Kaylee Alexander, PhD

🎙️Plan for a coffin train I mention on @deathstudiespod.bsky.social! This would have transported corpses ~30 km from Paris to Méry-sur-Oise, where Haussmann planned to build a 5k-acre Necropolis (that’s roughly 45x the size of Père-Lachaise!) to accommodate Paris’s dead for the next 600 years 🚂⚰️

Always a pleasure to nerd out over cemeteries and data!

Guide to Writing Alt Text for Museum Websites and Guides Learn the key strategies for writing alt text for museums to make visual content accessible and engaging for diverse audiences.

New blog post for Flatpage!

In light of the news on my first day of sabbatical: gender is a social construct, trans women are women, no amount of complying with authoritarians who pretend they will only strip some people but not you of rights will keep you safe. And in 2025 university administrators should know all of that.

Thanks for documenting us, @annaneat.bsky.social!

Come check out MaRMAT at #ALAAC25!

We're presenting in just a few minutes as part of the Metadata Interest Group program on Assessing Metadata for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Cultural Heritage Institutions cdmcd.co/LE4qmd #ALAAC25 @kpalex91.bsky.social @racheljwittmann.bsky.social

Stopped in my tracks by this sign pointing out the IMLS absence from #ALAAC25

🙌

New issue published! **Memory over Forgetting: Monuments, Memorials, and Intangible Heritage** - www.radicalhistoryreview.org/memory-over-...

Being a historian doesn’t give me the mantle of authority to say definitively what’s happening here or how anyone should respond, but I feel qualified to say this: If you were writing an account of how the United States devolved into violence and fragmentation, all this would be chapter 1 or 2.

Le Champ du repos: A Tidy Approach to Early Epitaphs in Père-Lachaise Cemetery Before the 19th century, burial practices often favored the wealthy, with the poor buried in mass graves. But during the time of Napoleon, new burial rules promised that everyone, rich or poor, could ...

link.growkudos.com/1esvclj9yww

PhD Research Fellowship in Digital Culture with the Center for Digital Narrative (280653) | University of Bergen Job title: PhD Research Fellowship in Digital Culture with the Center for Digital Narrative (280653), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Friday, August 15, 2025

PhD fellowship advertised here at the Center for Digital Narrative to research Computational Narrative Systems with @docmofo.bsky.social - applications due August 15! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Chapter 17 Le Champ du repos: A Tidy Approach to Early Epitaphs in Père-Lachaise Cemetery Abstract Contrary to pre-Modern burial practices, Napoleonic-era burial reforms promised separate graves for all and permanent burial for those who could afford it, thereby establishing a pseudo-democ...

🪦 Thrilled to share that my chapter, “Le Champ du repos: A Tidy Approach to Early Epitaphs in Père-Lachaise Cemetery,” has been published in a new volume for Brill’s Intersections series, Funerary Inscriptions in Early Modern Europe: Shaping Identities to Remember.

🔗 doi.org/10.1163/9789...

Proud of SLC!

CFP: What Do (Digital) Images Want? A Decade of Data, Power, and Visual Knowledge in Art History — DAHJ The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) marks its 10th anniversary at a crucial moment when digital images are not only omnipresent in daily life, but are generated by active agents...

New CFP: What Do (Digital) Images Want? Join us in exploring a decade of data, power & visual knowledge!
dahj.org/cfp/11

A graphic featuring the text "DAHJ" intertwined with geometric shapes and lines, accompanied by the numbers "00" and "10" in a modern font. The color scheme includes shades of blue and black.

We celebrate 10 years of International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ)—connecting global voices & reshaping art history through digital methods, collaboration & critical debate.

#DigitalArtHistory #DigitalHumanities #ArtHistory

An Update on NEH Funding Priorities and the Agency’s Recent Implementation of Trump Administration Executive Orders

I ran grant programs at @nehgov.bsky.social for over a decade. With colleagues, oversaw review of thousands of grant applications. Witnessed care & thoughtfulness of hundreds of reviewers. This statement is insulting to all of them. Whoever wrote it should be ashamed.

www.neh.gov/news/update-...

They’re taking *our* investment—the money that we spent months writing grants for, the hours and hours we all spent reviewing each others’ work, the money that was supposed to go to libraries and community groups—and blowing it on this nonsense.

Looking forward to my first #ALAAnnual Conference this June! @racheljwittmann.bsky.social, @annaneat.bsky.social, and I will be sharing the new and improved MaRMAT, our open-source software for assessing collections metadata. Until then, check out MaRMAT (Beta) on GitHub: github.com/marriott-lib...!

Heading off to New Orleans tomorrow for the @pcaaca.bsky.social conference! If you’re going, make sure you catch me and @librarianchef.bsky.social on Friday evening as we share a sneak peek into our forthcoming volume, “Libraries, Archives, and Collective Grief” 📚💀

#pcaaca25

What can one coroner’s report tell us about gender, silence, and the historical framing of suicide? Dr. @sarahlirley.bsky.social dives deep into a 19th-century inquest that left more questions than answers.

Read the full post here: radicaldeathstudies.squarespace.com/blog/suicide...

A bar chart showing total funding impacts by office in the NEH cuts, as of 4/10/2025. The chart is broken down by office in the NEH, including Challenge Programs, Data and Evaluation, Digital Humanities, Education Programs, Federal/State Partnerships, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, and Research Programs. The Federal/State Partnership column is blue (indicating active programs) with $50 million in funding. The Data and Evaluation column is tiny, under $1 million in annual funding, and is orange for cancelled. The digital humanities column, which comes in around $6 million, is about half orange (cancelled) and half red (discontinued).The majority of the remaining grants are turquoise (not yet accepting applications).

A bar chart showing program status by office in the NEH cuts, as of 4/10/2025. The chart is broken down by office in the NEH, including Challenge Programs, Data and Evaluation, Digital Humanities, Education Programs, Federal/State Partnerships, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, and Research Programs. The Federal/State Partnership column is blue (indicating active programs) with just one program. The Data and Evaluation and the Challenge Programs columns are also tiny, just one program each, and are orange for cancelled. The digital humanities column, with four programs, is half orange (cancelled) and half red (discontinued).The majority of the remaining grants are turquoise (not yet accepting applications).

I'm still formulating my thoughts about the devastating impact of NEH ODH's closure on the entire digital humanities ecosystem. In the meantime, I threw together a couple bar charts to visualize the number of programs and the total funding at stake in the NEH cuts. #DigitalHumanities #NEH

Opinion: Public libraries are at risk of federal funding cuts. This should alarm all of us If we let our libraries go, we won’t just lose places to study and explore; we stand to hobble innovation and research.

“As the saying goes, our researchers and scientists stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them. Libraries enable us to build on these previous foundations and see further into what’s possible.”

www.deseret.com/opinion/2025...

So excited to have had the chance to include some of my new work in the volume. Can’t wait to see it in print!

Thanks! Looking forward to reading this

“We had to erase trans people or we couldn’t get our federal funding”

Fuck the federal funding. You fight, you sue, you do not become complicit in our mass erasure.

We are all in this together, and we all go down together.

I will not allow us to be jettisoned or erased.

GitHub - marriott-library/MaRMAT: This is a metadata assessment tool to query spreadsheet-based digital collection metadata against lexicons of offensive and outdated terminology. This is a metadata assessment tool to query spreadsheet-based digital collection metadata against lexicons of offensive and outdated terminology. - GitHub - marriott-library/MaRMAT: This is a meta...

Making my way down to St. George for #DHU9 at Utah Tech and looking forward to sharing some of what @racheljwittmann.bsky.social and I have been up to! @dhutah.bsky.social

👉 github.com/marriott-lib...

If you have no qualms about flying the Nazi flag for “educational purposes,” you have no business holding public office.