iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Andy Famiglietti @afamiglietti.org · 15h

The point of cultural artifacts is that they are shared. Literally that's what makes them "culture." Will there be low value slop content in the background? Yes. Will it "personalized content" displace shared art and artists (even if some of those are synthetic some day)? No.

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Alexander Manshel @manshel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Require full books" is ranked 25th out of 30 here, only a few above "Private school vouchers" and "Allow A.I. use." The explanation? "Some experts saw this as common sense, though there is little existing research."

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cmrn knzlmn @ckunzelman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Pope’s lines from “An Essay on Criticism” have been much misunderstood: Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line, it "whispers through the trees." It’s not the predictability of rhyme pairs that is being censured (Pope used “trees | breeze” more than once) but (1/2)

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The @averyedison.com version of this comic is my favorite: bsky.app/profile/aver... And it remains the correct response to “IT HAS A SOUL” discourse. But this thread is right.

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I think we could try to falsify that premise (Thankfully, logic tells us that doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusion)

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Just found out that there’s a new, and final, installment of ITV’s groundbreaking 7up documentary series. Original creator/director Michael Apted died a few yrs ago so they got Asif Kapadia (dir. of Senna) to do it. Can’t wait to watch & have an existential crisis.

70 Up poster shows pictures of the children from 7up and them currently as 70 year olds

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I am thrilled to announce that the American Studies Program at Boston University will be accepting new PhD Students for the 27/28 academic year. These are fully funded, unionized, 5-year positions, with 4 semesters of guaranteed dissertation fellowship in years 4 & 5.

Application Deadline: December 15, 2026
The American Studies Program at Boston University is a nationally recognized leader in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Our students and faculty study the disparate yet interconnected cultures of colonial North America and the United States as seen in the ideas and actions of its people, and as expressed in a range of forms, especially culture, the arts, media, literature, and institutions - often seen through a global or transnational lens. Formerly known as the American & New England Studies Program, we maintain active collaborations with many cultural institutions in the region, especially in the Boston Area. Our large PhD program has produced tenure-track protessors, public historians, museum curators, and directors at major universities, museums, and other cultural and historical institutions.
Funding Opportunities
PhD students receive full funding for up to five years (12 months a year) under a collective bargaining agreement. During this time, they take courses, teach in their fields and disciplines of interest, and develop and write dissertations. The fellowship package guarantees four semesters of dissertation fellowship in years 4 and 5, with no service obligations Additional funding is available from Boston University for travel to conferences, for archival research, and for internships.
Current students have recently received outside fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Beinecke Library, the Corning Museum of Glass, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the American Historical Association.
Graduate Student Association
The Program's own independent Graduate Student Association (GSA) is comprised of elected PhD students who sponsor events and programs for developing professional skills, while representing our students' interests to the governing faculty.

A list of affiliate faculty, available also on the program’s webpage

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Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

ICYMI - my book dropped! Embedded Pedagogies brings together conversations on DH teaching and administration, offering theory, activities, and policies to imagine better educational institutions. Openly available: buff.ly/kQau5oV Launch event on 10/5 at 1:00 ET: cal.lib.virginia.edu/event/17640296

cal.lib.virginia.edu

Embedded Pedagogies Virtual Book Launch with Brandon Walsh

Join us to celebrate the launch of Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change, an open-access book authored by the Scholars' Lab's Brandon...

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

A fantastically sharp post that joins a sense of text's actual functioning (resonant with the Textpocalypse described by @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social) to a longer history of the class function of literacy that resonates with @mattseybold.bsky.social on deliteracy.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It took me too long to realize that this game is not a sequel to the groundbreaking first-person spy game set in Menlo Park.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Mac Le Moray. (Like when the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that's...)

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Omg nerds ftw

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is the inevitable consequence of treating education as primarily job preparation. But if “hiring companies” are really the “customer” then why are students the one’s with debt burden?

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I’ll stop apologizing. But I’m including a citation to this post.

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 09/09/2026

Sounds like a Future Me problem, not a Current Me problem

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Meredith Martin @mmvty.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It was a pleasure to help the author with this article and so serendipitous that @mellymeldubs.bsky.social was in town when we were in touch. Secret help from an incredible & stealth Princeton librarian also got @hathitrust.bsky.social in the convo, finally.

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Kristin Grogan @kristingrogan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I mourn the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose writing taught me so much. Much to choose from, so here’s a bit of Blue Studios I had pinned above my computer for a while: A book should be porous; it should have enough air and space, enough blue air, so that whoever is enters it can breathe.

Extract from intro to rachel blau duplessis’ blue studios

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

My experience is folks talk more about THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY (and just the very end, re biopower) than even the prison stuff. Which utterly ignores THE ORDER OF THINGS!

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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 07/09/2026

it is sooooo cool that we have an actual explainable algorithm here on bsky

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

What works does the r/classicliterature subreddit consider "classic"? This post gives you an answer (and some media ecological theorizing for good measure): cforster.com/2026/09/redd... With thanks to @mellymeldubs.bsky.social & @mariaa.bsky.social, whose work on Goodreads I borrow from.

cforster.com

The Reddit Classics

Reflections on the most frequently mentioned works in the /r/classicliterature subreddit.

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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

[jacques lacan explaining why you have to relativize the clinical situation to talk, in part to prevent the countertransference, early 1950s, colorized]

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I have to admit it's funny to begin a novel by arguing that all your problems can be traced to your mother's having asked your father, in the middle of your conception, whether he'd remembered to wind the clock

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Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

An undergrad told her professor President Trump made teaching about gender identity illegal and then THE PROFESSOR was fired. This happened LAST YEAR in Texas. www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-...

nbcnews.com

Texas A&M fires professor over gender-identity lesson in literature course

Professor Melissa McCoul "has appealed her termination and is exploring further legal action," her lawyer told NBC News.

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Sarama Burwani @ 7.56 @saramaburwani.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

$Panel 1: IEEE Single-Precision Floating Point standard Panel 2: Omni-Man: Look what they need to mimic a fraction$

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Stephanie Insley Hershinow @sinsleyh.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

It’s here! From the team that brought you Clarissa 2025, join us to read a rollicking delight of a novel. Whether you’re rereading or reading for the first time, there are lots of ways to join. We’ll have weekly Substack posts and bimonthly hybrid meetings.

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

For those who write tenure letters: you play an important role here. For the last few years I include a statement that the funding environment is bad and while any funding wins should be celebrated, lack of fundraising success should no longer be used as a meaningful metric for tenure.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I'm looking for a scholar who studies James Baldwin (broadly, his life and/or work) who is open to collaboration and computational methods. If you know someone nice, please let me know :D

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Jordan S. Carroll 🌹 @jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I can’t read about Meister Eckhart without imagining the makin’ copies guy calling him “the Eckhartmeister.”

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Roopika Risam @roopikarisam.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The alchemists were right after all. 🤷🏽‍♀️

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Jennifer Ashby @jenniferashby.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Delighted to share that my article on Mina Loy's conversion to Christian Science in Florence around 1909 has been published in Feminist Modernist Studies! Thanks to @euilibrary.bsky.social, the article is Open Access so is free to read & download (see below): doi.org/10.1080/2469...

doi.org

The making of Mina Loy’s Christian Science in Florence, Italy

The poet and painter Mina Loy (1882–1966) maintained a life-long, idiosyncratic belief in Christian Science. However, little is known of her formative introduction to the faith in Florence, Italy, ...

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

If it were me, I'd first try it via regulatiry of the high-frequency function words, which are exactly the sort of signal many stylometers already look for. Dunno if it would work well, but it'd be subtle and elegant if it did so.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 10/08/2026

I am reading a remarkably accomplished doctoral dissertation in advance of a defense next week and it is good to be reminded that early career historians are doing absolutely phenomenal scholarship despite the multitude of forces arrayed against them.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Compound bow First developed in the Ancient World Can't be drawn by just a random guy Tensile strength to make bronze arrows fly

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Kathy Harris @triproftri.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Because we want to have an intellectual convo about the adoption of a tool promulgated by the romance with innovation does not make faculty=deniers. We are doing what we are hired to do: think deeply & care for our (first gen) students. Now an old keynote: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpfP...

youtube.com

Resist the Romance of Innovation

YouTube video by Katherine D. Harris

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Ross Sayers @rosssayers.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

[James Stewart as Odysseus] now listen here, Agamemnon, I'm going home, y'see. You keep your fancy armour, I'm getting off this crummy ol' beach. [Spotting the Cyclops] now here's a curious fella, he's only got one peeper

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profchander @profchander.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

i played a couple of assassins creed games and at the end you have all this loot and gear and upgrades and stuff but you’ve finished all the quests and so you just sit there with all your hard-won shit and, like, wonder what the point was. assassins creed is just life is what i’m saying.

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Brian Glavey @glavey.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

So I'm starting a podcast about friendship and aesthetic experience called "Some Marvelous Experience." I've posted a brief teaser that explains a little bit about the main idea and will drop the first episode soon. Please subscribe and help me spread the word! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

podcasts.apple.com

Some Marvelous Experience

Arts Podcast · Updated Biweekly · A podcast about friendship and art hosted by Brian Glavey. For each episode I'll talk to a pair of friends about a work of art or aesthetic experience that they share...

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I'm glad someone finally had the courage to say it.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I was tracking down the etymology of AI "harnesses" and bumped into this recent paper: ["What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness" by Sanderson Oliveira de Macedo"] (arxiv.org/abs/2606.10106).

arxiv.org

What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness

The term agent harness now circulates widely in software engineering with generative artificial intelligence. It names the layer that wraps a language model and turns it into a coding agent able to ac...

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Juan Meneses @dissentum.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

See my ACLA seminar on World Literature and the Global South below 👇 and repost please and thank you!

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

arxiv.org

What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Genuinely, screenshottable/quotable content affords antagonism in a way that an audio clip doesn’t. I try not to be the bad sorta media determinist, but medium matters.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Is “whipsaw” becoming idiomatic?

New York Times headline:

White House Whipsaws Silicon Valley (and Itself) Over A.I. Rules

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

“the meaning of a word is its use” - Wittgenstein

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BGinCHI @bginchi.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

🧵 AF

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Hey, @epikt.bsky.social shout out in Man Carrying Thing debrief of social media drama about the fate of modernism. (See ~2:30) youtu.be/ENAHZMlW4fE?...

youtu.be

the "death" of literature and the rise of Pale Fire

YouTube video by Man Carrying Thing

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