scott b. weingart

@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.

Not even joking, really. If DH is dead, it's kind of a glorious, reverberating death with many afterlives. As @ryancordell.org points out, this work is everywhere now. Industry, too, and elsewhere beyond academia.

(is the title and first line of a paper that does not exist)

"In Our Whale Fall Era: The Delicious Deaths and Afterlives of the Digital Humanities"

"A term now more often tolerated than celebrated by friend and foe alike, digital humanities may have finally outlived its tactical convenience. Like the whale carcass that sinks then floats then sinks again, D—"

hi me too plz thank you =]

What Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities Abstract. Two recent volumes illustrate the resilience of established critical approaches in literary studies, the potential use value of quantitative and

Matt Wilkens on the end of DH:
"The steady state of DH, which I once believed was to be fully
subsumed within the humanities, now looks much more likely to involve the diffusion of humanistic knowledge into disciplines...constitutively quantitative and computational" academic.oup.com/alh/article-...

As a historian and a sentimental, I'm not even comfortable with people's traces gracefully degrading until not even a memory is left. But the AI angle does feel worse when I'm in certain moods: like a zombie afterlife, a face twisted but recognizable.

Job announcement: The College of Fine Arts and the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University seek a collaborative and strategic leader to serve as the next Head of School.

#JobAlert! Friends, my department, the School of Art at @cmu.edu in Pittsburgh, seeks a new Head — come be my boss! www.imsearch.com/open-searche...

I suppose I'd consider that the equivalent of putting them in the kitchen: pulling the website up and showing them a prompt or two.

I don't think so. It'd more be like you gave them a magic button that made nearly perfect looking, delicious food every time, but sometimes it's accidentally filled with arsenic. But it still tastes good.

This thread is bizarrely relevant.

I am sure it is brilliant, but I would not give Zotero write access to my closest loved ones nor to my academic heroes.

and it's *so easy* 😍

I do love pudding-based tools (as in: the proof is in the). And to be clear, I've been amazed and delighted by Zotero mcp, my little vibe coded GEDCOM parser, etc. Not criticizing, just thinking out loud.

Yeah that makes sense, and I like that aspect of it. Certainly the aspect of personal control, as @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social suggests. Are you spending any time with the students diving into the code? How do you keep it honest?

I like that exercise a lot. I suppose where I draw the line of concern is research analytics and the results therefrom, in an educational context. (Not sure why, because both research analytics code and everyday tooling code have distance-to-what's-going-on implications, in different directions.)

Caveat: besides one-off workshops, the last class I taught was the first semester ChatGPT made a splash, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about with respect to teaching in the age of language models. Caveat emptor. Trust people like @anasalter.bsky.social who still teach regularly. (10/10)

Obviously I've no idea how @anasalter.bsky.social teaches so this isn't a criticism of the presentation or teaching style. But I do worry about the increased distance between algorithm and interpretation in pedagogical contexts, which was already bad with one-button human-developed tools. (9/10)

But for DH students especially, there's often not enough curricular scaffolding / enough time in the course calendar to really dive into the mechanisms of the algorithms, which (I think) makes them even more dangerous from vibe coding than from the more-documented Voyant. (8/?)

That's maybe okay for the first time a student is introduced to a concept—not how I teach it, but I understand the pedagogical use of showing a student the easy way first and then zooming into what's actually going on underneath.

(7/?)

I'm not against claude coding solutions, even in teaching, but I do worry about it increasing the distance even further between what the math/code is doing and interpretations/conclusions.

(6/?)

That argument and realization deeply shaped how I teach, always trying to open the black box of software so people really understand what the heck is going on, lest they go entirely askew with their interpretations.

(5/?)

It turns out link directionality has serious implications for how you interpret the metrics of the network. Like you would assume opposite conclusions for e.g., centrality if you assumed link direction was opposite to what the software assumed was normal. Both were legitimate interpretations. (4/?)

In the end she won—it was her project after all. When citation chains were extracted, they were forward-facing.

This was documented, but hidden a billion pages deep in the manual. In related software, that directional decision was also a billion layers deep or entirely non-existent.

(3/?)

in the field) considered the default direction of links in the network to go *from* cited articles *to* citing articles, indicating the flow of ideas. I considered it the other way (from citing to cited), indicating authorial choice. Sort of an information science vs. history of science split. (2/?)

(cc @elotroalex.bsky.social) Hmm, bear with me for this longish thread.

(1/?)

When I used to build research software for citation/network analysis, I had this years-long argument with the head of one of our projects. Our tool extracted citation networks from bibliographies. She (along with many

Wishing you strength. Maybe you can have your AI agent take it for you.

I bet AI training is even worse than, say, leadership or bias training, because at least the people paying for it can watch and say "nah, this is bad". When AI gets thrown in people's brains turn off as though it's all some incomprehensible mystery, as impossible to evaluate as it is to understand.

I'm not even anti AI (or I suppose I'm pro whatever AI will be in thirty years while anti what it mostly is today), but those trainings are mind-boiling. I suppose pretty much all pre-boxed staff trainings are the same, but the AI stuff is even moreso somehow.

"The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars."