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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

yeah, it's weirdly self-righteous, or at least self-important, behaviour.

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Reposted by Kathryn

University of Illinois Press @illinoispress.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I'm sure many of you have already seen this newish preprint on the deleterious cognitive effects of using AI for writing tasks, but just in case: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088.... If you've been paying attention, you know/can intuit a lot of it, but it's something tangible w/ which to counter enthusiasts.

arxiv.org

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Oh, no, you do need those boots. I think I might also need them.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

It's such a nice little thing to semi-accidentally hand-sell a book.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Define it; at least one reviewer will grump about it if you don't.

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

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Solid choice. I just made myself a grilled cheese like I'm 12

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

have a wonderful summer, wise one!

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Nearly all UPs (as opposed to scholarly presses generally, which include for-profits like Routledge) are working under incredible constraints and w/ shortfalls, as Ken Wissoker's excellent thread abt Duke made clear, but there are the "doing the best they can in spite of" ones and . . . the others.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Did I miss something (the latest iteration of that dumbass screed) or are we just doing general venting?

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

And the stupid cyclicality of it is exhausting (as you suggest, this is not fundamentally new backwardness). We just get a few decades of halting progress under our feet, and here come the eugenics and the reactionary gender ideologies and the environmental despoliation again . . . (here too, fwiw)

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

I can tell you that as a real live human copy editor for a journal, I take four passes over every piece I touch—two while I'm making suggested edits, two when author changes come back—and every genuine professional will be similarly committed to taking care with your work. AI won't.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Book acquisitions, I meant, sorry. Where I see this stuff used and talked about most is in or in relation to production, already an area where houses are forever looking to cut costs. (AI does not, of course, actually do that, as you point out.)

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Yes, I was going to say. (As far as I know, no one is yet using this stuff in acquisitions, thankfully.) Still bad, though, and consistent with broader trends in UK publishing particularly.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Third-party for-profit companies that offer packaged book production services—sometimes just layout and printing, sometimes also including things like design and copy editing. Presses lean on them to varying degrees because they cut prod costs. They make up about 40% of the overall industry now.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

(The other problem with them tends to be greater-than-average use of packagers, which are terrible from a labour perspective and also more likely than not to make absolute slop of your page proofs.)

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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 and Hum sign agreement to pilot Alchemist Review

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

These people are so deeply unserious that their unseriousness sort of defies processing

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Yes, which is one reason the thread is great. (Somewhat similarly, it's Muse that makes Hopkins its money, in fact.) Faculty often have no idea of the complicated system of offsets that keep the whole rickety machine moving, and do not, in my experience, want to investigate on their own.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

(And keep in mind this is Duke, whose titles are often much buzzed about—so what is the situation of smaller presses with even smaller ops budgets that don't tend to get the same level of notice, do you think?)

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

the media wants us to be excited because it's the first ministerial summit here in however long and banker boy is deigning to visit to pipeline us up. we've been under a state of emergency for three days, MB for four. I opened the windows at noon today: first time I'd been able to since Friday a.m.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

It's nice to meet a fellow low-key Charlotte hater.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

My book project co-writer (who is currently an AD undergrad and so dealing with a lot of AI-related misconduct cases) were just having this conversation yesterday w/r/t fabricated citations. People of our respective vintages know enough to tell they're fake. Your average first year does not.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

This is (thankfully) already the case in some fields. E.g., my younger sister is in a graphic design program meant to prep her for work on video games, etc. Students who opt (as she has) for the track that includes trad art skills as well as CAD are getting hired faster. That thinking will spread.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

One doesn't actually need a PhD and a faculty job to grapple well with one's undiluted Deleuze or Hensley or whomever; one just needs curiosity and patience, and lots of people have those.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

* Para-academic forms & readings are obv. often great & needed too. In my late teens I got comfortable w/Baudrillardian analyses via TWOP recaps of American Idol; I know such stuff's valuable. But there's a tendency to condescend to "civilians," as a prof friend calls them, that's fully wrongheaded.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

They're a fun show (when Brock is not in a petulant mood)!

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

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.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Even the smallest conferences take wild amounts of (mostly unacknowledged) work. I might recommend energy drinks and/or requisitioning a grad student to serve as a conference assistant, if you haven't already done.

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

How do I make friends with your friends?

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

That, we'd both say, is a good thing—too many books are. (She's ~100 pages in and already planning a second reading. I am only about 20, but I've hand-sold two copies on the basis of those 20)

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.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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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

I honestly think a lot of it is that many left-liberals are former nerdy kids, and nerds are not known for their skill with catchy taunts

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Kathryn @fivefteditrix.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

That Howard is an HBCU probably makes the difference there.

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

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

I've been trapped in my chair for four hours because Maisie requisitioned my lap as nap space. Not a lot a human can do about it.

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

Yes, exactly. I don't worry about it anymore; it's entirely a problem of their behaviour, not mine.

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