Laura McGrath

LinkedIn has been feeding me this one for months, and I periodically check on it, thinking each time that that they MUST have swapped out the names of their "luminaries" by now. Nope.

Go Ada!

My baby turns 2 this week, and my IG algo almost immediately began serving me cute newborn content. And now, just like a red light mask and barrel jeans and that Italian leather sling bag, I want one.

Agreed, naturally. Not to hijack your thread with what should be a career therapy session. :)

I know you're not suggesting any sort of reset, ofc, and the "DH to AI" situation is not only rhetorical, but complicated by the very real threat of edtech grift. But I fear that, in our response to the latter, we've forgotten some of the great work done when we still called it "machine learning."

I think the point that I really want to make, here, is that we have great models for thinking about and teaching critical computation, and a shift from "DH" to "AI" (partly rhetorical) needn't entail starting over. We got really good, IMO, at building evaluative practices/informed skepticism!

The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!

And, IIRC, the answer to the second question was "not really," or at least not without a whole lot of human intervention. (Though @fredner.org @jdporter.bsky.social @heuser.bsky.social and @hkpmw.bsky.social would remember better.) Shocked— shocked!— to be having a very similar conversation now.

I've been around the block enough times to remember when "What makes a suspenseful story (and can we detect suspense computationally)?" occupied years of (excellent) LitLab experiments.

Really can't emphasize enough that my main use for this site is not to be Taken Seriously By Media but rather to post that, in the original 1957 book, the Grinch is at least 53 years old. The Grinch has seen two world wars and a great depression. He doesn't need to hear shit from you

Eleanor. Understatement of the CENTURY. (Your praises were sung!)

We're having dinner tonight, so I'll be sure to ask! (And tell him it came from you ;))

If you, too, are touring Vanderbilt today (with or without your lovable surly teen) and would like to hear me talk about Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, swing by the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center at 2!

Loading up on bottomless Make-Your-Own waffles while dad and big brother are distracted by campus map.

Cheers to the younger siblings who have been dragged along on their spring break. Doing the lords work with their eye rolls and heaving sighs and general impishness.

Campus-adjacent hotel continental breakfast scene: parents and kids getting ready for college tours. Everyone trying their best to look like they're OK and not scared out of their minds. It's all just too cute and too poignant to bear!

Hi! We’re an academic journal, and therefore do not pay contributors.

So thrilled to be joining JCA as Special Features Editor! Pitch me your clusters, conversations, rapid responses, interviews, and short vignettes!

Journal of Cultural Analytics Enters New Chapter with CDH, Joins Open Journals Collective Journal of Cultural Analytics Enters New Chapter with CDH, Joins Open Journals Collective

CDH announces new role as publisher of @culturalanalytics.bsky.social! New website launches with expanded vision for cultural analytics scholarship, supported by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program. JCA also joins @ojcollective.bsky.social. More on editorial team and new features below.

Helluva name for a postdoc

I have a DH job, so I probably don’t count, but I remember being asked about the future of DH when I was on the market and arguing that the future of DH is precisely the diffusion that Matt writes about here.

Never

I‘ve been seeing posts about reading conference papers and timekeeping today, so we’re basically half-way there.

Thank you, Ted! I have lots of thoughts on this disciplinary evolution, but I’ll save that for next time we get to have tea.

I hope literary scholars are proud of the fresh, grounded stuff coming out lately. Big Fiction, Teaching Archive, now Manshel on high school English, McGrath forthcoming on literary agents ("Middlemen"). All the concrete aspects of literature-as-human-activity we used to ignore. +

Mary Anne Gillies, on British agents. My work is different than all of the above and that it focuses on the 21st-century. And exclusively the United States.

Thanks, Hannah!!!

2x pie-eating champion has spoken! (In all seriousness, I’m very grateful for such a generous read from @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social)

Reading MIDDLEMEN as an ARC: it's sensational. As riveting as it is brilliant. Read it if you want to know how literature gets made now: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Also, newspaper arts and culture writing is often the only record that any of this stuff happened in the first place. As a professor and author, I see the slow elimination of this journalism as an attempt to quite literally erase history.