iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

What am I doing over my fall "break" you ask? Well, going to Taiwan to talk about DH, data science, and machine learning of course! Looking forward to some good conversations about curriculum building and research at National Taiwan University, thanks to a Fulbright grant!

Poster for a series of 3 talks to be held at National Taiwan University on October 14, 21, and 23. The titles are "Brinign data sicence and AI into the Chinese Studies Classroom," "Fine-tuning language models to detect shifting register in late imperial fiction: The case of the memorial as evidence" and "Vision language models, image collections, and late imperial woodblock prints: Building pipelines for large scale exploratory analysis for Chinese Print History."

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I have enough second hand PTSD that I straight up quit twitter at the first rumor that that the safety team was letting that sort of thing slip through the cracks

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I have friends and family who used to work in the anti-trafficking/anti-CSAM space. Extremely good mental health care and frequent breaks is a prerequisite. Most left the field because it is so damaging. None have ever suggested that "bearing witness" was anything but a route to pain and trauma.

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Oh I had blocked this one from memory!

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Anyway, I had a wonderful time, and engaging with brilliant students who aren't yet jaded about the world is incredible. Jaded students are great too, but to see the world so open and full of possibilities again!

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Princeton does a "take your professor to dinner" thing where students can invite a professor to dinner at the dining halls. A few students in my Chinese DH class invited me to join them last night. It probably seemed small to them, but it is moments like this when my work feels most meaningful.

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They were still relatively prominent in the city’s culture imagination in 2006/07! Enough so that I was inspired to write an extremely mediocre seminar paper about them while doing my MA a year later

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And obviously if you have been, you also still love it.

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If you have never been I’m sure you will love it!

Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Oh man, I lived in Kunming for a year back in the day and haven’t been back since I moved away. It is a great place and I desperately want to return

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Reposted by Paul Vierthaler

omg. yes, they actually have video of him at the game. when does marshall mcluhan walk out and dunk on sen schmitt?

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

An updated version of Scott Enderle's Topic Modeling Tool is now available here: github.com/mimno/topic-... Beta testers welcome!

github.com

Release v2.0.0 · mimno/topic-modeling-tool

Full Changelog: https://github.com/mimno/topic-modeling-tool/commits/v2.0.0

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Reposted by Paul Vierthaler

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 26/09/2026

The old website seems to be gone, but someone saved and posted all the old Popup Chinese episodes!

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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

there are only three narratives in fiction: 1) the hero's journey 2) a stranger comes to town 3) a greedy developer is going to tear down our beloved community center...UNLESS we put on the greatest breakdance show this town's ever seen

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

A downstream effect of this curriculum was that when I moved to Beijing in 2003 I could barely order food, but I could narrate the shit out of a story about 成吉思汗 (Ghengis Khan)

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Took a good three weeks to figure out why I was struggling. Foolishly, I stuck with it to the end of the semester. Shoulda just bought a pinyin copy (but hey, it was like 100 bucks and I was 18). I later discovered no one knew why there was even a GR copy to be had at the bookstore.

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh this takes me back, though I had the misfortune to be assigned the “Chinese Primer” for intro Chinese. Which would have been fine, except I managed to pick up the single used Gwoyeu Romatzyh copy at the bookstore. Everyone else was using Pinyin and I NO IDEA what was happening.

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Having little kids has given me a renewed appreciation for stickers of all sorts! Also, get your flu and covid shots!

Selfie of me with a sticker that says “I got my Flu shot”

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Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

a PhD position in LLMs, annotations, language and benchmarking @ University of Tartu. please share! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/

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Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 23/09/2026

Wonderful #DHmakes #DHbakes going on here, and this part is so relatable: "every ring came out of the oven slightly wonkier than the slice it came from, so the stack needed to be leveled layer by layer -- the difficulties of working with the real physical world, instead of purely onscreen."

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's possible for Jev/Laya/Decision Models to be not that big a deal as tech and massive as a new paradigm. Here's why I'm really excited from an NLP history perspective (thread)

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/09/2026

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

Free-text evaluation of answers to character modeling and constrained generation questions. This is just one of several scores Chronologic-EN can produce; we focus on it here because it's both the hardest test and the one most relevant to simulation of the past. Frontier models reach 72%; Talkie-1930 is stronger than several larger competitors, but not at the frontier by this measure. Note that this score has improved ~45% in the last two years, but still falls perceptibly short of ground truth.

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

We are hiring for several positions in the UW Information School, including a tenure-track position in Library and Information Science. Please share with anyone interested in these areas! Deadline October 30. Job: apply.interfolio.com/192127

Screenshot of job ad that reads: "The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to our Library and Information Science (LIS) research, with areas of relevance including, but not limited to:

Libraries - Academic, Digital, or Public

Librarianship - Leadership, Innovation, or Education

Information Technology - Ethics, Public Interest, and Justice-Oriented Approaches

Data - Archives, Public / Open, and Humanistic or Scientific Applications

Artificial Intelligence - Public Interest, Library or Cultural Heritage-Centered, Open-Source Applications in Information Institutions "

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I’ve actively avoided houses with heating oil ever since

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I’m so worried for folks. I lived in a house with heating oil the winter of my first semester of my PhD and filling the tank took ever last cent my roommate and I had. It was a tough winter and I don’t even think prices were abnormally high (late 2008/early 2009)

Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Reposted by Paul Vierthaler

I forgot that I made a starter pack with computational literary studies people — maybe it’s time for an update. Ping me if you’re not there! go.bsky.app/4et1nxZ

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Programming Historian @proghist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Grateful thanks to @princeton.edu, who have again renewed their membership to our Institutional Partnership Programme. As a #DiamondOpenAccess publisher, we rely on community investment to maintain and develop our multilingual portfolio of journals. 🔸 tinyurl.com/support-PH

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I probably fit pretty well here, but frankly I mostly just post nonsense on Bluesky

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I always have this fear that I'm going to lose half my students on the last day of the add/drop period. But as long as I make it through today without fumbling, looks like it'll be a full house in both classes!

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I kind of love that in this, the year of our lord 2026, the MARC standard homepage still looks like this (last updated, June 11, 2026): www.loc.gov/marc/

Image of the MARC Standards homepage, looking like it is straight out of the 1990s.

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

This looks like a cool text analysis library, and a nice discussion piece for my intro to Chinese text analysis class!

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Oooh, very cool! May have my intro Chinese text analysis class play around with this in the coming weeks!

Chloe Mashiter @chloemashiter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Reposted by Paul Vierthaler

Questions about TRANSMISSION? Thankfully this entirely benign and normal figure has answers for you! Group tickets currently on sale (the perfect way to play if you want to gather a bundle of friends for some spooky roleplay): everythingimmersive.com/events/trans...

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A lot of folks, even power users, stick with the GUI! I like the terminal but I’m not really sure it is meaningfully different when working with local models like this

It was very good! A lot of the lamb I had back then was probably of questionable quality, and I definitely remember reading in the years since about some folks getting caught trying to pass off cheaper meat for lamb.

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The going rate in my day was 1 kuai, but you could get them for 5 mao if you knew where to look

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

There was a time in my life I would have been absolutely scandalized at the thought of paying the equivalent of 8.5 RMB for a lamb skewer, but I guess I am just that bougie these days

Cart selling Beijing style yangrouchuanr for 40 ntd

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A bounteous vegetarian spread caps the end of an excellent first day of the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium conference here at Dharma Drum Institute of the Liberal Arts

An array of vegetarian dishes laid out in a buffet

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Paul Vierthaler @vierth.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Frankly its kind of absurd that my original license from 2007 or 2008 still works AND it's been the same one (I think) for PalmOS, Windows Phone, iPhone, Andriod, and back to iPhone. I have, however, purchased basically every feature and most dictionaries over the years.