How not to display art, by Michael Govan

Guy looking at a photo of Andy Warhol holding a Minox 35EL with a flash. Guy is saying, "What the ___ is this? Who is this person?"

Photo of an old 35mm camera with a large flash. Subtitle: "[If] your flash is larger than your camera, you've got something [wrong]"

Back to looking at the photo. Guy is saying, "A Minox. Why wouldn't you just use an SLR?"

The guy. Subtitle: He's the guy that paints soup. What an absolutely ridiculous setup.

i like most of the photography youtubers but i've found someone i do not like.

Careers - ITHAKA ITHAKA is committed to building and sustaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. We invite you to learn more about our mission, our values, and the benefits of working at ITHAKA.

While I'm at it, I also want to enthusiastically plug the open roles at ITHAKA right now www.ithaka.org/careers/

@ithakasr.bsky.social and @jstor.bsky.social were fantastic places to work and grow. 10/10 strong recommend!

hella weird to have *nothing* to do for 16 days. I should do this more often.

A detail of a painting by Nancy Graves showing an abstract sea of shimmering colored dots that form quasi organic shapes

After four awesome years at ITHAKA / JSTOR, I’m taking a needed two week staycation before starting an exciting new gig.

The last two days were about household chores, but today is being spent enjoying this stunning Nancy Graves at the @bampfa.bsky.social

Data Engineer #00246 - Richmond, Virginia, United States Title: Data Engineer #00246 State Role Title: Information Tech Spec III Hiring Range: $100,000 - $125,000 Pay Band: 6 Agency: The Library of Virginia Location: Library of Virginia Building Agency Web...

The Library of Virginia in Richmond seeks a data engineer ($100k-$125k) to transform data practices at a 200-year-old cultural heritage org with an eye towards the future.

Looking for someone to imagine & collaboratively implement tomorrow's data infrastructure.

Apply by May 1! Tell your friends!

If you’re teaching DH right now, how are you thinking about your students’ relationship to generative AI? Are you ignoring it? Banning it? Discussing a policy with them first? Encouraging vibe coding?

Interested to see how educators across the continuum of opinions are managing it.

nyx (black cat) sitting on a soundbar watching artemis bobbing in the ocean

nyx (black cat) sitting on a soundbar looking at me while artemis bobs in the ocean

nyx says welcome home

Imagine being in space 30 min ago and now you’re about an hour from In n Out

Tabby stands on hind legs with one paw outstretched toward a TV displaying a capsule above water.

NASA failed to predict the real splashdown risk.

If anyone knows any excellent and experienced data engineers who would be excited by a Richmond-based job in the cultural heritage sector, have them get in touch.

this is something which, plainly, AI cannot do. journalism is by definition out-of-distribution, and even if you presumed that everyone wanted to read more Claudeprose than people already do, "writing up one's findings" is not the primary job a journalist performs!

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

I just think it's also important to, like, remember how, how bad it was like, as someone said to me recently, like, I don't know whether we'll call this trauma with a capital T or trauma with a lowercase t, but it definitely like it was to have everyone crying in the office all the time. People had so much anxiety that we would kind of like have to take turns working for. The last few months I was there to be like, All right, you can't handle Today. Today. I'm okay. I can handle today, but you might have to handle tomorrow for me, because I might not be able to handle tomorrow. Like, I've never seen such a thing. You know, one of our younger designers had asked, because it was their first job out of grad school. Like, is this what it's like in the private sector too? Because this is so terrible. And someone's response who worked in the private sector was that, no, like, I've been terrible places, like I've worked at Amazon, I've worked other places where they didn't care about us, but we never felt like our leadership hated us just for existing. And that's what those months felt like, like, not our direct leadership, but anyone above that, and especially the highest levels, just hated us for existing, and that was really hard when, like our we had committed our careers to serving the citizens public.

Coding interviews of technologists who were purged from government under DOGE, and the sense of trauma is really palpable. Compared to the private sector orgs like Amazon, the jobs meant more and the way they were treated was way worse.

It "felt like our leadership hated us just for existing."

The funniest thing about all of this is that Israel hasn't actually achieved a single political objective even with the full-throated backing of the world's most important military power.

losing a war feels way better than i always imagined it would

Welcome back to earth! Here’s what you missed:

Spaceflight is inherently interesting of course but they can't keep doing the same thing if they expect to grow viewership. There should be a betrayal arc. At a pivotal moment one of the astronauts should be revealed to be evil

Data Visualization with Textiles This site is notes and drafts that may someday become a Handbook of Data Visualization with Textiles.

If you like data, or making things with textile crafts (sewing, knitting, crochet, weaving, etc.), I've finally written something up about data visualization with textiles. More words coming over the next few months! #DHmakes

He’s such a perplexing figure.

“We had a president born in California who was a Quaker, wrote the report that literally defined affirmative action, created the EPA, took us off the volatile gold standard, and normalized relations with China”

“Wow sounds like a pretty cool guy”

“Absolutely not.”

Colorful mural showing a central figure with arms raised in front of a birdcage releasing a white dove, symbolizing freedom. Surrounding scenes include imprisoned figures, community members gathered together, and imagery of struggle and resilience, blending themes of justice, cultural identity, and collective liberation.

Each April, JSTOR Access in Prison shares the intellectual work of people inside.

This year marks the introduction of #FairOpportunityMonth. The series features writing, research, & creative work published as it was submitted.

Read the opening post: https://bit.ly/4dR3ktS

Abstract As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of authorship and interpretation.

new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...

I’m gonzo for AI and this is a good idea. Wikipedia belongs to a deeper pace layer. Critical infrastructure. Move slow, edit things.

Kill Chain On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

New, from me.

you will have to pry the sushirritos from our cold dead hands. hash tag california strong

Yussss 🚚🚛🚚

finally, an explanation why an extremely heavy AI user and AI optimist like myself also cannot stand reading AI writing in public and/or under a specific person's name.

i don't care what Claude thinks, not because Claude is dumb, but because Claude is not a social agent. *you* are.

IR people who decry gender studies or arguments are fish refusing to believe the study of water is important.

A welcome sign with a tabby cat and behind it are the ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina

A close up of the ruins

One of the cats who lives at the sanctuary hiding behind some bushes

My Ides of March fun fact is that the place where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary, and I think it’s beautiful that creatures with tiny knives on their feet live there

Yes, that’s the issue. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate this: to the extent that LLMs serve a purpose in education, it’s an indictment of the education system, not a praiseworthy feature of LLMs.