Stephen Ramsay

I am reading Donna Haraway’s *A Cyborg Manifesto* (1984) for maybe the first time in fifteen years for a grad seminar I’m teaching on theory of new media. I was worried it might seem too much like a period piece, but DAMN, it lands. Maybe harder than it did originally.

"Sarkozy told Le Figaro he would take three books for his first week behind bars, including Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" - the story of a man who is unjustly imprisoned and who plots his revenge against those who betrayed him." Wait! What are the other two?

And the scrape function is fantastic, though the need for actual web scraping is rare with TEI (i.e. XML) collections. If I write my TEI dream tool, I'd like it to assume a tool like xan, though -- which I think means being able to export to a serialization format that xan can read easily.

No apology necessary! And let me say it again: xan is a wonderful tool. PERFECT for the kind of work my students do (humanities researchers doing computational work).

I feel like a pro-education Ursuline ghost army is exactly what we need right now.

It wasn't me! I swear it wasn't me!

I spent six days working with Claude to build a full-stack web app (check it out at AcadiMeet.org). The process was revelatory.

My conclusion: The old "hack vs. yack" binary in DH has collapsed.

Read my full reflection:

foundhistory.org/2025/10/meet...

#AI #DH #EdTech #HigherEd #Productivity

It's been a while, but I have exciting news! Our department is hiring a Digital Historian with a specialization in Early America. Help us spread the word by sharing this opportunity within your networks. #DigitalHistory #DH #HigherEdJobs

jobs.uc.edu/job/Cincinna...

What can English professors due to stop the wholesale takeover of society by generative AI? Well, probably nothing. But we few, we happy few must march forth bravely with the idea that "compute" is a fucking verb and "inference" is a fucking noun. Who hath no stomach to this fight, let them depart.

Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE Edited by Jeremiah Coogan, Candida R. Moss, and Joseph A. Howley Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean Advances the interdisciplinary study of enslavement in the Roman Mediterranean, bringing together classicists and scholars of religion Bridges the fields of book history, modern slavery studies, and ancient Mediterranean studies Prompts readers to rethink ideas of authorship, credit, and the origins of ancient texts and ideas Offers a collection of essays that are thematically organized around specific topics--such as gender, justice, disability, and letters-for easy adoption across a wide range of courses and disciplines $99.00 Hardcover Published: 01 October 2025 384 Pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches ISBN: 9780197769966 Also Available As: E-book Bookseller Code (06)

Our new volume 📖 , Writing Enslavement, is out now—physical and digital. the editors, @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social, @candidamoss.bsky.social, and @illdottore.bsky.social, put an amazing amount of work into a volume that is both slavery studies and book history. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Possibly useful data point: I call the plumber at the slightest provocation, because I am without doubt -- and in sharp contrast to my father -- the least handy person within a thousand miles.

I feel like I would never, ever, ever use AI to write a paper, lecture, letter, whatever. Is this because I am a strongly ethically-minded and possibly even virtuous individual, or is it because I'm like my dad who would do basically anything to avoid the indignity of calling a plumber?

Why doesn’t LaTeX automatically interpret such a list as countably infinite?

It's made me wish for the something like it for TEI. A little command line tool that can validate, query, count, pretty print, and visualize TEI. It's even made me wonder if I should devote an upcoming sabbatical to building something like this (some of those features are harder than they sound).

GitHub - medialab/xan: The CSV magician The CSV magician. Contribute to medialab/xan development by creating an account on GitHub.

The other thing is that the course gave me an opportunity to dig into xan github.com/medialab/xan. This little gizmo is AMAZING for wrangling CSV data (as historians are wont to do).

My University is really not into people hosting their own UNIX servers. So I decided to switch from maintaining a Linux server (which I've been doing for twenty years of tech courses) to using Docker containers. A few blips here and there, but this is some slick tech and it has worked out well.

I've been teaching a course on data in the humanities -- how to create it, manipulate, visualize it, etc. but *without* coding (or much coding). So: CSV, XML, JSON, SQL and all their ecosystems (plus a bit of UNIX). There are a few interesting things about this course, but I want to mention two:

Also, the thumbnail of my book shows part of the blurb describing it as "witty and incisive . . ." Couple of things: (1) I didn't write this and (2) I am *way* more witty than incisive.

Well, look at that! All my friends are here!

On the Digital Humanities A witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities Since its inception, the digital humanities has been rep...

I have a new(-ish) book out: *On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations* from University of Minnesota Press.

www.upress.umn.edu/978151791501...