Natalie M. Houston

ICYMI - wrote this week about AI, student motivation, and writing.

Btw, I created the Bluesky feed "CLS in DH/NLP".

It collects posts containing the keywords: #CLS, #CCLS, #JCLS, #CCLS2025, CLS INFRA, Literary Computing, SPP-CLS, Computational Literary Studies, Cultural Analytics, Digital Literary Studies, etc.

👉 Feel free to like and share

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and starts in 2024—a 31-year leap. Are creators imagining futures that are closer or further away?

Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting.

doi.org/10.18737/552...

A screenshot of the book chapter, "Not With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot" by Melanie Walsh and Anna Preus. The first two paragraphs read: "It was still unclear whether Donald Trump would be re-elected President of the United States on the night of the election, November 3, 2020. Even by morning, key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were too close to call. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, the outcome of the election would remain unclear for another three and a half days. In the meantime, the world watched, waited, and tweeted. As early ballots rolled in, Twitter (X) users of all ideological stripes made fluctuating predictions about the election’s outcome. When a few swing states seemed to tip toward Trump, a user named @CausticPop gloomily joked, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a WI/MI/PA,”1 a joke that was retweeted more than 5,000 times.2 Hours later, another user struck an even stronger chord with the same apocalyptic..." A screenshot of the tweet in question is pictured by @CausticPop is pictured. It reads: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a WI/MI/PA." It was posted at 9:16 PM on November 3, 2020, and received 3,753 retweets, 851 quotes, 20.6K likes, and 219 bookmarks.

A screenshot of a tweet by Joyce Carol Oates that read: "this is the way the world ends / this is the way the world ends / not with a bang or a whimper / but with “deeply-offended-by"" It was tweeted at 10:28 AM on October 20, 2017

What do Elon Musk, Joyce Carol Oates, Adam Schiff & Ezra Pound have in common?

They all remixed T.S. Eliot lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper"

Why have these lines become a meme—used across the political spectrum? Find out in our new book chapter!

Scrapped David Bowie Tapes From 1974 Sigma Sessions Have Been Discovered Scrapped David Bowie recordings from his 1974 Sigma Sessions have been discovered by a record collector in Philadelphia.

Lost David Bowie sessions from 1974 rediscovered!

One of my favorite reads last year-- and there's a sequel coming out this spring!

This is a great intro activity-- I've done something similar, but always a bit more structured-- next time I'll try it this way and see what kinds of variables emerge --

This was the reminder I needed to see today!

So grateful for the people on YT who post videos showing how to fix random things! (Today it was how to remove a drawer from a piece of Ikea furniture I assembled at least 15 years ago and couldn't easily figure out.)

Looking forward to reading this!

Congratulations!

Reminder: You actually have three more days to get your shit together for the new year because 2025 doesn't really start until Monday.

‘It’s game over for facts’: how vibes came to rule everything from pop to politics From voters picking up ‘bad vibes’ to the Brat girl summer, vague instincts now make the world go round. Does this represent a crisis of seriousness or has it always been feelings that make us human?

As a Gen Xer, I have always associated "vibes" with hippie boomers. This essay explains their return: "They are precious fairy dust to keep the all-seeing algorithms from sinking their vampire teeth into our culture, and yet they are a modern marketing tool." www.theguardian.com/culture/2024...

Dead Silence A Best Book of 2022 by the New York Public Library • One of the Best SFF Books of 2022 (Gizmodo) • One of the Best SF Mysteries of 2022 (CrimeReads) • ...

Currently enjoying this take on the "spooky abandoned space ship" genre: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes. #FridayReads us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of ...

A poem appropriate for the (grading) season, by @josephfasano.bsky.social: poets.org/poem/student...

DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WASHINGTON, D. C. Dec. 2, 1949 Dr. Norbert Wiener Mass. Institute of Technology Cambridge, Nass. My dear Dr. Wiener: The publication of your book on Cybernetics has caused the editorial staff which is in charge of the revision of the Dewey Decimal Classification considerable difficulty. We are in the position of being asked by sincere inquirers as to how to classify the book and by less sincere people who like to confront supposedly expert classifiers with problems which they are quite certain are beyond our capabilities. Quite frankly, cybernetics is. We have read and reread reviews and explanations of the content of your book and have even tried to understand the book itself, only to become more uncertain as to what field it falls into. I am appealing to you as the one person who should be able to tell us. Possibly you already know that the Dewey Decimal Classification attempts to assign a number to the subject content of books. Generally speaking, a book can only be assigned one number and consequently we cannot take care of the many aspects that certain works cover. The problem must be simplified and consequently, is your book such as to place it in psychology? Does it belong in the field of electronic computation devices or does it belong in mathematics? If we were not somewhat desperate about this particular problem, I should hesitate to bother you with it. Cordially yours, Esther P. Potter Director

A frustrated letter from the Library of Congress asking Norbert Weiner what section of a library his book is supposed to be in (1949).

I'm only partway thru, but enjoying it so far

Looking forward to this!

Happy to see #fridayreads starting to flourish here! I'm currently enjoying The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard: pirate space opera politics and intrigue, with sentient ships in the mix.

Wonderful strategies here for non-poets too:

some little bluesky tips 🦋

your blocks, likes, lists, and just about everything except chats are PUBLIC

you can pin custom feeds; i like quiet posters, best of follows, mutuals, mentions

if your chronological feed is overwhelming, you can make and pin make a personal list of "unmissable" people

University presses putting together starter packs of all their authors on Bluesky is such a good move.

A young man and woman on a steamer to London, with the man picking up a handkerchief. The scene is from Annie Edwardes's Archie Lovell.

I'm giving another paper tomorrow on Annie Edwardes, my favourite Victorian sensation novelist you've really never heard of. Cover 👇 from the yellowback edition of Archie Lovell (1866), depicting a dramatic moment between the heroine & the caddish Gerald Durant on a steamer to London.

Next level

Didn't find one, so made a computational literary studies starter pack, with notable bunch of european folks and early career scholars.

My circle here is small, so please reply/dm to be added or removed and suggest people from your networks!

go.bsky.app/4et1nxZ

I created my Banned Books course in 2016, and have taught it regularly since-- including this term. Sadly, always increasingly relevant.

Me too!

+1 (h/t @ncecire.bsky.social )

I love to see the paleography bat signal go on -- this is what a social network is good for! (I don't have any answers for this one but maybe you do)