John Bell
@novomancy.bsky.social
Director, DREAM Studio. DH & XR @ Dartmouth College. Digital Curation @ UMaine. Art & code @ WWW. #10print
Reposted by John Bell
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...
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
September 30, 2026 at 1:08 PM
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...
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.
August 30, 2026 at 4:05 PM
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.
Moving day means organizing all the dreams and putting them in neat little boxes.
August 5, 2026 at 1:06 PM
Moving day means organizing all the dreams and putting them in neat little boxes.
Reposted by John Bell
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...
June 29, 2026 at 5:49 PM
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...
$80 is a lot to pay for the shareware version of a $100 game.
June 25, 2026 at 2:39 AM
$80 is a lot to pay for the shareware version of a $100 game.
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/article/fox-...
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.
apnews.com
June 15, 2026 at 12:01 PM
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/article/fox-...
Reposted by John Bell
30 billion street and environmental scans from Pokémon GO players were used to train US military drones
www.resetera.com/threads/15...
www.resetera.com/threads/15...
June 11, 2026 at 5:18 AM
30 billion street and environmental scans from Pokémon GO players were used to train US military drones
www.resetera.com/threads/15...
www.resetera.com/threads/15...
Reposted by John Bell
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
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...
arxiv.org
June 10, 2026 at 5:27 PM
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
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)
June 2, 2026 at 7:37 PM
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)
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.
May 18, 2026 at 4:52 PM
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.
Reposted by John Bell
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...
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...
Artist Outreach | The Australian Emulation Network
auseaasi.org
March 10, 2026 at 3:50 AM
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...
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...
Reposted by John Bell
📢 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!
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!
April 22, 2026 at 3:07 PM
📢 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!
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!
Reposted by John Bell
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: https://bit.ly/4mjsMKR
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: https://bit.ly/4mjsMKR
April 9, 2026 at 6:11 PM
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: https://bit.ly/4mjsMKR
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: https://bit.ly/4mjsMKR
Oh boy. If an outfit like NBC News is going this direction, that's not good. Understandable, maybe, but not good.
April 7, 2026 at 8:42 PM
Oh boy. If an outfit like NBC News is going this direction, that's not good. Understandable, maybe, but not good.
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.
April 6, 2026 at 10:56 PM
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.
Reposted by John Bell
It is the year 2026 AD. Super hackers have gained illicit backdoor access to the AI Claude through the Chipotle support chat.
April 4, 2026 at 3:41 PM
It is the year 2026 AD. Super hackers have gained illicit backdoor access to the AI Claude through the Chipotle support chat.
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.
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.
April 5, 2026 at 2:32 AM
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.
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.
Reposted by John Bell
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)
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...
arxiv.org
March 25, 2026 at 12:01 PM
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)
Reposted by John Bell
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.
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.
www.psychologytoday.com
March 13, 2026 at 4:37 PM
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.
Reposted by John Bell
Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...
www.historians.org
March 7, 2026 at 9:29 PM
Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...
Reposted by John Bell
@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... :)
Submissions for Are.na Annual vol. 8: score | Notion
Hosted by Notion Sites — The easiest way to get a website up and running.
aredotna.notion.site
March 3, 2026 at 6:59 PM
@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... :)
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.
> Honestly, I have limited specific knowledge of [topic], so I want to be careful here rather than give you confidently wrong information.
March 3, 2026 at 5:01 PM
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.
> Honestly, I have limited specific knowledge of [topic], so I want to be careful here rather than give you confidently wrong information.
Reposted by John Bell
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.
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.
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.
prospect.org
March 2, 2026 at 2:29 PM
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.
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.
Uh. Exactly what kind of "engagement" are you signing us up for, DH2026?
Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.
Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.
March 2, 2026 at 2:53 PM
Uh. Exactly what kind of "engagement" are you signing us up for, DH2026?
Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.
Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.