iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

oh no—realizing it was found *quite* close to the iSchool buildings AND the library. Yay!

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aelang.bsky.social @aelang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Any day is substantially improved by news that a grad student got a job

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Reposted by Ryan Cordell

also inspired by @literaturegeek.bsky.social's gorgeous work at @wolfproofpress.com, plus @ryancordell.org & his ideas for bringing printing into the classroom, Robin Sloan's experiments at www.penumbraprint.com and the Crail Press thecrailpress.com

penumbraprint.com

Penumbra Print Shop | Home

Penumbra Print Shop is Robin Sloan’s new manufacturing project.

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Reposted by Ryan Cordell

aelang.bsky.social @aelang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

so I 3D-printed an etching press & made my first print & was unprepared for just how restorative it would be

a 3D printed etching press in green and white

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Every time I complete my university-mandated security or ethics training modules, I think about all the students taking online courses designed in just this soulless, click-through, occasional formulaic question way, & it makes me sad They shouldn’t have an AI agent take their courses—but I get it

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Our current moment is casting my mind back to my dissertation research on American apocalyptic movements William Miller’s followers didn’t really lose faith until his end-of-world predictions failed THREE times & even then a subset held on & eventually formed the Seventh Day Adventist denomination

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Ok @remedygames.com patched Control: Resonant, it’s not crashing anymore, & I’m having a blast flying around weird interdimensional Manhattan fighting possessed buses & vending machines

I just want to say—very genuinely—how happy it makes me to have a job where in the same week I watched one student play (& then catalog) Zork from a 1980s floppy disk & computer, & then helped another student find a storage solution for sheepskins we’ll be using to make early modern inking balls

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I hadn’t seen it. The class is online so this might require some adaptation but I will look through these exercises!

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yes that makes sense. I want to come up with something like “you have this historical book data—what steps would a process need to follow to compare word frequencies between different books?” then perhaps something more complex like topics, sentiment

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Does anyone here have a favorite in-class exercise for helping students consider how algorithms work? Ideally this is completely non-computational—I just want them to try to think procedurally about how they would need to transform data—ideally historical/texty data—step by step

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I mean, here’s a business plan to keep Skeuomorph going! 😆

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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I am really glad to know that our Washington Press was part of Soybean, though—we inherited it from the Art school, where it must have gone after Soybean folded—but I’m glad to know we have that little part of local print history @skeuomorphpress.org

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Bittersweet to have a colleague share photos from Soybean Press, which folded a decade(ish) before I arrived at UIUC. The Washington Press we’re now refurbishing was in regular use then—what’s painful is all the equipment that went to scrap *just before* I arrived—like a functioning Intertype!

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Empathy, from someone who’s been unable to fully undo his contact info being “Darth Father” for about a decade now

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the images are all borked today so I can’t even reply with a “ba-dum tish” gif

every paper in a stack of papers—real or virtual—takes twice as long to grade as the paper before. By the end of the stack the time between papers is approaching infinity. I am typing this post because I should be commenting on the last few papers in this stack.

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I feel this so much & genuinely think the answer is just scale & attention—there were more people paying closer attention, so things could percolate in a way they can’t in these new smaller, quieter networks

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“The ideological clowns are out,” he declared, aggressively honking his giant red nose

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that’s a question better suited to @drtlwagner.bsky.social & their students but I think overall the answer is yes!

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Had to reassure a younger colleague today that my curt texting habits are just a sign of my age, not of any impatience or annoyance with them

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Y’all some of @drtlwagner.bsky.social’s students are testing all the floppy discs folks have donated to @skeuomorphpress.org’s Undead Media Lab, & I am over the moon to report that Zork WORKS!!!!

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ah, that must be where it came from—I must not have noticed it falling out of the box!

Amplifying this bat signal—the Beef & Sheep Lab has skins for us we can use to make inking balls & we need help from folks who know how to work with animal skins

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Me, being resourceful, thinking ahead: I’ll add a zoom link to this meeting, just in case we need to move it online Me, this morning, rushing to get out the door: oh, this is a zoom meeting. I can just take it from home! My student, a few mins later: hey, I’m at your office like we agreed…

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Reposted by Ryan Cordell

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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There’s a square piece of metal soldered to the angled strip, and what feels like a piece of laminated cardboard with the letter glued to the top

Digital Humanities @ King's College London @kingsdh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I ❤️ the experiments that emerge from @skeuomorphpress.org being housed in the CU Community FabLab One FL staffer has been recreating borders from a 19th century wood type catalog—the early prototypes print well & today I walked in to find a functional, tiny 3d printed composing stick! #dhmakes

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Reposted by Ryan Cordell

Senior Research Software Engineer wanted to join the amazing team at King's Digital Lab 👇

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iSchool at Illinois @ischoolui.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A colleague had this Linotype training keyboard in her personal collection of mechanical keyboards—she’s letting me borrow it for my class about lino next week The “keys” are attached to angled metal strips, just to practice typing I am so charmed by this artifact!

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Reposted by Ryan Cordell

After graduating with his MSLIS in May, Nicky Martin spent the summer as a junior fellow at the @librarycongress.bsky.social before starting a new position as an open publishing applications specialist at the Claremont Colleges, working with digital libraries and preservation. ▶️ bit.ly/4xTe7Kr

Nicky Martin (MSLIS ’26) poses in his regalia in front of an orange fountain at Hailene Gateway

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