iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Logically, deconstruction is attending to something that's always already been there - not always purely accidentally. If not quite a method, deconstruction's a style of drawing attention. It involves a certain amount of misdirection that I think is worth drawing attention to, after all these years.

There seem to be parallel sorts of moves in bibliographical thinking, and in many other areas, probably going back centuries, in the background. If there are dominant traditions, then there will always have been alternatives, within and outside them, contrary waves almost carrying along each other?

Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 07/10/2026

"Digital products are interpretive ecosystems rather than neutral carriers of information" - reminds me of your rhetoric article. It is more-than-plausible output, it concentrates and expresses values. If the interpretive system is an individual human, those are embodied in, as well as through, us.

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Reposted by Paul Harland

So pleased to see @djevans.bsky.social’s new article, “Speculative Bibliography as Infrastructure: Building the Viral Texts Search Index,” out in the Victorian Institutes Journal scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/victori...

scholarlypublishingcollective.org

Speculative Bibliography as Infrastructure: Building the Viral Texts Search Index

Abstract. This article gives a history of developing a search index for the Viral Texts Project (https://clusters.viraltexts.org/). It takes up the challenge of representing speculative bibliographies...

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"To study reprinting at this scale is to reimagine texts as relational entities that are repeated, excerpted, recombined, orphaned, and embedded within shifting bibliographic contexts. While traditional bibliographic work emphasizes textual integrity, authorial intention..." @davidgunkel.bsky.social

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Something something something something something.

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Which one? Must've been a killer.

Andrew Whiteley @andrewwhiteley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Reposted by Paul Harland

Another example of how the racist thugs who claim to be 'protecting our women and children' are actually the biggest physical threat to our women and children. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

theguardian.com

‘Bully in every way’: domestic abuse survivors say ex-partners behind far-right UK street patrols

Seven women share their stories to make people aware of patterns of violence behind anti-immigration street patrol movement

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I think it's better to retain sympathy even for people who somehow forget or lose it in themselves. And the radicalisation that produces violence in susceptible individuals, from whatever political extreme - perhaps with denials of responsibility from those who stirred it up - is the bigger threat.

If you got up really late, then it's still almost early. If you got up really early, you probably need another coffee. If you're in between and still dithering about it, that coffee won't help.

What time is it where you are?

I did repost it, though, didn't I? Been trying to write an essay for ages partly involving that essay by Barthes, amongst other dead authors and readers (and some presumably live ones).

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I don't think so? Maybe you should have a go!

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Let me put it this way: that others routinely misinterpret your words to the point where you feel called to patrol social media to confront and correct them, is its own indicator that “communicative intent” is not a robust way of thinking about how language makes meaning in the world.

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Yes, Trump was like that earlier in the year back in 2020 and of course he didn't win - but it didn't work out well after that either.

Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes, Freudian slip? (But doesn't he say troops rather than warriors at the end?)

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Useful post - I'd've missed the wider implications, for sure, and the clumsiness of the encounter. I guess our whole lives are filled with these cultural cues (including in the farm picture books, of course).

Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The deceptive narrative of the meet-cute?

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Vanessa Cheng-Matsuno @vchengm.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

WIPS – Women in Political Science will begin its online writing sessions next Friday 25 September. Would you like to join? We are a small, informal network for early-career women in permanent or tenure-track positions that work in politics, broadly defined (interdisciplinary is welcome!) 1/4

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026

Jack Smith: "History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It's often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort."

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Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

ALSO: Cyberselfish was born as an essay in Mother Jones! To celebrate the rerelease we’ve spiffed up the formatting, found the original art, and just generally made this and a followup piece look as shiny and new as they deserve. www.motherjones.com/politics/199...

motherjones.com

Cyberselfish

Silicon Valley, one of the country's biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Is this about spies - field agents? In the entertainment field, actors have agents who act on their behalf. Biological agents could be weapons or washing powder. There are agents everywhere!

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yes, not sure about that analogy!

Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Reposted by Paul Harland

Why are people so confident that if the results of AI look like thinking that this means the thinking is being done by what’s in the box, rather than by what’s in the diagram as a whole? Are they just not considering this as a possibility? Don’t believe in the possibility of collective cognition?

Diagram borrowed from here: https://thinkfaith.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/aisystem-1024x853.jpg

It shows a box with the components of an AI system and then humans surrounding that box inputting data, designing algorithms, directing questions to the system, and assessing its outputs.

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Jérémie Beucler @jeremiebeucler.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

1/15 What do we actually do when we deliberate, and how does it change over time? New preprint with @wimdeneys.bsky.social : "Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning". 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf... (yes, I like flashy titles 💅) A 🧵👇

Title page showing:

Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning
Jérémie Beucler a,* and Wim De Neys a

a LaPsyDÉ, CNRS, Université Paris Cité, F-75005 Paris, France

Abstract

When an intuitive answer is uncertain, people are thought to engage in further reasoning. But what people actually do during this additional thinking, how it unfolds over time, and why it sometimes leads to better answers remain unclear. We scored think-aloud protocols with large language models to track, moment by moment, four possible functions of deliberation (generating candidate responses, justifying them, controlling intuitive responses, and regulating cognitive effort), together with expressed confidence. Deliberation showed a clear temporal organization: generation dominated early, whereas justification, control, and regulation became increasingly prominent as reasoning progressed. Correct responses involved more justification, control, and regulation than biased responses, and these evolving dynamics predicted accuracy for out-of-sample participants and items. Confidence and deliberation also showed reciprocal lagged associations: lower confidence predicted further generation, justification, and control, whereas regulation predicted subsequent increases in confidence. Deliberation, then, appears to involve not a single act of "thinking harder," but an evolving interplay of reasoning processes whose organization is linked to whether reasoning succeeds.

Keywords: deliberation; reasoning dynamics; verbal protocols; large language models; metacognition; dual-process theories

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Sounds fun - but missed dates!

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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hire Anthropologists

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Dr Ian McCormick @wokestudies.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Nearly 4m records of enslaved people in 20 former British colonies now searchable online “the most systematic set of archival documents we have on enslavement in the British Caribbean and British colonial world” www.theguardian.com/news/2026/se... #research #history #slavery #higherEd #edchat

theguardian.com

Nearly 4m records of enslaved people in 20 former British colonies now searchable online

Exclusive: Collection’s 300,000 pages record lives of enslaved people in countries including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa and Trinidad

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Luca @lucagalletti.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Still holds up today #MontyPython1975 IG: @thecinevoidclub www.instagram.com/thecinevoidc...

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Data Rescue Project #DataRescue @datarescueproject.org · 22/09/2026

The first keynote speaker of #iPRES2026, Sibyl Schaefer, has upped the meme game to ask: if we're in this intersection of of crises while still having to work, where do we go from here? and how do we get there together?

Venn diagram showing us in between having to go to work and the apocalypse

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Dr Ian McCormick @wokestudies.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“As I have often said, England is in reality a despotism—this despotism consisting, not of an autocrat, but of an oligarchy—not of an individual, but of a few hundreds of aristocratic families.” --- G. W. M. Reynolds, The Necessity for the Ballot, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 22 June 1851.

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Juraj Medzihorsky @medzihorsky.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A *fixed* effect. Another example of Slovakia's unusual population registration system at work, making its demographic stats challenging to compare, I'm guessing.

An Eurostat chart of Population change 1 January 2015-2025

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Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is an amazing snapshot of consciousness science in 2026! My talk "To understand consciousness, study insects" - argues that our best chance of discovering the nature of consciousness within the next 50 years is through understanding the insect brain.

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I read The Small Back Room on the back of the film and that was pretty good.

Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Gonna start with Gidget Goes Hawaiian or La Notte...

Lauren Leek @laurenleek.eu · 10/08/2026

Reposted by Paul Harland

We have more data about ourselves than ever. So why is everything converging on the same? In my new post I use data on high streets, Billboard hits, a million films and my own AI personas to expose the algorithms behind the sameness and how to regulate them. laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur...

laurenleek.substack.com

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.

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Paul Harland @pabloredux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Thought for a moment it said, his broken word order!