Cover of new book in the U. Minnesota Press Debates in DH series: _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_, eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies. The book cover shows the title of the book in large, upper-case-only, sans-serif block letters (colored yellow for "Critical Infrastructure Studies" and red for "Digital Humanities") against a diagonally tiled, grey background with a drawn, shaded texture suggesting concrete. The overall visual effect is of text stenciled on a concrete wall in an urban infrastructural environment whose brutalist modern style has been given nuance in two ways. First, the architect has qualified the heavy-handed systematicity of modernism through the decor of slightly irregular tesselation (the tiles are of several shapes in an overall geometry whose system is unclear and unpredictable). Then it is as if some street artist or street theater group has come along and stencil spray-painted a poster for their improv event over the building wall.

I had fun writing alt-text for this image of the cover of the new _Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities book (in Debates in DH series) I co-edited. See alt-text of the image. (Book description & contents here: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608...) @uminnpress.bsky.social.

Alan Liu cradling in his arm five copies of the paperback edition of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities while standing in front of a painting against the red wall of his dining room. The painting is a large, abstract oil work in blue-gray and burnt-orange colors by artist Harry Reese; it is titled "Consensual Hallucination" in allusion to the canonical passage defining "cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer.

Physical copies of our Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities book (newest volume in Debates in DH series) arrived today just in time for the holidays! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

New Year's Resolution to invest in your career? If you work in research software, data, or computing infrastructure in London & SE England, the STEP-UP mentoring scheme can connect you with a fellow dRTP for guidance and growth. Learn more: step-up.ac.uk/mentoring/

Some limited travel support available so please hurry up to register and request it - it would be good to have leadership in research data and infrastructure roles represented at the event!

Screenshot of page 52 University of Minnesota Press Spring 2026 catalog, showing the book cover, description, and contributor names of the new book in the Debates in DH series (ed. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies) titled _Critical Infrastructrure Studies and Digital Humanities_. The text of the description reads as follows: How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world. _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection....

U Minnesota Press's Spring 26 catalog, listing our new Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (in Debates in DH series), eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, @jamessmithies.bsky.social): z.umn.edu/spring26. Table of contents: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

Fantastic Futures 2025 - ConfTool Pro - BrowseSessions Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with…

I'm lucky to be chairing a great session with lots of brilliant short papers, from 'The Politics of AI Training Data' (with people who critiqued the KB NL in the audience!), vision language models, work with newspapers and more! www.conftool.org/fantastic-fu... #FF2025

In case you missed it yesterday @dchavezheras.bsky.social @kingsdh.bsky.social presented Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives ISSA collaborative project supported by BFI Innovation Challenge Fund in partnership with film archives & @kingsdigitallab.bsky.social github.com/kingsdigital... #ff2025

Recognising Text, Recognising Processes eXplainable Automatic Text Recognition for Scottish Spiritualist Newspapers

Wonderful project from @jnockels.bsky.social on improving text recognition in historical Scottish newspapers, in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland. www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/rec...

#ff2025

Questions you Questions you imagine Al could answer. Mundane/ prosaic questions. Completely fanciful/ absurd questions Questions you imagine Al could never answer

Evaluation. Confidence dimension. Personal and Supportive. Using LLMs to answer a question for myself, Knowing what to use LLMs for, Knowing how to evaluate answers from LLMS; Helping a client to use LLMs to answer a question, Advising a client on what to use LLMs for, Advising a client on how to evaluate answers from LLMs

Loved hearing about this AI literacy project to support information professionals (as well as the public)! misbehavingmachines.net #FF2025

Would be interesting to know more about how those human in the loop workflows are integrated into the augmented cataloguing process #ff2025

Fantastically interesting use of many many vlm models to augment metadata of artworks at Harvard Art Museum - Jeff Steward pointing out that AI descriptions may extend curator views / eyes to make art more searchable and accessible #ff2025

Great 'text on maps' work presented by Katie and Bert #FF2025

Katie posted: If you want to play around with our text on maps data viz interface the link is text-on-maps-viz.allmaps.workers.dev

Fab from French Ministry of Culture - https://comparia.beta.gouv.fr for people to compare LLM responses blindly and then learn about them. Developed by a solid multidisciplinary team. #ff2025

Compar:IA allows users to evaluate multiple LLMs, revealing over-/under-representations, biases, environmental footprint, etc in LLMs’ responses. This tool helps building a high-quality data sets in French and other non-English languages (including users’ prompts data). comparia.beta.gouv.fr #FF2025

GitHub - kingsdigitallab/kdl-vqa: Python tool for batch visual question answering (BVQA). Python tool for batch visual question answering (BVQA). - kingsdigitallab/kdl-vqa

for those who attended the IIIF workshop yesterday by @iiif.bsky.social this might be a useful tool to try github.com/kingsdigital... #ff2025 - developed by @kingsdigitallab.bsky.social

Welcoming a spectacular crowd today for the first day of Fantastic Futures 2025: AI Everywhere, All at Once! #ai4lam #ff2025 Online registrations are open throughout the next two days so if you couldn't make it in person, register to access the livestream! https://www.conftool. [1/2]

New blog post: What is a research software analyst?

Arianna Ciula @arimare.bsky.social writes about her role at King's Digital Lab as an RSA. How is being an RSA different from being an RSE? What skills are needed? And why don't most UK dRTP teams have RSAs? step-up.ac.uk/blog/2025-12...

Registration open for first DisCouRSE Focus Group: Team Culture and Leadership in dRTP contexts. How can leadership influence a healthy team culture in dRTP context? Take part to exchange ideas & practices. discourse-network.github.io/events/20260...

The event