@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social interesting question of what happens when a literary prize (sign of autonomous authorship) is tied to the new hallmarks of brand management or heteronomous authorship

It is “impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror”

A documentary, a podcast, and a festival appearance … uh yeah, they would have turned down the money too

I teach an intro to DH course and have decided to focus an entire unit on it. We learn about the history of AI and play with basic building blocks in simple Python (like ngrams and vector semantic stuff). Hitting the targets for an intro class is always difficult so I’m always refining

Route 30: Stories from Westmoreland County, a Pitt-Greensburg Production Society & Culture Podcast · Local histories, mysteries, and anecdotes about the people and places of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania as told by the student researchers of the University of Pittsburg...

Last year, we won a grant to start a campus podcast and we are launching this week. Our goals were to give students paid local journalism and multimedia storytelling experiences while strengthening connections bw the uni and the local community. Share and listen!

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

Route 30: Stories from Westmoreland County, a Pitt-Greensburg Production Society & Culture Podcast · Local histories, mysteries, and anecdotes about the people and places of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania as told by the student researchers of the University of Pittsburg...

Last year, we won a grant to start a campus podcast and we are launching this week. Our goals were to give students paid local journalism and multimedia storytelling experiences while strengthening connections bw the uni and the local community. Share and listen!

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

Ahh

What is opposed to autonomous? I can’t make it out

RIP Sam Keith

I bought The Maxx #1 while my mom was checking out at the grocery store. I fell in love with the art immediately and still think the series is the greatest

Is my wife the only person in the world who, instead of saying “press play” or “let’s start the movie,” shouts out “Roll that beautiful bean footage!” in homage to a Bush Beans 1994 ad campaign, because it would be great for me if there were others

I like capta, makes sense to me. Worth pointing out this is very similar to the critical account of data as that which is captured in chap 1 of Data Feminism by Ignazio and Klein.

I swear I don’t need any cosmic signs to start a new essay or whatever, but the new Pynchon novel and the latest Epstein dump both mention Peoria, IL, my hometown, exactly once and as a punchline for pretty much the same joke, and it sure feels like someone wants me to start writing about this.

Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers. In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.” But recently, I came across a Substack post analyz…

Come “poke around” our data “to find new books and authors [you’ve] never heard of!” @jamesfolta.com makes great use of the Int'l Bestsellers dataset built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on @literaryhub.bsky.social. lithub.com/find-your-ne...

No way? Yeah it truly is. I was pretty shocked when I saw the note. Somehow the more conspiratorial explanation makes more sense.

Agreed. It’s also fun to see someone go through some of the same steps (What is the most read novel in the dataset?) that led us to write about The Girl on the Train here:

doi.org/10.1353/sdn....

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

Publishing flows (no domestic) A Flourish data visualization by cody

When we published international bestseller data with @post45data.bsky.social all I wanted was to make a Sankey diagram but never managed, now someone has. And it looks beautiful. Check it out!

Source: substack.com/home/post/p-...
public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...

The NEA is a Zombie What Was the NEA?

Started mucking around with data this morning. Made a couple interesting charts from data about all the writers who ever got an NEA grant, with data from Xander Manshel + team. Decided I’d write it up for my first post.
substack.com/home/post/p-...

We've got more than just a new website redesign this week: Here we offer a portrait of the university to come: without walls and without borders, online and free for all.

Support Public Books:
buff.ly/JF5zxCh

Wow, this looks fantastic. Gotta love free, open source, expert driven sharing of knowledge.

Cultural Futures: Pitt-Greensburg Symposium Showcases the Impact of Digital Studies Pitt-Greensburg hosted its first annual Digital Studies Symposium entitled “Cultural Futures” on Jan. 21, featuring guest speaker Dan Sinykin, assistant professor of English at Emory University. Si…

I had a blast hosting @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social last week for our first ever Digital Studies Symposium, and now the student paper has put out a sweet little write up. It definitely nails the spirit of the event. Check it out!

insiderupg.com/2026/01/29/c...

Breton’s surrealist manifesto is good. Formally illustrates some of the principles it calls for.

lol, guilty 🙋🏽

BookReconciler: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering We present BookReconciler, an open-source tool for enhancing and clustering book data. BookReconciler allows users to take spreadsheets with minimal metadata, such as book title and author, and automa...

A hard problem with literary data is navigating btwn editions of books and what the "work," or the theoretical text that unites all editions. I've been lucky to work with @thisismattmiller.com and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, who built a tool to address this + do much more

arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165

For all the important legal challenges happening with real artists and creatives, it will be wild to see what happens when users can demand seeing Mr Beast make people survive a week in the Deathstar

I started anticipating this a year ago, yet I’m still ruffled. I think the end game is an OpenAI streaming service that skips over Netflix as key competitor and goes straight at YouTube (#1 content generator).

Why wait for a video to exist when you can just prompt it into existence?

“My question for Vice President Bush is why did your staff reject my question? Are you afraid of open discourse with the students?”

From Freaks and Geeks, season finale

This is actually a good example of why the customer model is wrong.

I wouldn't have chosen poetry writing, but UNC made me take a class. And it absolutely made me become a much better writer, with an eye to concision and an ear now trained to the rhythm of words. I'm a better historian as a result.

Ok stop joking I want this

Oh so that’s how the House of Leaves house got bigger on the inside than the outside

I don’t think it’s too early to call it for best of 2025 for me.
Novel: Solenoid
Film: One Battle After Another; runner up: Sinners
Album: Bleeds by Wednesday
TV: … the Studio, maybe?