Laura O'Brien

Photo of the front cover of a standard-sized (half sheet) zine titled "Queer Book History: a tasting from SHARP's 2025 Queer Book History Bibliography. By Visconti; Wingate; Keller, Coker; et al.". The cover background uses a glitched photo of a handwritten manuscript.

Photo of the table of contents of a standard-sized (half sheet) zine titled "Queer Book History: a tasting from SHARP's 2025 Queer Book History Bibliography. By Visconti; Wingate; Keller, Coker; et al.". The table covers 32 pages and says: • Credits & how to cite this zine. • Introduction Resources: • Intro to general book history • Intro to QUEER book history! • Teaching queer history toward • A model teaching approach • Black, Indigenous, POC + Queer • Broader BIPOC book history • Zines, community periodicals, DIY queer publishing history • Libraries, archives, museums • Archives & catalogues • Design & art. • Close readings • Ethics & justice re:gender & sexuality • Feminist 2SLGBTQIA+ • Community & conferences • Queer book history isn't past • Current book arts practitioners relevant to queer book history • Want more queer book history? • Back cover & reuse/ remix info

"Queer Book History" zine is done (32 pages!), just getting final team edits pre-pub. Built on upcoming @sharpnews.bsky.social Queer Book History Bibliography—100s of resources by team led by SHARP Bibliographer @bibliowingate.bsky.social. Zine=fave reads, teaching examples, community+conf info +

Ditto! we'd love to acquire one as well

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

I'll ask my Storymap users on campus if they've seen this before and if I hear anything I'll let you know. Good luck!

I'm not 100% sure what process you were using (I'm on Mac, not Windows), but is it something like this? It looks they are using a Zoomify function in Photoshop to make tiles hosted in Github. It's 5 year old documentation, but I didn't find much more current bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.ed...

Adopt A Station - Rescue Public Media Help preserve independent journalism and community programming across America by adopting a public media station. Congress has voted to rescind public media's funding.

This site helps people find radio stations hit by the public media funding cuts--in addition to your home outlets, people might consider donating to rural stations as they will be hit much harder than urban public radio
adoptastation.org

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky

rdcu.be/etk07

The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

Slowing Down in Library Management: A Perspective from a Branch Campus Academic library administrators at branch campuses face a variety of issues at both the local level and within their larger institutions. In such busy environments, the lessons of “slow librariansh...

Hi 📚 friends! I wrote a reflection article for the latest issue of the Journal of Library Administration. It's about my experiences with applying the lessons of slow librarianship to management:

"When people write things drawing on ideas I recognize from the literature without citing them, I feel a kind of rage because either they think their idea is novel due to not doing the reading or they know their idea is not novel and they have elected to pass it off as so."

#DHMakes edges finished! What do you think?

Thank you! I'm checking back through your #DHMakes posts for the basics, but I'm sure there's much more to it. Did you rely on Gephi for the initial spatialization? (If you ever write your project up anywhere, let me know! It's beautiful as is of course)

I LOVE this! I want to show this to my DH network analysis class this fall--I would love if someone made a physicalization of a network for their final project!

To put it another way—no one in power in 2025—not politicians, not tech oligarchs, not business tycoons—seem in the least concerned that AI might challenge them or our power structures—& that is an important media history distinction we should notice & learn from, practically & intellectually (3/4)

Very curious if yr turning on the PRIMO AI research assistant or not. Today I heard about 2 big academic library systems + one big university library saying *no* & not turning it on. I'd love to see what the landscape looks like.

Is your library turning on PRIMO ai research assistant? Why/why not?

An interesting question in a students’ reflection on "format" across book & digital media. With books, we have associations of prestige with particular formats—is the same true for file formats? To put it simply, are some file formats—consciously or subconsciously—"fancier" than others?

YouTube video by Elle Cordova File types hanging out

I think there can be some implicit hierarchy. youtu.be/T8dVdye559E?...

Thiiiiis. I want things like “vaccine uptake high enough for herd immunity” and “public transit”, and I literally cannot provide them for myself.

That last question — when we are in the position to rebuild, what will we need to have? (when, not if!) — is one I arrived at after listening to a team I’m on trying to figure out what to do about our grant funding being rescinded. It’s really the question that is keeping me going.

Now that I've used bluesky for liveposting a conference, can I say that I love that it *requires* me to include alt text before posting media? Accessible by design!

When my students ask me "what was the most significant change in the last 100 years?" they always expect me to say "the Internet" or "space travel." But most Americans fundamentally don't understand either "some of your siblings will die young" or "women are pregnant or nursing for 1/2 their lives."

Paviwala compiled a dataset from Chaudhuri (1976) and Bowen (2005) on the commodities dealt with by East India Trading Company and their values. Disambiguating and merging data categories across decades and respective scholarly interests #BostonDH25

Wikipedia image of regions impacted by the East India Trading Company

Finally we have
Building a Digital Trade Archive: Visualizing British East India Company Data (1660–1834) with Munirmahedi Paviwala (Boston College) #BostonDH25

Catholic Directory project schema

I love a data schema 🤗 #BostonDH25

Joanna Schroeder presents an Example: How do we assign IDs to people? Translate rules to processes Students correct any incorrect generated IDs "corrected IDs")

Students working on this large-scale DH project develop research skills and regional expertise that lets them help disambiguate which people with the same/similar names are indeed the same individual #BostonDH25

Next up is Turning Almanacs into Data with Ashlyn Stewart, Joanna Schroeder, Yuchen Xiong (Boston College) #BostonDH25 digitizing 19th c Catholic Directories, with information on dioceses and Catholics across the U.S.

Al and museums, or, can you trust a digital object?

1. Data integrity: what essential information is collected or presented?

2. Data value: how useful is the info that is collected? What value is placed on it?

3. Data use: is the collected info being used ethically?

#BostonDH25

Peter Botticelli presenting

SRO in Data-Driven Approaches to Historical Collections at #BostonDH25 - first up is Digital Engagement with Art Collections with Peter Botticelli from Simmons

Cognitive dissonance is the humanities being at the same time both a useless waste of time and an imminent threat to the government.

Say Goodbye to Small-Town Libraries and Museums, Thanks to Trump’s Latest Cuts The NEH budget is tiny. The loss is huge.

My Slate piece on the widespread NEH grant cancellations is live. So much gratitude to everyone who took the time to talk with me these past few days while fighting fires on every side.

#humanities #highered #neh

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

It's tough to get true validation data and benchmarks to measure full translations created by LLMs as they don't exist (or are inaccessible?) #BostonDH25