting this October phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/2475... with @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy @universityofleeds.bsky.social Available full or part-time. #archives #skystorians

my kingdom for a single journalist at the BBC, or any other major news org, to push back and point out that 1) settlement is not automatic, and then 2) ask the home office why they have been repeatedly lying about this for months

I added more imprints to a corpus with enough going on, and I found another woman in the London book trades that has been assumed to be a man.

Meet Sarah Surman Cliff Cruttenden. She trades as S. Cliff and S. Cruttenden. Sources assume man, so no one caught a woman as the same person with 3 names.

HSTM Collections at our University Library: recent accessions A list of accessions in 2024 and 2025, of archives and books, in History of Science, Technology and Medicine, at the University of Manchester Library.

In case you're interested: here is a list of recent accessions in #HistSTM at the @uomlibrary.bsky.social Special Collections

blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2026/0...

they'll be convenient enemies regardless of what they do, that's playing out in the states right now. you can bend over backwards to appease fascists and it will never work, because their whole ideology is irrational and premised on the idea of purging enemies. they need enemies to function

we migrated to alma/primo (barf) and are forced to use consortia records, which means we have to use outdated subject headings and can't use our own 69X local fields. has anyone else dealt with this and found a workaround, or a way to advocate for change? #critcat

Title page of "El principe en la idea" by Diego Enriquez de Villegas, printed in Madrid at the Imprenta Real, 1656

First opening after the title page. Verso of title page has a quote from what seems to be the book of Solomon in Latin (book 3, chapter 3, verse 7). Recto of opening has a centered column of text in many different fonts ala an early modern title page

Another two pages of the weird title page/intro thing. The printer is using *ALL* the types. All the text is centered, the font size varies. It's all very dramatic and quite a statement.

The dude is still going. And it's totally like a title page advertising it's content. But we're like 6 pages after the title page??? He's just saying what is going to be in the book.

Graphic design is my passion, but make it early modern:
There's a book called _Principe en la idea_, and someone got new type & wanted to use ALL of it, or the author wanted to have a 22-page title page? & the body has an entire column for footnotes?
books.google.com/books?id=EP1...
#BookHistory

I’m very excited to read this!

The World's First Fully Automated Genius System Experience the future of education with PureGenius - an AI-powered learning platform that unlocks every student's potential. Sign up for early access today.

long story but i just founded an AI education platform. if you want to join the board or contribute to the blog, hit me up. just submitted a conference talk on "surveillance as care" to ELO. wish me luck!!!! puregenius.education

Lecture | Erin McGuirl: "No Modern Publishing Without Women" YouTube video by Houghton Library

if you were unable to attend Erin McGuirl's Winship Lecture, "No Modern Publishing Without Women" at Houghton Library, the recording is now live! 📜

www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCs...

Discover how queer studies, book history, and visual culture intersect in this fascinating essay collection, and how a variety of media have helped shape queer community – from zines, to romance novels, to social media.

Order your copy today: bit.ly/4kvJE00

University of Pennsylvania #BookHistory

#LibraryJobs

Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

FREE UKSG webinar: The Open Access–AI Conundrum: does free to read mean free to train? - UKSG This is a fantastic opportunity to listen to expert speakers with no travelling required. This is a free webinar - Please note that advance registration is required. This webinar will be recorded and ...

If you missed the recent @uksg.bsky.social webinar on Open Access and AI, the recording, our slides, and our responses to the (many!) questions we did not have time to get to in the session itself, are now available on the UKSG website. 📚 #AcademicSky #OpenAccess

Electronic Resources Librarian The University of Kentucky Libraries is vital to fulfilling the goals of enhancing and expanding the university’s research enterprise, and we are looking for a tenure-track faculty librarian to serve ...

U Kentucky Libraries is hiring a tenure track Electronic Resources Librarian. It's a great place to work!

ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/622...

Wait a Minute…What If I Don’t Want to Use AI? AI is everywhere right now. It writes summaries, explains theories, fixes grammar, and recommends playlists.But here’s the thing nobody says out loud: you’re allowed not to use it. Whether you feel…

By popular demand, here is the full, glorious message from Aberystwyth University Library, on their blog:

wordpress.aber.ac.uk/librarian/?p...

Hat tip to @walkyouhome.bsky.social for prompting me to realise it was a blog post, and thus available to you all ❤️

When the premise is that _anyone_ can vibe-code a new application--and don't get me wrong, it's a glorious vision in underserved fields--I worry that these sustainability tasks aren't even on the radar.

A Fuller Statement About My Bluesky Posts Let me paint a picture of what it was like to be a woman math major at the University of Chicago circa 2004.

More details and context about what being a woman math major in the early-2000s was like and why it was so damaging here:

cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/a-fuller-s...

Papyromania: Women, Books, and Scraps in the Long Eighteenth century./ Deidre Shauna Lynch (etc.) / March 26, 4 p.m., UConn Humanities Institute. The central image, the trade card from c. 1750, is a trompe l'oil image of an untidy pile of comic portrait prints and printed maps, with Griffin's trade card--identifying the location of her shop-- positioned in the centre.

Look at the great poster the U of Connecticut made for me--incorporating the witty trade card of Elizabeth Griffin, mid #18thc London map & printseller.
Immodest of me--but I believe my talk (3/26, 4pm) will be live-streamed, so pls let me know, farflung Bsky pals, if you'd like more info'.