Jim Casey

@jimccasey1.bsky.social

Posts

Lots of group albums: coloredconventions.org + douglassday.org + digblk.psu.edu + editorshipstudies.org. Got a couple solo albums in the works, mostly on the history of editorship.

Posts Replies Media

Ben Brumfield's recent blog post on using LLMs to transcribe historic documents (or not, as it were) content.fromthepage.com/can-multi-mo... makes me curious. Has anyone tried to use LLMs for first-pass OCR correction? Seems like there'd be lots of shortcuts for incidental OCR errors like tlie/the.

🌟 CFP UPDATE! 🌟 Due to popular demand, we are extending the deadline for submitting abstracts to Cultures of Scale in the Debates in DH series. Abstracts are now due 🌟 May 31st! 🌟 Please help us share the word? dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/culture...

Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor | Debates in the Digital Humanitiesdhdebates.gc.cuny.edu Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

I've got a new plan to save the newspaper industry

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Jim Casey

Beyond excited to announce the CFP for a new volume in the Debates in Digital Humanities series: “Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor” Co-edited by @jimccasey1.bsky.social @shsalter.bsky.social @jgob.bsky.social Submit abstracts by May 15, 2024 dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/culture...

Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, and Labor | Debates in the Digital Humanitiesdhdebates.gc.cuny.edu Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

One fun thing that keeps me awake every Feb 13 is worrying about our Douglass Day website crashing. Can we manage with 8000+ visitors? Guess we'll find out!

Incredible to see THE Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden commenting on Douglass Day! Guess we're all grown up now! >>> newsroom.loc.gov/news/join-th...

Join the Library of Congress for Douglass Day 2024 and Black History Month Eventsnewsroom.loc.gov Join the Library of Congress for Douglass Day 2024 and Black History Month EventsLibrary’s By the People Initiative and Pennsylvania State University Invite Public to Transcribe Frederick...

It's far from High Tech™ but the Google Sheet we're slowly building to aggregate data collection from 20+ researchers and handle all kinds of interpretive and archival ambiguities is really something to behold. It's the kind of deep infrastructure that rarely surfaces, but I'm sure proud of us.

"Show Frederick Douglass some love: Transcribe his letters for Douglass Day on February 14" New post about our joint event from the LOC's utterly amazing Lauren Algee : blogs.loc.gov/manuscripts/... 19 days left! Still plenty of time to sign up!

If I were starting grad school over again, I'd study the history of cooperative and worker-owned publishing. Sad but not surprising to watch Pitchfork crater while Defector and Brick House thrive. Surely lots more to learn from 19th/20th century experiments in co-op publishing.

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Jim Casey

Debates in the Digital Humanities is looking for guest editors for its next general volume. Inquiries due 1/31. More info: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/ddh-cal...

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Jim Casey

Come live in Atlanta! Come work with a bunch of great folks! One more week to apply for this #AIAINetwork postdoc, aimed at humanities PhDs who use, critique, historicize, theorize, or otherwise engage with AI in their work.

Big news over here in the #AIAINetwork: we're hiring a 2-year postdoc! If you work at the intersection of AI and the humanities, and would be happily housed in the Emory English department, then this job is for you! Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/136528

#AHA24 + #MLA24 Please help us spread the word? (1 of 2) Penn State has SIX (!) Just Transformations 1yr postdocs. Open for work on racial justice, Black Studies, Black DH, and lots more. Comes with 70k+ salary, moving costs, research support. *Due Jan 9!*

Just Transformations Postdoctoral Fellowshippsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

Unpopular opinion: the MLA convention somehow morphed into one of the better scholarly events out there. Plenty of complaints, sure, but I've been almost every year since 2017. And as all the tweets & texts are reminding me–a lot of good work is happening in those dim ballrooms!

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Jim Casey

If you are a college/university administrator, and you don't have a detailed, specific plan for dealing with online campaigns and targeted harassment, you are failing as a leader. And this means educating your Boards on how all this works, too. Lead, don't crumble. Because they'll come for you, too.

It's wild. The intersection of AI and newspaper archives is going to be one of the most contested spaces for a while. Humanities & cultural heritage types have been fairly flat footed here, but there's a reason a lot of the biggest tech companies have invested in semi-public newspaper divisions.

NYT suing Open AI and MSFT, in order to prevent both use of their articles in training, and summarization using Bing—which they characterize as a competing product. Gift link. One thing that gives this suit weight is that both Apple and OpenAI are paying other news publishers.

The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.’s Use of Copyrighted Workwww.nytimes.com Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.

Wait, I'm sorry, the very first newspaper in Oregon was a handwritten paper called the Flumgudgeon Gazette and Bumble Bee Budget!? That Portlandia vibe goes a long ways back doesn't it?

All the big 19th c. newspapers had in-house libraries, but I've never seen anyone say much about them. Archives of business records & back issues, sure, but I get the sense a lot of them kept all kinds of odds and ends. Who ran 'em? What happened to all their holdings? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I will never understand how the New York Herald, a nativist and deeply xenophobic newspaper, became the most popular American paper around the world. Not just in Europe, but also in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico, India, etc. In all fairness, people in the c19 didn't get it either.

Please help us share? Due in *2 days!* RSAP Article Prize 2022-23 ($1,000) submissions are due by Dec 22. Open to any articles on periodicals in the Americas by early career scholars. Info & submissions: periodicalresearch.org/rsap-article...

I tend to think of our colleges and universities as a neoliberal disasters, but then I go reading about K-12 Ed Tech and...yikes. I was reading yesterday that our gov't paid Google billions for Chromebooks that have a planned obsolescence of 4 years.

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Jim Casey

10th Annual Holiday Solidarity Toy Drive continues. You can purchase gifts so that incarcerated caregivers can surprise their children for the holidays - www.target.com/gift-registr...

Gift Giver Pagewww.target.com Find the perfect gift on .

Bloviating professors aside, can we talk about the compelling visions for the future of the humanities that are showing up in grant CFPs lately? Program officers don't tend to pontificate in public, but it's striking how many CFPs are leading our field(s) forward in critical & ambitious ways.

Had no idea that CAPTCHA is an acronym - "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"

(🙄 at the tempest in a teapot all weekend over on the old site. An excuse at least to bump an oldie but goodie.) We all know the "public" in "public history" and "public humanities" comes from Reagan-era culture war attacks on higher ed, right?

What is Public Humanities?dayofph.wordpress.com Public Humanities is the work of moving humanistic knowledges among individuals and groups of people. Some of the most common varieties of that work are translational scholarship; cultural organizing...

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Jim Casey

Reply to

Jess Nevins

As an exercise, look at your stack of books / folder of downloaded PDFs & try to name the processes that made those sources available to you. You are not a lone scholar! Reframe that as a net good and make that labor visible. Critical archival studies + critical data studies + media literacy.

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Jim Casey

Reply to

Meredith Martin

2. Collaborative infrastructures (esp in DH) are denigrated as service & not scholarship (other book with @zoeleblanc.bsky.social on this). I have zero patience for non-DH scholars performing helplessness around "technology" as if to preserve some sense of unmediated research & reading expertise.

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Jim Casey

Reply to

Meredith Martin

My issue is actually with humanities colleagues who don't see building community & infrastructure as part of what we need to do. All the other divisions do it! My take is that any strengthening of the humanities on campus and beyond benefits my research (and life) but it's a slow, long game.

The amount of hidden labor that goes into a digital collection is still astounding. The CCP's workflow takes 28 (!) major steps to assemble the files, metadata, and transcripts. And that's aside from building teams and sharing the materials. Oh lord.

🎃Happy Halloween to all the academic job seekers🎃 All the other people are off in costumes and eating candy while you're stuck fighting Interfolio (or worse) to hit those application deadlines. Solidarity, friends. It's the worst.

Always surprised to see how many corporations sign up for Douglass Day. The 22-65yo demographic gets overlooked too often in public humanities. And DD breaks from the corporate "sage on a stage" default. Who else is doing humanities outreach in corporate spaces nowadays?