Tessa Gengnagel

Honestly seems like they thought we were capable but lazy. Which is wild on its own but maybe not as offensive (though extremely presumptuous in multiple directions). Anyway, onwards and upwards. We can use the reviews to improve the abstract and clear things up so the process isn't entirely broken.

They for sure thought they were being helpful and their other comments show they're not an idiot. But since they assumed we had actively opted for AI translation *into* English, it's even more offensive to tell us we should try "thinking in English" instead 💀

Thank you and no apologies needed! To me that point seemed very clear. I don't know what that reviewer was thinking but thankfully it doesn't matter 😄

Die Gedanken sind frei!

By which I mean: Was that option not meant to allow the live presentations to be translated into different languages? Because the presentation language was asked separately and I stated that ours would be in English. Which is why I don't understand the reviewer thinking otherwise.

It's almost comically offensive. They might have been confused by the AI translation option in Conftool (I might have checked that wrong, I thought it was about allowing the live presentations to be translated into all kinds of languages) but either way, what a wild thing to say.

Actually I'm realising that the reviewer who (wrongly) assumed we used AI translation in our submission might have been confused by the AI translation option in the Conftool on top of things. Now I'm confused as well. @dh2026daejeon.bsky.social Was that option meant to be multidirectional? #DH2026

That's a very interesting point. Def tracks! I can also see why the reviewer might have thought we translated parts because the vibes may be slightly "foreign" even if the language isn't. They said we should try thinking in English... so much to unpack... (I do think in English more than I'd like).

(But also I'm not the only author of the paper and who knows why they were so adamant it was an AI translation, maybe the different parts felt too frankenstein'd together. Though to me that spells the opposite of bland AI slop. Reviewer 2 found it too dense. Reviewer 3 wanted even more refs 😂 Mess.)

Congrats! I've applied for a travel stipend as well so fingers crossed! (As Tara pointed out, the reviewer might not have been Anglo, so I shouldn't have gone off like that, just got up in my feels bc I've put in so many years to get to that level. Reviewers should be mindful of such sensitivities.)

At least I hope reviewers will consider keeping such thoughts to themselves 😭 I'm sure if I met them we could laugh about it but it's really a crazy thing to say with such confidence (and be wrong about). It's actually the best review aside from that. But even just the idea of AI is bricking people.

True, I assumed that based on the way they phrased their criticism which very much points in that direction but due to the lack of open peer review, it's just a guess. You'd think a native Anglophone would be able to tell the difference though, so maybe they're not.

(Also, yes, I've always used em dashes and will continue to do so and that doesn't make me AI either lol)

(With this thread I'm only venting on my own behalf, not that of my co-author who may well have different opinions. I'll now focus on being happy that the paper was accepted at all despite these weird misunderstandings and despite the real – rather than imagined – shortcomings that it has.)

Btw not saying the abstract was above reproach, there were plenty of issues with it because it was a very short notice write-up and the issues that arose from that were correctly identified by the reviewers. I'm very grateful for the constructive comments. But the bizarre ones are blowing my mind.

I never translate my stuff. I never even use AI to copyread. I don't use Grammarly or the like, my grasp of English might be better than that of the students of that reviewer! Get a fucking grip! It's an overall helpful and nice review at that but I hope that person does some introspection.

Nothing is ever good enough for all these Anglo humanists who established the veneer of their academic writing in the first place. Such that they think we must be using AI when we are simply forced to adopt their lofty style as a basic mode of communication. I'm genuinely so mad.

Like now we're supposed to apologize for being too eloquent in English while still holding on to the idiosyncracies of our thinking? We're supposed to erase those, too? What is this imperialist attitude! (I'm not saying we won't be more specific in the presentation on some stuff, that's a given.)

Neither am I going to change the way I think nor am I going to dumb down what I want to say just so that it seems more palpable to Anglo audiences. To have the years-long effort of learning English well enough to join that level of academic discourse thrown back at you is just breathtaking!

This just perfectly illustrates how quick English native speakers are to assume that any kind of semblage to their own academic lingo that strays in complexity of thought but still expresses it eloquently enough in English must be some sort of translation wizardry. Just no.

Our paper @sarahalang.bsky.social was accepted to #DH2026! Yay! But also: One reviewer thought we used AI to translate it into English! No! I can't express how incredibly offensive and patronizing that review is. Worse, I'm sure the reviewer is a lovely person. But wow. #DigitalHumanities

Stand der DH

Sind wir alle Komplizen des Niederganges der (traditionellen) Geisteswissenschaften?
fragt @windhagr.bsky.social in seinem sehr spannenden und neue Perspektiven eröffnenden Vortrag „First, They Came for the Traditional Humanities…“
@dhdkonferenz.bsky.social
#DHd2026

#DataFeminism appeared in 2020.
How come it’s still not established in #DigitalHumanities?
Interest seems to have died down 😕

We provide an overview of its principles tailored to #DH in our working paper ⬇️
zfdg.de/wp_2026

PS: Take part in the open public review process!
#DHd2026

Cover: From Global to Local?

Just in time for next week's #DHd2026, our new publication "From Global to Local?", a reflection on the state of #digitalHumanities in German-speaking countries, its pasts, currents and possible futures.

doi.org/10.26298/198...

#DHd @DHdKonferenz

It seems to me that defining DH as purely quantitative methods is a neat way of shaving off all the hard-fought interventions made by people who were interested in making the field reflect the diversity and complexity of the actual world.

To have a reasonable conversation about "AI" in which people are not just dunking or repeating truisms or (best case) muddying the waters, one must do two things:

1. Disentangle the signifier "AI" from actual material technologies.

2. *Entangle* actual material technologies w/ a sociology of use.

When Musk said the "cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted" for training AI, what he was really saying is that he would not pay for digitisation, and had reached the limits of useful data he could scrape for free. The GenAI house is built on sand.

intense flashback to palaeography class

Aktuell wird wieder das Ende der #Literaturkritik zelebriert, zuletzt in der FAZ und von Jonathan Guggenberger in der taz. Als Lösung dafür: der Verriss. Welche Funktion die Ermutigung zum Verriss erfüllt und ob Laienkritiker anders werten, betrachte ich in der ZfdG, #litwiss: shorturl.at/D8JTi

Computational Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, _Computational Humanities_ redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to n...

Syllabus time. Computational Humanities from Debates in DH series is OA! Co-eds with @dmimno.bsky.social Jessica Marie Johnson. Articles from @dbamman.bsky.social @kmcdono.bsky.social @roopikarisam.bsky.social @bschmidt.bsky.social @barbaramcgilli.bsky.social @quinnanya.me @tharsen.bsky.social 👇🏼