Jim Casey

Couldn't agree more. I know some people are still fighting the good fight on the inside, but even still... I keep thinking all the valiant public servants at the NEH/IMLS & co. gave us the gift of being able to see all kinds of things as possible. Still don't know what we do in that wake.

I have always liked reading these NEH announcements. It's great to read about people getting funding for cool new projects. But good grief - the absence of the Office of Digital Humanities is SO LOUD.

Israel Detains, Chokes, and Beats Up Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls Meanwhile, there’s not a peep from mainstream media in the U.S.

Israel Detains, Chokes, and Beats Up Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls newrepublic.com/post/198550/... via @newrepublic.com

AI and Blackness: Towards moving beyond bias and representation In this paper, we argue that AI ethics must move beyond the concepts of race-based representation and bias, and towards those that probe the deeper relations that impact how these systems are designed...

I mean... @profdancy.bsky.social & his lab has been doing this work. Got a bunch more in store arxiv.org/abs/2111.03687

I'm working on a new proposal these days with a bunch of ridiculously smart and creative people. Getting to riff on their genuinely original ideas and deep bodies of work, well, I really can't recommend it enough.

Yes!! Cuz you know a fifth of the syllabus is already at "Hey, check out this really smart thing that Dorothy Berry wrote."

I am thinking about a new version of my "intro to dh" next year.

CCP, Douglass Day, CBDR, etc are all based so thoroughly on the principles and lessons of various organizing traditions. I'd love to make that more visible in classes. "We Want People's Community Control of Modern Technology 101"

YouTube video by Center for the Study of Rhetoric Race and Religion 2025 Summer Symposium: Works in Progress

You don't want to miss this!! If you can't attend and would like to sponsor someone to attend, please scan the code at the end of the video.
And one more thing: PLEASE SHARE this time!!
Thanks!!

youtu.be/btNpuZW8xao

Facing this Court A Sober Look at What to Expect in Trump v. Casa And What We Do About It

"We must create an atmosphere of expertise about birthright citizenship, and about the 14th Amendment, and about its significance in our lives."

sherrilyn.substack.com/p/facing-thi...

a man and a woman are dancing together in a living room in a room . ALT: a man and a woman are dancing together in a living room in a room .

I cannot tell yall how excited I am for the things we have cookin up involving the new Liberatory tech project & crew within @digblk.bsky.social 👀.

Excerpts from proofs of the title page of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction by Eric Gardner and of the Contents page. The latter lists: Acknowledgments, page ix; Chapter 1, Strangers and Neighbors: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Life and Work, page 1; Chapter 2, Origin Stories, page 29; Chapter 3, Reconstructing an Abolitionist Voice, page 66; Chapter 4, “Go on”: Harper’s Challenges to Reconstruction, page 94; Chapter 5, “Lay the whole foundation anew”: Harper in the Thick of Reconstruction, page 134; Chapter 6, The Fifteenth Amendment and Epic Struggles, page 176; Chapter 7, Endings and Not, page 221; Notes, page 263; Works Cited, page 295; Index, page 305.

Proofs are proofed. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction is on track for 1 Oct release from Oxford UP. The book wouldn’t exist w/o support from the NEH & so many librarians & scholars committed to the fact that Black history is American history. We still have so much to learn.

Quite a roller coaster! We like to think the work can be useful to folks in the wider world, but maybe it would be nice if the work was a bit less immediately useful?

Grateful, at least, for the journalists and justices who are such serious students of history!

Jackson called out Thomas’ limited reading of American history, noting that he cited only a handful of late 19th-century lawsuits that mostly had to do with disputes over government pensions and employment. Jackson pointed to other debates happening at the very same time, known as the Colored Conventions. These were political gatherings where Black Americans organized for racial justice while debating the issues of the moment. In so doing, she opened the door for authentic originalists to expand the scope of who the Supreme Court considers—whether it is only the old, dead, white men who held a monopoly on power in early America who count, or indeed the entire country. Jackson pointed to the Colored People’s Convention of the State of South Carolina in 1865 to show that “rights” were understood more expansively than Thomas claimed: “ ‘Right’ is defined to be the just claim, ownership, or lawful title which a person has to anything.”

Article is paywalled, but here's the passage

Ketanji Brown Jackson Did Something Brilliant and New in Her Biggest Dissent of the Term This move was an astonishing corrective to a term drowning in calculated political maneuvering over legitimate judging.

A wild week in so many ways...

slate.com/news-and-pol...

Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital col...

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961
Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

Increase in deduction for certain Alaskan whaling captains The provision, which was added to the bill to win the support of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, would allow a $50,000 deduction for whaling-related expenses, up from $10,000

Not even making this up

There's so much evil in that bill, but tax breaks for killing whales??

This is a concentration camp

Fabulous news! Many thanks for sharing this update.

Those who organized Colored Conventions rallied for democracy and citizenship rights as state and national forces sought to deny them protections clearly outlined in the constitution. They were often forcefully dissenting voices.

We will soon make public a new trove of Reconstruction conventions.

Ha, thanks! I guess that goes in the ol tenure file huh?

1 E.g., Colored People’s Convention of the State of South Carolina (1865, Charleston, SC), Colored Conventions Project Digital Records (last visited June 15, 2025), https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/ show/570 (“ ‘Right’ is defined to be the just claim, ownership, or lawful title which a person has to anything”).

There's something really interesting going on here methodologically in Justice Jackson's Medina v. Planned Parenthood dissent. You can see it in one footnote.

In short, Jackson is emphasizing that Black Americans are part of the original "public" about which "originalists" should be concerned.

Congratulations! Can't wait to dive in!!

I’m so excited that my book is now out in the world. It pulls together my scholarly training in African American literature with my turn to digital humanities. I’ve also published the complete data dataset of 100 years of AFAM and am lit anthologies that is the backbone of the book.

Especially hilarious to drop location from newspaper citations. Sure, let's just cite _The Times_. Readers can figure out what city on their own, right? Yeah, no.

Loving the Zohran campaign's emphasis on the many languages we speak in this country. A multilingual republic is really a beautiful thing to believe in.

Greenland Whale, book illustration engraved by William Home Lizars 1788-1859

I mean.... how could I NOT have myself painted into a ginormous version of this one? www.1st-art-gallery.com/After-Stewar... Surely that would settle all the madness!

Maybe those repro paintings places in China? (Was low key obsessed at one point of deep pandemic madness)

Citizen DJ / Homepage Citizen DJ invites the public to make music using free-to-use audio and video collections. By embedding these materials in hip hop music, listeners can discover items in the library's vast collections...

I feel like the pandemic happened and people missed the insanely cool Citizen DJ project at the LOC?

citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov

A fun game I like to play—

Every time someone asks about "AI" in our schools... just say "private equity" instead

How are our students learning with private equity? How can we better prepare our students for the age of private equity? How is private equity reshaping the workplace? How is private e