Alison Booth

American white girl , 1960-1970s Part III or so in My Race and Place

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open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I post weekly or so. subscribe for free. I look at race and place, statues, memories about changing technology and academia across a lifetime. Practicing prose and poetry and keeping some hope a bit apart from the news.

I am always looking for an escape from ideology. That’s why I admire the Department of Ideology Hunters. They know gender backwards and forwards when they see it. (Love Virginia Heffernan).

MAGA Gender Theory Trump's ideas about gender are way, way, way more complex than Judith Butler's.

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Alison Booth (@alisonbooth) After long silence, thoughts on not dying too soon, also known as living to 100. We are celebrating my mother’s 100 year. What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural?

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Autocomplete To be continued (feel free). creative commons license

UVA, with an Interim President, pays dear to a search firm and squanders human hours instead of serving the mission of learning! Instead of freaking out: share your pernicious or bizarre autocompletes. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

I hope all is well! I sometimes get similar reviews from family members.

Paul G. Mahoney Paul G. Mahoney is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor and served as dean of the Law School from 2008-16. Mahoney's teaching and research areas are securities regulation, law and economi...

In a remarkably sedate Board of Visitors meeting (why, closed session for 1.5 hour at least), members of the community were able to hear the roll call to appoint Paul G. Mahoney the Interim President of UVA. www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/prof...

While I am feeling the changing of the guards in the library.virginia.edu/dh-center I take delight in
rewriting today: Substack newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
A sabbatical in this day and age doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

Why AI chatbots lie to us | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A sensible account of why we must keep humans in the loop, ignore sycophancy, and keep a leash on "agentic" AI driven by the doubtful goals, roles, and notions that slipped into the pre- and posttraining. Humans still have work!

Inconvenient truths from @alisonbooth.bsky.social:
1. The narrative genre that ends in death is not (necessarily) tragedy. (See: biography.)
2. Reference entries (e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of Nat'l Biography, etc.) are not biographies. (Because genre, not bcse poorly written)
#DH2025

Richmond, Indiana 2 What one wants to remember

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I think about the secrecy of outsiders. As the white faculty family in a small town, we had little to fear, but we really were extremely bent to please. This post is wondering about Black-white relations in the 1950s where I was born.

How Many Statues are Enough? Mount Rushmore Ambitions and Iconoclasm

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Have a look, and share any statue interests of your own. Have you ever seen a Madonna of the Trail in person?

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u... After last night's headline, this outcome. What next, all y'all? There will be no university presidents safe from trumped-up charges in Newspeak. I actually invoked states' rights in my messages to senators and congressman this morning.

Richmond, Indiana Quakers of Earlham; National Roads

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This begins My Race and Place, memories and investigations from childhood onward, probing privilege and contact zones. It's a thread in my Writing without Surveillance sabbatical newsletter.

The Fiction Folders Archaic documents

The second post has fun thinking about typing and the days of copy centers and sending originals to publishers. There will be more frequent posts at first to set up the sections or threads of this refreshing venture. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

Writing without Surveillance Samples from an archive before email, before the Internet, before AI; a content provider experiments in a time of catastrophe as if we still send SASEs.

I am just starting alisonbooth.substack.com/p/writing-wi..., my year of writing in genres I supposedly outgrew after I got my tenure track job. I need my other favorite Substack authors for the most timely insights. What I past feels urgent to me but runs along memory lane.

@megsmith.bsky.social Like the Rocovery Hub for American Women Writers and your "infrastructure as mutual aid." I'm serious about satirizing the throwback National Garden of Heroes and the data implicit in the list of people offered as subjects for statues. #ACH2025

@lyndamk.bsky.social shares praise of www.sucho.org
Love the image of the skeuomorph blue "floppy" disk on the life raft, fits with the rowing crew metaphor. The organized collaboration.

@lyndamk on @datarescueproject.org #ACH2025 keynote. Sped-up precarity of meta/data now. Not to hoard, but proceed with calm, expert care. Their data is knowledgeable in all senses: not noise or "raw" data, and because they know this loss has precedents, e.g. 1890 census.
Also DataRefuge.

Every one of the examples in this talk is splendid and exciting to me. Such genuine doing-good with human-scale collaboration and tech-critique and repurposing. Love the cardboard boat.

📣Tune in to the “Digital Blackness” panel at #ACH2025 today (06/11) at 7p ET!📣

Panel will feature presentations from #DigBlk’s @dejaworkman.bsky.social, @weygudey.bsky.social‬, & @dburgher.bsky.social, and chaired by @jimccasey1.bsky.social‬.

Register at ach2025.ach.org/en/

Jugaad is bricolage with a geopolitical edge? Not to romanticize resourcefulness and mashups (gerry-rigging) under deprivation/duress. But we're in the conditions of scarcity, find resistant abundance without othering.

Looking forward to #ACH2025. It opening with a webinar with closed chat makes me speculate on which friends and colleagues are responsible for the emojis flying up the screen.

#ACH2025 Starting with Rahul Bhargava, "Civic Jugaad" dataculture.northeastern.edu We live in experimental/precarious/fascinating times for transdisciplinary and intersectional DH. See Data Culture Group. Participatory community data is where going gets tough.

Maybe anxiously doomscrolling isn’t the best thing to do the night before #ACH2025 starts. But at least I know I’ll be in good company for the rest of the week, as our #DigitalHumanities community comes together to create a space of care & solidarity. Looking forward to seeing y’all in a few hours 🫶

NO KINGS CHARLOTTESVILLE · Progressive Democrats of America **In America, we don’t put up with would-be kings.** NO KINGS is a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption from Trump and his allie...

I'm attending No Kings's event, “NO KINGS CHARLOTTESVILLE” - sign up now to join me! www.mobilize.us/progressived...

Welcome to UVA! Glad you'll grow our lively AI culture across departments including MediaS. The Library's DH Center (with incoming Faculty Director Lisa Blackmore) and Data Analytics Center etc--fertile and creative work with LLMs. Also, Cmnwealth Prof. AI/English Matt Kirschenbaum comes in 2026!

I plan to participate online in the wonderful ACH Conference next week, ach2025.ach.org/en/ which has the coolest landing page ever. Registration is very reasonable for members.

How to Make It as a Woman How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses,...

See my book p. 14 and elsewhere on statuary and other series of personifications of nationhood. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...