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Are they, like, holding out for E. Gordon Gee, or what?

Adam Bursi @adambursi.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Reposted by Kathryn

Speaking of which: We at Fortress Press are eager to read (with human eyes 👀) proposals including but not limited to: late antique and medieval Christian history; Jewish Studies; Islamic Studies; and Religious Studies broadly conceived. Please reach out if you’re working on a project!

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OUP, btw, was the first of the large UK UPs to cut its in-house copy editors. This was and remains a strong signal of its general attitude to quality assurance, imo. People need to understand that as publishing labour goes, so go their own publishing processes, and choose their options accordingly.

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Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.

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Oxford University Press and Hum sign agreement to pilot Alchemist Review

When I say "please don't publish with the big British houses if you can help it, because they're going hard for LLM nonsense that disrespects everyone's labour and expertise," this is the kind of nonsense I mean (h/t @shannanclark.bsky.social): www.alpsp.org/news-publica...

alpsp.org

Oxford University Press partners with Hum to pilot Alchemist Review, an AI-based editorial assistant that will enhance manuscript assessment while reducing a...

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Co-signing! That people commonly make this claim is, of course, partly the fault of institutions that pressure scholars to frame every bit of writing they do as high stakes, a novel "intervention," instead of treating scholarship as the accretive process it is. But it's still a silly tack to take.

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Among other things, this thread is useful for dispelling the persistent assumption that university presses are out here making a killing because they're pricing paperbacks ten dollars higher than folks might like. . . . Please do read for a view of the actual economics.

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It's rough being a humanities editor rn. At a conference last weekend, someone asked if, that being so, I was thinking of diversifying into business. I said no: for one thing I'd spent 10 yrs on it. For another, it feels vital now to support humanist scholarship people can teach & read & learn from.

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The hist and lit depts at my alma mater have retained unfashionable bib & methods course requirements at honours undergrad and MA levels partly for this reason. As Dr. Gower says downthread, that doesn't solve the AI problem, but it does mean those depts deal w/ fewer AI misconduct cases than others

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One reason the "oh, but we need to make our work accessible to the public" line often taken by institutional humanists annoys me is that it presumes "the public" needs things streamlined when in fact there are plenty like Mom who actually enjoy meeting this work in its original form & terminology.*

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Trying to find a suitably gentle way of explaining to an author that they might be able to fight me on suggested stylistic adjustments, but they cannot really fight The Chicago Manual of Style.

WOR$T GIRL IN ACADEMIA @medievaliste.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Early reviews of @nathankhensley.bsky.social's latest are in: my mother calls it "brain-straining" (complimentary) on a level w/ A Thousand Plateaus

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Reposted by Kathryn

It's time for me to embarrass myself by putting this out there: if your college or university in the greater Los Angeles area needs an instructor for anything to do with music history or medieval studies, I'm available to teach this fall.

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Reposted by Kathryn

University of Illinois Press @illinoispress.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

The annual University of Illinois Press Summer Sale starts now! 🎉 Enjoy 50% off *ALL* books until June 16 when you use code SUMMER25 on our website! www.press.uillinois.edu

Summer Sale
All books 50% off
Use promo code SUMMER25
June 1-16, 2025
University of Illinois Press

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

The face of a little criminal who hooked a paw into the savoury pastry I was eating *as it was on its way to my mouth* and swallowed a chunk before I could get it away from her. She had just had her own breakfast, natch. (I: Maisie, no! Onions are bad for your liver. She: [insolent snarfling])

A grey and white cat lying on top a carrier, staring unrepentantly at the camera

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Jennifer Schell @jenniferschell16.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Interested in writing for American Gothic Studies journal? See the following call for Provocations pieces. We're looking for essays that revisit and update terms/concepts pertinent to the field of study! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

docs.google.com

UPDATED CFP: “Provocations” for American Gothic Studies

UPDATED CFP: “Provocations” for American Gothic Studies American Gothic Studies is seeking short essays for its “Provocations” section. These pieces (2,000 words) are meant to question conventional wi...

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Not watching the video from your "go ahead and croak, peasants" senator no matter how many times you all angrily QT it, sorry. I encounter enough eugenicist bs as it is. (You don't have to give these people added airtime.)

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WOR$T GIRL IN ACADEMIA @medievaliste.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

One could argue that by promoting incel ideology through its platform, OpenAI is openly recruiting domestic terrorists.

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will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

ok ok ok real talk TRADE HISTORY is when your book is called ‘the untold story of [a subject that is absolutely very much a story lots of people have already told’

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Reposted by Kathryn

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

A collection of the Letterform Archive's ephemera — from chopstick wrappers to transit tickets to product labels to punk flyers to calendars

letterformarchive.org

Ephemera

Letterform Archive’s collection of ephemera aims to outlast its impermanent nature and provide endless design inspiration.

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Okay: if you have a quantity of something with countable components (apples, dollars), you have a *number *of those components. If you have a quantity that is not countable (love, guilt), you have an *amount* of it. You can have more or fewer countable things, more or less of an uncountable thing.

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The thing about Zoom conference is that they don't seem entirely real, so a person can easily do things like agree to present at one, then book a trip to the US, for which she will, on the advice of her government, not be bringing her laptop, during the same period.

Haunted by a chat I had w/ a publisher of scholarly editions this past weekend in which he mentioned that, where he might once have sold 2,000 copies of Jane Eyre in an AY, he now sells about 500, b/c profs are finding students struggle too much with it. JE is not difficult, as 19th c. novels go!

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Though in many individual cases one could argue they've done it to themselves, I'm increasingly sorry for/offended on behalf of men that they get marketed to like this. Such a sad, limited, fundamentally stupid conception of what masculinity and manhood are about. Like a GI Joe cartoon.

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Well, I guess now I really will have to see if I can get across the border in November without being delayed or detained! Fun times to be a non-US member of the North American Victorian Studies Association, let me tell you

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

It sounds very "naïve humanist" of me, I know, but: Why is the notion that a healthy society needs philosophers *and* plumbers, historians *and* home care workers, so difficult for so many to grasp? There's such a wide range of human skills and talents, and almost every one of them has a place.

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Simon Davies @simonfd.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

This is an incredible collection, truly amazing design work on display here

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

We can & should shame presses for indulging in (or permitting) AI use. But before we do that, we need to shame some for their increasing reliance on packagers, which pay their overburdened contractors shit rates (ask me how I know!). Overburdened workers making shit rates won't do top-notch work.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Colleagues in-house: If your press *doesn't* go in for AI nonsense or the use of packager slop in prod, advertise that! Authors, prospective authors, and freelancers all want to know. It will help your employers' business and reputations to be loud about your quality controls, trust me.