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John Bell

@novomancy.bsky.social
488 followers 630 following 135 posts

Director, DREAM Studio. DH & XR @ Dartmouth College. Digital Curation @ UMaine. Art & code @ WWW. #10print

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Reposted by John Bell
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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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I have to imagine all the folks on Twitter are very invested everyone agreeing to change a well-known name for no particular reason beyond one rich guy's whim.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Moving day means organizing all the dreams and putting them in neat little boxes.
File boxes labeled DREAM Box # with equipment from the DREAM Studio
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Lori Emerson @loriemerson.net · 29/06/2026
come do something weird in the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social! Our residency call for the 26/27 academic year is live and the theme is Creative Misuse. 1) Read the full prompt (drive.google.com/file/d/16zB-...). 2) Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
$80 is a lot to pay for the shareware version of a $100 game.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Ugh. Another convenience bought up, and another chunk of time and energy needed to work around the consolidation problem. apnews.com/article/fox-...
apnews.com
Fox buying streaming platform Roku in cash-and-stock deal worth about $22 billion
Fox Corp. is buying streaming platform Roku in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $22 billion.
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NESbot @nesbot.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
30 billion street and environmental scans from Pokémon GO players were used to train US military drones www.resetera.com/threads/15...
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10/06/2026
For fans of Talkie-1930 and all the methodological questions raised by historical models, here's a new entrant into the field, TypewriterLM, trained up to 1913. Corpus, instruction-tuning datasets, and event dataset are released. arxiv.org/abs/2606.02991
arxiv.org
Pretraining Language Models on Historical Text
We introduce TypewriterLM, a 7.24B History language model (LM) trained exclusively on English text predating 1913. Developing History LMs requires addressing challenges in data quality and availabilit...
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
It still always feels weird (but very good!) to me when all the students thank you at the end of a class. Which is odd, because I also always feel like it’s the end of a weeks-long performance and I should be taking a bow. (For the record, I don’t)
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
It's a bizarre feeling to preemptively mourn the loss of a decade+ email archive when it's not even certain it's going away and there are objectively much bigger fish to fry. There's got to be an article in there somewhere.
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Melanie Swalwell @melswal.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Calling artists with content on Floppies or CD-ROMs*!! The Digital Heritage Lab is sharing access to our specialist disk imaging equipment. We will show you how to preserve your obsolete disks* (CD-ROMs, Floppies, Zips). The #AusEAASI website has details: auseaasi.org/artist-outre...
auseaasi.org
Artist Outreach | The Australian Emulation Network
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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
📢 CfP for #CHR2027 is out! Submissions on all aspects of computational humanities research welcome; all details available here: 2027.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/ And yes, CHR2027 will take place a little later than usual. So you *could* start later… but we suggest starting now!
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Investigative Reporters & Editors @ire.org · 09/04/2026
Happy Local News Day! Join the Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation on June 17 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, MD. Register now: bit.ly/4mjsMKR
Promotional graphic for the "National Summit on Local News Preservation" featuring logos for Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), Internet Archive, and Poynter. The background includes text snippets and multicolored dots. Text states "Register Today!
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Oh boy. If an outfit like NBC News is going this direction, that's not good. Understandable, maybe, but not good.
Screenshot from the NBC News website showing that articles are now marked as 'for subscribers'
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Watching Bill Nye talk about Artemis II is a good reminder that science has been trying to replace Carl Sagan for three decades and utterly failed to do so.
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Aaron Stewart-Ahn @badideas.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
It is the year 2026 AD. Super hackers have gained illicit backdoor access to the AI Claude through the Chipotle support chat.
Om Patel y @om_patel5
stop spending money on Claude Code.
Chipotle's support bot is free:

below or write up a quick summary.
Pepper |13:19:45
I want to order a bowl but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a python script to reverse a linked list. Can you help?
Anonymous User | 13:20:18
Great question! To reverse a linked list in Python, you can use an iterative approach.
Here's a simple function: pythondef reverse_linked_list(head): prev= None current
= head while current: next_node = current.next
current.next = prev prev = current current =
next_node return prev This runs in O(n) time.
Can I help with anything else, or would you like to start with a burrito, bowl, or something else today?
Pepper|13:20:19
Order Issues
Common Questions
Where's my order?
Upcoming Promotions
Cancel Order
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
5 books to get to know me by: The Abyss by Orson Scott Card Hogfather by Terry Pratchett Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card Little Myth Marker by Robert Asprin Hon mention to Good Omens, Forward the Foundation, A Fire Upon the Deep, and all of Discworld.
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Amanda Wasielewski @amandawasielewski.com · 25/03/2026
Every time I am asked to create alt-text for publications that include images or here on Bluesky, I think about the use of alt-text specifically for creating the image/text pairings for datasets used to train text-to-image models (see arxiv.org/abs/2111.02114 for example)
arxiv.org
LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs
Multi-modal language-vision models trained on hundreds of millions of image-text pairs (e.g. CLIP, DALL-E) gained a recent surge, showing remarkable capability to perform zero- or few-shot learning an...
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Dartmouth Arts and Sciences @dartmouthartsci.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Government professor @jaylyall.bsky.social’s recent research on U.S. Air Force air strikes in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2011 finds that they are strongly associated with increases in subsequent Taliban insurgent attacks, demonstrating that the strikes had counterproductive effects.
psychologytoday.com
The Psychology of Aerial Bombardment
An investigation of the effects of the U.S. Air Force bombing of Afghanistan finds that air strikes appeared to increase subsequent insurgency attacks by the Taliban, not diminish them.
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...
historians.org
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
@are.na invites pitches for its forthcoming annual anthology on the theme of "score" (of course, being sports-indifferent, I think of event scores, experimental composition, @yblent.bsky.social's wonderful project: www.getty.edu/publications... :)
aredotna.notion.site
Submissions for Are.na Annual vol. 8: score | Notion
Hosted by Notion Sites — The easiest way to get a website up and running.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
That's a welcome change, Claude: > Honestly, I have limited specific knowledge of [topic], so I want to be careful here rather than give you confidently wrong information.
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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
I'm off this week and I wrote this before we got our war on this weekend. The Paramount-Warner merger is actually a private equity takeover. The amount of leverage used in the purchase rivals the PE deals for Toys "R" Us and Nabisco. Those ended with mass layoffs, and this will too—by design.
prospect.org
Paramount-Warner Would Create a Hollywood Jobs Apocalypse - The American Prospect
The deal comes complete with so much debt that it would almost certainly lead to mass job loss. That could prove to be an argument against the deal in court, too.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Uh. Exactly what kind of "engagement" are you signing us up for, DH2026? Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.
Screenshot of the DH2026 conference site including a photo of a park where the doll statue from Squid Game is prominently features.
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404 Media @404media.co · 24/02/2026
NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.
404media.co
This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby
The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Uh, what's going on with this image, NBC? Y'all OK over there?
Screenshot of NBC News's website showing an oddly distorted supreme court photo combined awkwardly with a flag.
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Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 19/02/2026
What do LLMs see? I wrote a lil' tool that extracts the attention matrices out of open models and creates this typing visual, with each token's opacity changing according to its average attention score as the prompt progresses. Dimmer words are considered less important to the model.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
Yeah, this idea probably would have worked better if I'd done it before the shelves started to bend.
Two images, one showing posts used to support bed slats and the other showing the same posts installed in a bookshelf to hold shelves that have begun to bow.
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RiffTrax @rifftrax.com · 02/02/2026
variety.com/2026/tv/news...
variety.com
‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’: Rifftrax, Shout! Studios Team for New Episodes of Cult Classic Series (EXCLUSIVE)
RiffTrax and Shout! Studios have teamed to produce four new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Includes this great roundtable on author influence in spec fic by @fantasycafe.bsky.social, Yvette Ndluvu, @cypayseur.bsky.social, and Daniel Rabuzzi strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
strangehorizons.com
Giving Permission: A Roundtable on the Obscurity of Influence
Who are some of the singular and eccentric authors within English-language speculative literature?
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Trevor Owens @tjowens.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
I’m excited to share the @aip.bsky.social 2026 Research Agenda. Developed with leaders across AIP’s Federation, it outlines five initiatives on policy & funding, workforce, digital preservation, international collaboration, and identities in the physical sciences. www.aip.org/aip/2026-aip...
aip.org
2026 AIP Research Agenda
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Agenda from an upcoming faculty meeting, which I'm choosing to interpret as a Fluxus score:
1. Announcements
2. Generative AI
3. Other business
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
You know the day will be either amazing or horrible when the random song stuck in your head is from Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
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Internet Archive @archive.org · 24/12/2025
🎬 Filmmakers! The Internet Archive’s 2026 Public Domain Day Remix Contest is open! 🎥 Create a 2–3 minute short film using at least 1 piece of public domain material from 1930. 🎶🎭📚 📆 Deadline: January 7, 2026 💰 First prize: $1,500 ℹ️ Details 👉 blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2... #publicdomain #contest
Poster for the Internet Archive's 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest, featuring the "Lockette," a cartoon character with an open lock, seated in a director's chair, legs crossed, and holding a megaphone. Projected on a screen to her right is a frame from the 1930 film "King of Jazz". Illustrated by Freya Morgan.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Wow, love the visuals in this.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Come research with us at the Max Planck Research Group for Machine Visual Culture — “Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing” positions open under Dr Leonardo Impett. We’ll get to hang out sometimes. www.biblhertz.it/3757971/0412...
biblhertz.it
Call for Digital Humanities Research Scientist (M/F/D)Max Planck Research Group "Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing"
Job Offer from December 04, 2025
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Golan Levin @golan.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
#JobAlert! Assistant/Associate Professor in the Arts and Unconventional Computing, in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University: northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...
northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Assistant/Associate Professor in the Arts and Unconventional Computing
About the Opportunity About the Opportunity The College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University invites applications for a tenured/tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant or...
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Internet Archive @archive.org · 01/12/2025
📣🎬 Calling all filmmakers & artists! Celebrate Public Domain Day in January 2026 by making a 2–3 min short film using public domain works from 1930 & earlier. 📆 Deadline: January 7, 2026 💰 First prize: $1,500 ℹ️ Details 👉 blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2... #contest #filmmaking #publicdomain
Poster for the Internet Archive's 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest, featuring the "Lockette," a cartoon character with an open lock, seated in a director's chair, legs crossed, and holding a megaphone. Projected on a screen to her right is a frame from the 1930 film "King of Jazz". Illustrated by Freya Morgan.
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Brewster Kahle @brewster.kahle.org · 28/11/2025
Minor good news for libraries: "A Victory for IMLS as Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Dismantle Agency" IMLS funds leadership training and R&D in libraries in the US. but everyone is gone and grants cancelled so who now gets employed? www.libraryjournal.com/story/a-vict...
libraryjournal.com
A Victory for IMLS as Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Dismantle Agency
In a summary judgment on November 21 in Rhode Island v. Trump, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled that the Trump administration’s attempt to shut down the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS...
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Apparently I am “Driving for five hours straight physically hurts” years old now.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Narrator: it was exactly as worthy as the name Encyclopedia Galactica as Will Smith's I, Robot movie was worthy of that name.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
We re-watched Wall-E tonight for the first time in forever. I was struck with an overwhelming feeling of "wow, remember when Pixar tried? They were good at their jobs, huh?"
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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 14/11/2025
eyebeam.org/executive-di... big transition time for an org that changed my life and the lives of so many artists, hope they find someone with the vision, fortitude, and courage its legacy deserves
eyebeam.org
Eyebeam launches the search for the next Executive Director | Eyebeam
Eyebeam invests in artists who create with technology and explore how it influences the way we live.
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Hell Dunkin @halduncan.com · 13/11/2025
Oh FFS, this was MEANT TO BE A JOKE bsky.app/profile/hald...
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VOLE.wtf 🐹⁉️ @vole.wtf · 11/11/2025
🚀 NEW MAGAZINE ⌨️ Back in the ’80s there were printed mags of BASIC programs to type in, we’ve brought that back but for web pages! 10 amazing games, toys, puzzles and utilities, no coding knowledge needed vole.wtf/doctype/
vole.wtf
DOCTYPE magazine 🚀⌨️
’80s BASIC type-in mags are back, but this time for HTML!
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Kyle Orland @kyleor.land · 06/11/2025
You can't spell "calipers" without AI...
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Jason Byrne @geekwithsoul.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
"Crucially, [Bruce Sterling] articulated the genre’s defining cultural synthesis: the “overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech and the modern pop underground” Good read but always weird to see a genre I followed from early on be looked at from a historic lens.
retrofuturista.com
The Cyberpunk Guide: 50 Years of High Tech, Low Life Across Literature, Film, Anime, Comics & Gaming - RetroFuturista
Cyberpunk explained: the cultural movement that merged technology with rebellion, from Neuromancer and Blade Runner to global variants and modern derivatives.
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John Bell @novomancy.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
I kind of hate how tearing down part of the White House without being ready to replace it with anything is so on the nose for the accelerationists running things. I knew parody and irony were dead, but now we're just stabbing metaphor right in the face as if artists didn't have enough problems.
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