iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Have a look at Laura B. McGrath's book (rich in data on book deal announcements. My Substack post walks down memory lane in the life of an agent's office in the 1970s.

open.substack.com

Agency, 'literary' 1

In which it is confirmed that I had no street smarts.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This is one of my Substack posts might interest my DH friends. It tells the story of a friend nicknamed Al, and some unique interaction with the boundaries of art, avoiding death or accidents in Venice. Play carefully with AI and keep doing your own writing.

open.substack.com

AI, Al; Can’t You Write?

Some art sight-seeing and reading/writing that AI can't do for you, aided by our friend Al.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... still life painting and botanical archives seem remote from AI or digitization. But see the Large Nature Model as animated data viz at the Schwarzman Humanities Center (Refik Anadol). The unique, ephemeral stripes on the tulip, replayed as structured data in time.

open.substack.com

Florilegia

Garden varieties of the world unite

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

open.substack.com/pub/heatherc... this sounds like a much better way to celebrate 250 years then an ersatz garden of AI-generated statues.

open.substack.com

May 24, 2026

For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something.

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Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 08/05/2026

#DHmakes 🧑‍💻

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu... Frankencitations lead to scholarslop. This article is an example that might get students to see why professors care so much about making them do the honest work of reading and writing. That ? is on the minds of my Academic Integrity AI (AI x 2) subcommittee.

insidehighered.com

What Happens When Fake Citations Layer BS on BS?

An interview with an academic who has seen their impact up close and personal.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Could ‘A River Runs Through It’ Have Been a Hit Today? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/b... This is a good piece reviving the marvel of Norman Maclean, 1m copies from UChicago Press. It reminds me of his raspy voice, his ability to convince a kid she was interesting, his grief shared with my parents.

nytimes.com

Could ‘A River Runs Through It’ Have Been a Hit Today?

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Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Thanks @dhnow.bsky.social for signal boosting! Be sure to check out the post by @winnieepm.bsky.social with which this post is in dialogue. Winnie has lots of great thoughts here on what it means to learn, live, and find your way in DH. scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/breadth...

scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu

breadth and depth, a self-centered dialectic

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about that canonical debate around depth vs. breadth in digital humanities (DH). I remember initially my reaction was feeling that “true” DHers should be both, that th...

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Scholars' Lab @scholarslab.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Join us in 2 weeks for our interdisciplinary grad Praxis Fellows’ final digital humanities presentation! In-person (w/lunch) or on zoom, Thurs 4/30 12:30pm. Please register:

cal.lib.virginia.edu

Praxis Fellows Final Presentation

For this session, please join us for a showcase of the work undertaken by the Scholars’ Lab’s Praxis Program students during their fellowship this past year. Praxis is a...

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... The interview regards the attraction of novelist sisters apparently imprisoned by Victorian propriety and remote rural life, who won name-recognition and millions of "likes," not to mention tourist business. Some digital book history and fun passages included.

open.substack.com

Touring Wuthering Heights

An interview with Sarah McConnell on With Good Reason, Virginia Humanities

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

open.substack.com/pub/virginia... Virginia Heffernan calling out the loss and sinister warp to American intellect because of the Epstein magical mystery tour.

open.substack.com

Toni Morrison Is Not in the Epstein Files

Let's talk about the serious intellectuals, the ones not on the Lolita Express, the ones who could spell.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... is one of my poems inviting future stirrings of household gods or stuff. What we waste or keep is a metaphor and an actual hassle,

open.substack.com

To Do List

A distraction, From April, 2008; revised December 28, 2020; share, January 8, 2026

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

There's lots to say when you think about the Unreliable Narrator as I do. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... The emulator machines are out there giving verisimilitude for unreliable reasons, like courtiers. But take joy in all the good stories also out there. How to preserve these posts?

open.substack.com

Unreliable Narrator

Any Memoirist

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Brett Bobley @brettbobley.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Throughout the day, I'm going to attempt to tag some of the PI's who just won HAVI awards from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! "Bridging Large-Scale Computational Analysis and the Close Viewing of Film and Television" @dbamman.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social Taylor Arnold, Allison Cooper.

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Scholars' Lab @scholarslab.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Machines in the lab. Retro arcade videogames, a typewriter that types you prompts to type back memories & prints the outcome as a zine; a even wooden generative poetry machine (last 2=by Critical Makerspace Fellows Holly Zhou, Alexa Luborsky; both w/Ammon Shepherd) +

Photo of a wood-boothed videogame arcade booth with red and blue buttons and joysticks; the monitor shows a videogame credits list

Photo of an interactive typewriter art electronics and collective memory mapping exhibit, with an electric typewriter and printer in a red snd blsck marble painted booth with an iridescent acrylic surround

Closeup photo of a wood poetry generator machine, a massive wood barrel made of staves laserburned with short phrases; 3D printed red chains allow three sections of the cylinder to turn at different rates when the crank is cranked, aligning the phrases into new combinations of poetry lines

Photo of a wood poetry generator machine, a massive wood barrel made of staves laserburned with short phrases; 3D printed red chains allow three sections of the cylinder to turn at different rates when the crank is cranked, aligning the phrases into new combinations of poetry lines

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... There's a tad in this post of DH re literature online (a mess). Or well done, e.g. Donna M. Campbell's bibliographies for the Edith Wharton Society public.archive.wsu.edu/campbelld/pu... And let's winnow wheat of supported history from chaff of fake tributes.

open.substack.com

Haunting National Holidays, Superhero Teams, and Other Time Laps

In which clever readers will detect political allegories; some will appreciate a story and poem by Edith Wharton; others will note recommendations of Tana French and other detective series

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Remember your first email account? Curious about AI? See how helpful Claude can be! But do not volunteer when asked to help the LLMs shape your world and consciousness! This post semi-seriously proposes AI as a workaround for our decades of email overload. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

open.substack.com

Urgent Email Redux, Contextual Help

Tech Memory Laps 1

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

substack.com/@alisonbooth... Let me be sure not to feature my profile picture. Fall cheer pictured from NY. All posts I read are suitably concerned about latest events. We keep on. I share a talk (outtakes and images) I gave to the hospitable Victorian seminar at CUNY Graduate Center.

Flowers in Fall sunshine in Conservatory Garden, Central Park.

The waterfall surrounded by Fall foliage in the Harlem side of Morningside Park, with green pond in foreground.

This is an imported stalactite grotto with a girl who captured a goose statue at Kykuit, the astounding Rockefeller estate.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... In this post, I honor a book by Sheila Gerami that ties the 1901 Hall of Fame for great Americans to the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. But that ain’t all I share some AI chatbot absurdities about the proposed Garden of American Heroes in 2025.

open.substack.com

Heroes for America: Ranking and Forgetting in Public

A Nineteenth-Century Idea, a Proclamation for Statues in the Age of Chatbots

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I post weekly or so. subscribe for free. I look at race and place, statues, memories about changing technology and academia across a lifetime. Practicing prose and poetry and keeping some hope a bit apart from the news.

open.substack.com

Alison Booth chat

Join now in the Substack app

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

UVA, with an Interim President, pays dear to a search firm and squanders human hours instead of serving the mission of learning! Instead of freaking out: share your pernicious or bizarre autocompletes. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

open.substack.com

Autocomplete

To be continued (feel free). creative commons license

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

In a remarkably sedate Board of Visitors meeting (why, closed session for 1.5 hour at least), members of the community were able to hear the roll call to appoint Paul G. Mahoney the Interim President of UVA. www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/prof...

law.virginia.edu

Paul G. Mahoney

Paul G. Mahoney is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor and served as dean of the Law School from 2008-16. Mahoney's teaching and research areas are securities regulation, law and economi...

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

While I am feeling the changing of the guards in the library.virginia.edu/dh-center I take delight in rewriting today: Substack newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... A sabbatical in this day and age doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

library.virginia.edu

Digital Humanities Center | UVA Library

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Why AI chatbots lie to us | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A sensible account of why we must keep humans in the loop, ignore sycophancy, and keep a leash on "agentic" AI driven by the doubtful goals, roles, and notions that slipped into the pre- and posttraining. Humans still have work!

science.org

Why AI chatbots lie to us

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

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Glen Layne-Worthey @gworthey.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Inconvenient truths from @alisonbooth.bsky.social: 1. The narrative genre that ends in death is not (necessarily) tragedy. (See: biography.) 2. Reference entries (e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of Nat'l Biography, etc.) are not biographies. (Because genre, not bcse poorly written) #DH2025

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I think about the secrecy of outsiders. As the white faculty family in a small town, we had little to fear, but we really were extremely bent to please. This post is wondering about Black-white relations in the 1950s where I was born.

open.substack.com

Richmond, Indiana 2

What one wants to remember

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... Have a look, and share any statue interests of your own. Have you ever seen a Madonna of the Trail in person?

open.substack.com

How Many Statues are Enough?

Mount Rushmore Ambitions and Iconoclasm

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u... After last night's headline, this outcome. What next, all y'all? There will be no university presidents safe from trumped-up charges in Newspeak. I actually invoked states' rights in my messages to senators and congressman this morning.

nytimes.com

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This begins My Race and Place, memories and investigations from childhood onward, probing privilege and contact zones. It's a thread in my Writing without Surveillance sabbatical newsletter.

open.substack.com

Richmond, Indiana

Quakers of Earlham; National Roads

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

I am just starting alisonbooth.substack.com/p/writing-wi..., my year of writing in genres I supposedly outgrew after I got my tenure track job. I need my other favorite Substack authors for the most timely insights. What I past feels urgent to me but runs along memory lane.

alisonbooth.substack.com

Writing without Surveillance

Samples from an archive before email, before the Internet, before AI; a content provider experiments in a time of catastrophe as if we still send SASEs.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

@megsmith.bsky.social Like the Rocovery Hub for American Women Writers and your "infrastructure as mutual aid." I'm serious about satirizing the throwback National Garden of Heroes and the data implicit in the list of people offered as subjects for statues. #ACH2025

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

@lyndamk.bsky.social shares praise of www.sucho.org Love the image of the skeuomorph blue "floppy" disk on the life raft, fits with the rowing crew metaphor. The organized collaboration.

sucho.org

SUCHO website | SUCHO

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

@lyndamk on @datarescueproject.org #ACH2025 keynote. Sped-up precarity of meta/data now. Not to hoard, but proceed with calm, expert care. Their data is knowledgeable in all senses: not noise or "raw" data, and because they know this loss has precedents, e.g. 1890 census. Also DataRefuge.

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Center for Black Digital Research 🖤 #DigBlk @digblk.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

📣Tune in to the “Digital Blackness” panel at #ACH2025 today (06/11) at 7p ET!📣 Panel will feature presentations from #DigBlk’s @dejaworkman.bsky.social, @weygudey.bsky.social‬, & @dburgher.bsky.social, and chaired by @jimccasey1.bsky.social‬. Register at ach2025.ach.org/en/

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Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Looking forward to #ACH2025. It opening with a webinar with closed chat makes me speculate on which friends and colleagues are responsible for the emojis flying up the screen.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

#ACH2025 Starting with Rahul Bhargava, "Civic Jugaad" dataculture.northeastern.edu We live in experimental/precarious/fascinating times for transdisciplinary and intersectional DH. See Data Culture Group. Participatory community data is where going gets tough.

dataculture.northeastern.edu

Data Culture Group @ Northeastern University

Interrogating our datafied society

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pam lach @plach.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Maybe anxiously doomscrolling isn’t the best thing to do the night before #ACH2025 starts. But at least I know I’ll be in good company for the rest of the week, as our #DigitalHumanities community comes together to create a space of care & solidarity. Looking forward to seeing y’all in a few hours 🫶

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

I plan to participate online in the wonderful ACH Conference next week, ach2025.ach.org/en/ which has the coolest landing page ever. Registration is very reasonable for members.

ach2025.ach.org

11 June - 13 June 2025, Virtual Conference

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

www.neh.gov/program/nati... This is so timely, as in the Hall of Fame (NYU, the Bronx) 1901, competing with Munich's Temple of Fame and other pantheons in other nations: tablets in a colonnade designed by Stanford White. Statues were added after 1920--a busy era for statues as we now realize.

neh.gov

National Garden of American Heroes: Statues

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Considering 1) humor as a tactic to challenge autocracy 2) How Harvard could play nice. 16 Presidents have received Harvard honorary degrees. Photo by Anon: AI and a small group of Jewish friends who don't feel safer because of anti-antisemitism sheep's clothing on the rampaging wolves in academe.

AI simulation of smiling Donald Trup in Harvard robes and cap with gold MAGA tassel, holding a diploma and sign reading PhD in Engineering.

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

@mvsa.bsky.social I'm thinking about Genealogies and looking forward to the conference in Fort Wayne, IN. Do you find anyone you research/descend from/want to know about at cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/perso.... Why not? It's a bibliography, not Wikipedia.

cbw.iath.virginia.edu

Collective Biographies of Women - DB - Persons

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Midwest Victorian Studies Association @mvsa.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

The new deadline for MVSA in April 2025 in Fort Wayne, IN, is Dec. 1! Attendees wishing to workshop a written project can apply for seminar spot by Jan. 5. Grad students doing dissertation research may apply for the Arnstein Prize, deadline Jan. 2. Visit our website for info: midwestvictorian.org

midwestvictorian.org

Conference

“Genealogies” – 2025 April 3-6, 2025, hosted by Purdue University Fort Wayne, IN. “Darwin’s Finches,” or “Galapagos Finches” [colorized]. Journal of Researches into th…

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

I see we cannot link to a certain Chinese LLM so I only tell of its hilarious result: "Rewrite this story in the style of Henry James" with the words (it knew exactly) of "Hills Like White Elephants." 28 uses of "shall," and phrases like "whose countenance bore the marks of a restless energy."

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Alison Booth @alisonbooth.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

My students and I are playing with "Hills Like White Elephants" in a course on taste and textual DH: experiment with the words and punctuation of the text (no title, no author). I asked DeepSeek,"Rewrite this story in the style of Henry James." It was ready! chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/f43...

chat.deepseek.com

DeepSeek

Chat with DeepSeek AI.

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