iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 14h

Apparently a scholar of Chinese Islam many of us know and cite/assign has been engaged in a campaign of shocking antisemitic harassment of a colleague and their family. Truly appalling! www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

usatoday.com

Haverford College professor charged with antisemitic cyberstalking

A Haverford College professor was charged with cyberstalking a colleague through a series of threatening, antisemitic online messages.

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

J'ai voté au Canada (et au Québec) pour la première fois ! (Pour @rubaghazalqs.bsky.social que j'apprécie beaucoup malgré le souverainisme)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Final reminder that this exciting talk by George Qiao previewing his forthcoming book (coming out early next year, I believe) is coming up on Friday - it's open to all (as long as you can make it in person)

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Reposted by David Porter

Amy Stanley @astanley711.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Excited to be working with Norton on two new histories of Japan! I have my work cut out for me for approximately the next decade!!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Find a single example of Pangram specifically, not some other AI detection tool, flagging pre-AI books/articles as AI

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Reposted by David Porter

Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

We’ve got an Ivy League provost over here who can’t use his own brain to write an OpEd, he needs ChatGPT to help him with his sentences and thoughts. He needs the bot to write emails clearly. I’m so disgusted and also laughing so hard somehow

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yes that post was extremely silly in a number of ways (including that it made the same error of treating the name as unrealistic)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

(including the original screenshotted post defending her, which is also based on the false assumption that the name is unrealistic)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sure, I don't think she had any understanding of Chinese naming, but I think 1. it's a little silly to call the name racist and 2. (the point I actually care about) this discourse is giving people wrong ideas about Chinese naming practices

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I've got no particular interest in defending JKR who is a horrible person, but as a linguistic matter, I think Cho Chang is fairly justifiable as a somewhat irregular romanization (and note that lots of name romanizations of diaspora Chinese are irregular!) of a name like Zhang Zhou/Zhao/Qiu

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This one is also super fun for anyone who's ever wondered "what would it be like if non-Europeans made super orientalist depictions of Europeans." Answer: they did and you can see them here!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Continuing in the same vein, how about next he makes a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico that eliminates all the tariffs that are strangling the North American economy?

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This is the first talk in our yearlong SSHRC-sponsored series on Frontiers of Late Imperial China. Stay tuned for future talks by Samuel Bass, Sixiang Wang, Sarah Bramo-Ramos, Lan Wu, Lili Xia, and Jaymin Kim

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

On Friday, October 2nd, we'll be hosting George Qiao of Amherst College for a talk at McGill titled "The Business of Empire: How Frontier Trade Remade China in the Early Modern Era." It will be 3:30 - 5:00 PM in Arts 260 (on the main campus of McGill)

Poster containing the same information as in the main post plus some sponsorship information

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There's definitely more writing about the Qing than any other imperial period, but there's good stuff to read for every era

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Academic, but mostly on the readable end. There will be an assumption of knowing some basics already, so the place to start is William Rowe's China's Last Empire: The Great Qing, which is a more general book but would give a framework to build on (and does a good job when it talks about Qing empire)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Didn't say it was a failing, just an encouragement to anyone who might be interested - there's a lot out there to look at and learn from!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There's also a good collection of chapters on a number of different parts/peoples of the empire in Empire at the Margins (edited by Crossley, et. al.)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Yes, I totally agree most people don't know anything about it. I'm just pointing out that what's missing is the interest, not the opportunity!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

For a sense of broader imperial ideology, A Translucent Mirror by Pamela Crossley (though you'll have to push through the introduction, which is long and dense), Mark Elliott's The Manchu Way is the classic account of the Qing military elite (though I'd like to think my own book is a decent update)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

John Herman's article "From Land Reclamation to Land Grab: Settler Colonialism in Southwest China, 1680-1735," Empire and Identity in Guizhou by Jodi Weinstein

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Depends what you're interested in - for issues of empire/imperial expansion/colonialism, China Marches West by Peter Perdue, Taiwan's Imagined Geography by Emma Teng, Forging the Golden Urn by Max Oidtmann, Qing Colonial Enterprise by Laura Hostetler, Land of Strangers by Eric Schluessel

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

And the kinds of ways in which they were represented in imperial cultural production would have made any European imperialist proud (google "Miao albums" if you want a taste)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Where the Qing did have a great deal of ethnic prejudice was in places like Yunnan, Guizhou, Taiwan, etc, where indigenous groups were absolutely viewed as savages and there were extensive efforts at replacing them (via settler colonialism) and "civilizing" them

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In general, the Qing rulers had pretty positive attitudes toward Mongols, who themselves made up a substantial portion of the imperial elite - the Dzungars were wiped out not because of anti-Mongol (or even anti-Oirat) prejudice but because they were Mongols who wouldn't submit

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The funny thing about the Qing specifically is that the stuff that everyone thinks about as emblematic Qing imperialism (Dzungar wars, conquest of Xinjiang) was not particularly tied to bigotry - the Dzungar genocide was brutal but also seems to have been a spur of the moment decision by Qianlong

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I certainly agree that most English speakers don't read it, but there's actually quite a lot of very excellent Qing history written in English - plenty to get a sense of how the empire worked!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Zhang Xianzhong wondering what he has to do to get some credit

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Reposted by David Porter

Society for the Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies @ssycds.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Job alert: The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in either middle period China (Six Dynasties to Yuan) or modern China (late Qing to present). Link in comments.

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about this and think that the kind of search and translation abilities that were important to figuring this out are ones that are genuinely helpful to humanistic research and it's worth distinguishing them from, say, using AI to write your papers

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The AI made some mistakes along the way - it at one point invented a whole set of fake correspondences with a different collection. But I would probably never have found these matches without it (indeed I didn't when I first worked with these Manchu texts a decade ago)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

In the interests of considering valuable humanistic uses of LLMs - I was just able to use Claude to identify the Chinese source of several Manchu-language stories of the strange (that were translated/adapted/elaborated from that Chinese source)

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Was the goal for heaven to be filled only with people evil enough to make Kirk look like a saint?

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The analogy to anxiety about math tests is so dumb - people aren't anxious about AI because they're scared about not knowing how to use it; they're anxious about it's horrendous potential effects on society

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Was not at all shocked to see that idiot's pinned post is about how caring about Uyghurs is a Zionist plot

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Probably underrated how many Americans are just mad that Trump is ruining the HOMES acronym they learned as a kid for the Great Lakes

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I mean he should actually be imprisoned for life because the Caribbean boat bombing thing is just mass murder, but since that's too good to hope for, I'll settle for your idea

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This is true from a linguistics perspective, of course, but from a socio-political perspective "Chinese language" is an extremely important concept, and really can't be done away with

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Reposted by David Porter

sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Thinking a lot about my courageous college friend, Felicia Sonmez, today, who also lost her job as a national reporter at the Washington Post—for speaking out about the toxic sexism in the newsroom back in 2023.

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Reposted by David Porter

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The politicization & illegal cancellation of federal research funding is an existential crisis for every research university in the country, especially flagship R1 publics. Again, you would think university presidents would speak up, loudly & collectively, about this. Alas. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

and, purely hypothetically of course, people a government is pressuring a university to fire because it doesn't like their politics

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is not because Cofnas personally is a victim deserving of special protection but because the procedures that exist for firing people need to be capable of distinguishing between racist cranks doing work of no scholarly merit [con't]

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Cofnas has no business being employed by a university, but disciplinary standards need to be enforced by scholars in the discipline, not by university bureaucrats just trying to avoid political problems/bad press

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is true. I think the nuance in the Cofnas case as currently playing out is that firing you in this hypothetical is a decision that should be made by biologists, not by the university administration unilaterally

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This lets Ghent off the hook too much, because he was in fact hired to do racism

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The terrifying thing about "race realist" "scholarship" is that I'm pretty sure this is actually an effort to refute an even more extreme anti-Semitic conspiracy theory

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The people who get offended by it are dumb, but I think endearment/respect goes too far in the other direction. It's basically just a neutral generic, lightly slangy term for foreigners.

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Wikipedia's treatment of Lin Zexu's relationship to Muslims/Islam is, um, interesting...

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Glad to hear it went out - we sent it to a bunch of departments/centers around Montreal but always hard to tell if it's actually getting distributed. And thanks for sending to your student!

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David Porter @dcporter.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

If you've got any grad students at UdeM you think might be interested in participating in the workshops, please encourage them to sign up! Look forward to seeing you at the talks in any case!

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