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Jonathan

@jsench.bsky.social
4.3K followers 3.1K following 1.4K posts

Prof of Book History @UWMadison. Dir., Center for History of Print & Digital Culture. Author: Intimacy of Paper. WheatleyCensus.org. Summers @CalRBS. Assoc Editor @PBSA. 4:56 marathoner. Mediocre triathlete. Episcopal. Little League ⚾️ coach #BillsMafia 🦬 ♾️

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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 21h
Is there going to be peer review on this stuff, or can I just do a website and some tweets saying that I solved a bunch of major problems too?
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Of course another version of the question is once AI obsoletes the income available to you and I, what do we want to do with our time and selves?
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
They are THE questions.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The follow up question: you’re back on campus for my 100th birthday party. You’re now retired: what are you doing with your time? What are you thinking about? How have you lived your values?
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Today in a class exploring the concept of the liberal arts and sciences (vs instrumental learning) I asked freshmen if they didn’t have to worry about money what theyd major in: the common answers: taking care of the earth & animals, learning languages, exploring culture & geography, seeing art.
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Dorothy Berry @dorothyjberry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I'll never understand how "a lot of mostly/potentially/probably incorrect metadata is better for digital discovery than accurate but sparse metadata" became a popular idea than "we will put things online more slowly, but we will do it with accuracy"
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Honestly instead of learning new techniques to hack my nervous system I'd like to live in a equitable life-affirming society that didn't push me into fight or flight hour after hour. You?
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 02/10/2026
Calling all NYC artists — painters, filmmakers, poets, musicians and more! Did you know our city provides grants to support your work every year? And this year, we're DOUBLING the amount — from $5,000 up to $10,000 per artist! Deadlines are approaching fast — apply today at nyc.gov/artistgrants.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
“A-Z Foods,” an abecedarian by Fall 2026 LIS 350: History and Future of Books at UW-Madison. In 4 quarto sheets pamphlet bound in press ephemera.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It's me, i am darwin
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
“A-Z Foods,” an abecedarian by Fall 2026 LIS 350: History and Future of Books at UW-Madison. In 4 quarto sheets pamphlet bound in press ephemera.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Omg hot metal!
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 01/10/2026
This is something I’ve discussed regularly with @jsench.bsky.social - on so many campuses there was about a 10-15 year window—a blink by academic standards—between older presses, etc and the modern book lab movement—were all trying to re-acquire what our institutions had, just a few years ago
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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
With capitalism (and later with bureaucracy), this process has been called “alienation”
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is horrifying and exactly what a lot of us have been warning against for years. So fucking frustrating. We could have had better—politically, technologically, socially, and economically. We need far better leadership in all fields, at all levels.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
it's almost as if poststructuralists were on to something
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The amount of time I spend each day going to removepaywall dot com in order to read something is dispiriting. I understand writing & websites cost $! I dont know how to solve this problem! But I know having all the good info & well thought perspectives locked up while the worst shit is free is bad!
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
One reason I’m resistant to the suggestion that “we” (humanists? academics? The Left?) bracket out the political and economic contexts of this or that tech to think about its boundless potential is that that selective forgetting and abstraction from power is just what underwrites this kind of pablum
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Counterpoint: It would be great if people read some of the things that have been written about AI surveillance of workers! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke... www.cambridge.org/core/books/q... www.ucpress.edu/books/uberla... jacobin.com/2026/09/amaz...
press.princeton.edu
Data Driven
A behind-the-scenes look at how digital surveillance is affecting the trucking way of life
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"Eventually, all our graves go unattended." A great Conan O'Brien and Martin Hagglund mashup.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The US military has many types of institutions within it. In addition to the armed services, it also has a media and educational wing. Hegseth's assault on all these institutions shows how authoritarians operate. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/which-stor...
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 30/09/2026
Friends, while they're trying to talk about fictional machine gods, don't lose sight into what they're all actually powering in real life. You can browse the the entities on the website and use the API, and learn more about it on the DAIR project site: dair-institute.org/projects/sur....
dair-institute.org
Surveillance Watch
This interactive map reveals the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
No bibliographical sinning on my watch!
A table tent that says pages drying but pages has been struck out with the correction “sheets!”.Sheets of letterpress printing drying on a wall of shelves.
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Dr. Scandal Piñata @dr-g.myatproto.social · 28/09/2026
I’m in this webinar and, academics, take some time and learn who Marc Rowan is and how he steers our pensions into his company’s maw with one hand, while helping Trump come up with punitive policies aimed at hostile control of universities and curricula.
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Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Star Trek: The Next Generation is 39 years old today! I was one of those suckers whose life it changed. A thread of my writing about it, starting with how the show offers a defence of the humanities: #StarTrek #TNG #SFF buttondown.com/surekhadavie...
buttondown.com
Star Trek's defence of the humanities; more international editions of HUMANS
Thanks for reading Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian! If you’d like to support my work, buying or gifting HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY...
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This thread is so important because it gets at the AI industry’s central failure of imagination. While I’ve met exceptions to the rule in Silicon Valley, most human beings do not reduce their sense of being alive to a stream of successive task completions, and find it a truly alienating vision.
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Alexander Manshel @manshel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
FULL BOOKS! Or, as we once called them, BOOKS.
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JayIsPainting 🍁 @jayispainting.earthskyart.ca · 28/09/2026
Company invents tool you can buy to save you from other tool it makes that you can also buy.
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Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Animated skeleton just hanging out with his similarly dead friends and their favorite stuff in this bizarre memento mori by Carstiaen Luycks. It's his day.
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fuck ChatGPT flyers. The future is broadsheets.
A crowded broadsheet with way too many fonts. It says:
Forget ChatGPT Flyers
Say it with 
Broadsheets
Unlimited fonts
Stretch them
Or cram a really long sentence into one line for no good reason
No whitespace
Mix capital and lowercase
Pointing hands
(They're called manicules!)
Don't be left behind
Broadsheets are the future
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
And then I wore it to coach a little league baseball game immediately after.
Me behind a chain link fence coaching baseball in a green sport coat and blue pants.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It’s a little tight in the middle!
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Tonight I'm wearing a sport coat to my promotion to full professor recognition reception that I first bought at JC Penney in the nearest city to my tiny collegetown so I could wear it to a scholarship awardee reception in the fall of my senior year in 2003.
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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.
apnews.com
https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It looked real bleak, man! Whiskey, a stick to bite, and a rusty saw blade bleak! And that’s if you survived a childhood full of fatal viruses, bacteria, and parasites!
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
omg
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
toilet as a service.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This is how you end up having to pay a monthly subscription fee to your toilet and then dealing with the situation when they lose/sell your health data they had stored on some other third party's servers.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Diogenes of Sinope lived in a barrel.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Splatr.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
AI Toilets grant money.
Call for proposals for grants to “reimagine the bathroom” using AI and computer chips.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Did we get so much generative AI in the 2020s because tech worker power had grown and organized throughout the 20teens? Seems like maybe its the thing that got heavy investment in order to crush organized tech labor.
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Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
"Rather than using art as an occasional creative supplement, this study found that drawing comics can serve as both a medium and method through which students cultivate professional identity, visual thinking, and critical reflection." #GraphicMedicine #meded pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42319991/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Visual Attunement: A Longitudinal Study of Comics-Based Education in a US Medical School - PubMed
This article explores the role of comics as a sustained pedagogical practice within medical education, presenting findings from a longitudinal qualitative study conducted at Penn State College of Medicine, United States. Over two pre-clinical years, a self-selected group of medical students-known as …
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Carin Ruff @carinr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🚨📚📜🚨 "With a chirograph, Pope Leo has granted the Vatican Apostolic Archive and Vatican Apostolic Library an additional area within the Vatican City State, and asked that a new building be constructed."❗️ www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news...
vaticannews.va
Pope orders expansion of Vatican Apostolic Archive and Library - Vatican News
Given the increase in the Holy See’s bibliographic holdings and documentary production, the Pope expands the Vatican’s archive and library, and asks ...
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Kruttika Susarla @kruttika.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
ICYMI: @librariesftp.bsky.social shared a new resource! A snapshot of how 15 library systems across the US are funded + governed. This was led by Azani, @dylanflesch.bsky.social , and a few FTP volunteers + designed by me. You can download the zine here: www.librariesforthepeople.org/snapshots
Cover for FTP's new zine: Budgets are Values: How Public Libraries are funded in the US
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We were about to cure a bunch of cancers with mRNA vaccines developed from federally funded university research. Instead the Dumbest Man Alive is gutting the NIH for his loser ego & funneling cash to grifters who'll launder it through AI companies and deliver nothing but the first quadrillionaire.
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 20/09/2026
Giving an external committee power to veto research funding because it doesn’t align to a political agenda will not only harm science, it is a threat to democracy.
nytimes.com
White House Moves to Take Control of N.I.H. Grants (Gift Article)
Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would place grants under review by an outside panel, the latest effort to redirect billions of dollars in research spending.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026
The US higher education system is not equipped to correct for the effects of systemic injustice and underfunding at the high school, middle school, and elementary school levels.
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