Poster for an invited talk at the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative at Penn State: “HOW DID THEY DO IT? EXPLORING MULTILINGUAL METADATA AND THE LIMITS OF AI-AUGMENTED TRANSLATION IN DH” by Zoe LeBlanc taking place on April 22nd, 2026 at 12PM EDT. People can join on zoom. The poster is mainly blue, with highlights on yellow, and it has a picture of Zoe.

🚨 Join us next week for a conversation with the amazing
@zoeleblanc.bsky.social. Have you been wondering how we can pair big DH datasets, translation and AI? She has a great example of that mix 🍲

🗓️ Wednesday, April 22nd at 12PM EDT

Register at tinyurl.com/dla-leblanc

#DigitalHumanities

22 Short Films About Springfield first aired on 14th April 1996, making Steamed Hams thirty years old today.

Cover of the daily progress with headline “Ryan returns” about the selection of former President Jim Ryan to speak at graduation

understand why students might think this is a rebuke of the UVA Board shenanigans but absolutely humiliating to see the whitewashing of a man who unashamedly lied about students & called in state troopers to brutalize them as an quixotic demonstration of why harvard should take him back as prez

American bittern standing very still in a creek.

Great blue heron perched on a branch up in the trees.

Yellow-bellied sapsucker standing on a branch, beak slightly open after eating something.

Field sparrow standing on some branches in the foreground while a squirrel runs past in the background.

Some bird photos from a recent bird walk at Ivy Creek Natural Area in beautiful Albemarle County.

Go home GI, your edgelord era got indexed by the Wayback Machine and a grad student is writing about you

Your girlfriend started following Hasan Piker, GI

GI, your meme coinS dropped 80% in value because the president’s son rug pulled you GI

Mostly the latter. And also in kind of a meta sense: if you didn’t know enough to know e.g. that historical geolocation can be fraught, how can you know that the output matches your intent?

I think that for something like this, you can reasonably say “this is a straightforward transformation, there’s not really a lot of scholarly choices being made here.” But if a person not only didn’t do the work but potentially doesn’t know how to do the work, how does that person know?

Here’s a question: if you never read any of the code, how do you know that it’s right? Both in the senses that the basic logic is correct and also that the subjective choices made in the code match what you want to convey as a humanist?

Amazon: we have lost $100 billion creating Amazon Flame, the Breado knockoff that serves you ads and tells the police about you.

Cursed thought: Roottrees but it’s Elon Musk

Quick search backs this up: Ogles’s district has about 1/10 the population of NYC.

lol NYT trots out the “did not comply” boilerplate for Ruben Ray Martinez despite the “secret execution” context of his death.

Remember how the bipartisan effort to transfer control of TikTok to right wing oligarchs was sold through the idea that Americans’ privacy rights had to be protected from the Chinese?

first time in new york since zohran took office and other than having to recite the shahada on arrival at laguardia nothing much has changed

Basically agree, with the caveat that teaching with this kind of tool has to be managed very carefully.

If there are scholarly ethics concerns with asking an LLM to write a journal article, those same concerns should apply to asking an LLM to write the code that the article is about.

Not accusing anyone upstream of doing this, but I feel like AI-critical digital humanities folks are going to carve out an exception in the criticism for AI-coding, fundamentally because most of them don't think that coding is intellectual labor.

An American Street

lmao NYT publishes this fluff piece about how cool this image their photog captured is and doesn't comment at all on how the cop looming over the center of the frame has a big tear in his pants crotch. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/u...

Half the countries that just sent troops to Greenland (specifically, UK, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark) were part of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, so there’s definitely a limit to how outraged I think they’re entitled to be.

How UVA’s presidential search missed what took us an hour to find Inside Higher Ed frames the controversy surrounding Scott C. Beardsley's appointment as the University of Virginia's president.

This seems to strongly suggest that the incoming president of UVA doctored his CV to the edge of outright dishonesty, and that the most recent changes came months before Jim Ryan was forced, as if they were made in anticipation in Ryan’s removal. augustafreepress.com/news/vanishi...

texts from douglas wetmore to nicole sheridan 2/21/2025 9:16:33 AM Ego and pride are terrible 2/21/2025 9:16:58 AM Read a Shakespeare play sometime!

one member of the board (douglas wetmore) walked into the meeting, noting the large crowd of protestors. his response: "ego and pride are terrible"

and as a video

Ask not what your representative will do for you (nothing), ask how you can make your representative so miserable they quit their job

Do you think this story, whose thesis hinges on three social media posts from random users (including one with “over 700 likes”) is ethical journalism?

There are important differences between saying that a thing is bad and saying that people should feel bad about it. It is *bizarre* to interpret the general statement “humanists should know how to do fractions” as a personal attack.

I realize now I may be the only humanities person who is mad at the assumption we have bad math scores.

Don’t normalize that assumption! It’s *bad* to be innumerate, no matter how much Foucault you’ve read.

I’ve seen multiple threads today that are just “I’m a respected humanities scholar and I can’t do middle school math” and it sucks!

I’m enjoying this Fuchsia Dunlop book about Chinese food, in part because she’s so openly good-natured and also inexplicably hostile to Daoists. Just like “this dish is indescribably delicious and beloved by all under heaven except those goddamn Daoist monk jackasses.”