..."Vice President Spiro Agnew, enshrined as St. John the Baptist; Joe Namath as St. Patrick, and President Nixon as the "Savior." (AP Wirephoto)"
Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 21, 1972
... "Front left: Boston Bruins' Bobby Orr, holding a hockey program in place of a Bible, a hockey stick grasped in his hand to guard his flock; Germaine Greer in martyr's robes, her hand clutching her book "The Female Eunich"; ...
Newspaper clipping with illustration of various individuals dressed as saints in the style of stained glass windows. Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Mass. Fri., July 21, 1972
From a folder called "Outrage/Humor" in a former faculty member's papers:
"'Canonization'-- Sainthood has been bestowed by an imaginative maker of stained glass windows, Christy Rufo, and are on display in the back row of windows at the Spaghetti Emporium in Cambridge."
Just let us teach the idiosyncrasies of the human record.
Meanwhile, I'm just here like... Can we just teach people real research skills? Instead of trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of an opaque and ever-changing third party app?
People get so mad that books are in a catalog and archival materials are in a finding aid at the same institution that they are willing to hand research and discovery over to AI.
"Well, we cut costs in half by having an AI do this transcription work, but then we had to spend the same amount of time as usual going through and fixing the errors..." then DID you cut costs in half? 🤔
I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite
My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.
It is true: many things were indeed invented in early modernity! It is also true that many things were only “invented” in early modernity because modern historians don’t like reading Latin or Arabic or Greek.
Friendly reminder! Yes physical books feel so nice but audiobooks are not cheating.
Title page of a printing of Chaucer's "The Wife of Beith", 1777.
📣 Call for Applications!
No institutional affiliation needed!
Robert & Judith Raymo Chaucer Travel Fellowship for the use of books & materials in the Robert and Judith Raymo Chaucer Collection in Smith College Special Collections.
⏳️ Due Jan 5, 2026
More info: libraries.smith.edu/special-coll...
Remember when record labels bankrupted teenagers for downloading Metallica?
I refuse to give em dashes to the AI
One thing I really hope we can leave behind in the 2010s/early 2020s is the idea that being cynical = being wise.
If you want to have an impact on the world, that involves being sincere. Yes people will sneer, but sneering has no impact. Genuine sincerity breaks barriers and moves mountains.
In fairness, that’s because a bunch of PhDs are in actuality very annoying and disagree on everything but THAT’S HOW KNOWLEDGE WORKS
Good thread on the human and relational component of the best kinds of research. Why choose a poor substitute when real flesh-and-blood colleagues and collaborators are just a lunch or coffee meeting, or email or phone call away?
Screenshot of a Google search with added date at the bottom, July 29, 2025 Highlighted sentence in AI overview says "Sylvia Plath did not have a cat named 'Daddy' at Smith College."
Screenshot of a Google search with added date at the bottom, "July 30, 2025". First sentence of the AI Overview is highlighted and says "Sylvia Plath was involved with The Campus Cat, a Smith College student piblication, during her sophomore hear in 1952."
The AI overviews continue to baffle. At least they're both correct?
One of the things that drives me up the wall is when people say students “need to learn how to use AI” to succeed in the workplace. It is EXTREMELY EASY to use a chatbot. That’s the whole point of it! You do not need training to type in the box! What are you even TALKING about?? +
Tag shaped piece of cardstock paper with handwritten note
Best little note from a teacher appeared in the mail today.
"- for making old things cool for young kids
- for sparking wonder"
Immediately hung right by my desk, of course.
"Being inclusive and expansive in imagining the futures we want also requires investigating the social expectations and pressures that often influence what we do and do not say in various professional circles."
www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2025/ai-feel...
Something really important about organizations’ decisions to adopt AI tools which people need to understand is this: it often comes down to a room of a handful of people who are simply uninformed and think it’s just a new norm they’ll be left behind on if they don’t find a use for it in their work.
Photo of the Beauvais Missal on Fragmentarium
Students deciding how to video & 3D model their books
Photo of a chart showing the comparative contents of several books of hours (the gold line down the center shows the location of the hours of the virgin)
Photo of a sheet of parchment with ruling lines drawn. We're ready to write!
Day 4 of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160) we started with fragments (I boosted @lisafdavis.bsky.social's Digital Fragmentology course), moved on to video & 3D imaging, then data visualization & physicalization, and now we're team-building a quire! Only one more day to go 😭
Students in Digital Codicology class sitting around the table, making their illuminated initials.
Photo of a beautiful illuminated initial S (made by a student)
Photo of a bound version of the sheet we printed at Common Press on Monday
Photo made by a microscope camera, it's a close-up of a little face in a root in LJS 419, a 15th century Italian herbal. The little face looks very grumpy.
Days 2 & 3 of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160)... more materiality (we bound our printed sheets and made illuminated initials!), talked about cataloging, IIIF, VisColl, DM, HTR, and we toured our digitization lab (SCETI) and took photos of our own. WHEW! Two more days to go!
And that's a wrap on my return to the conference presentation circuit.
Photograph of a photo album showing two pictures of a calico cat. Top picture is of the cat crouched down ready to pounce, the bottom picture is of most of the cat laying down and looking off camera.
Despite being inaccurately listed in the finding aid, I can't say I'm disappointed in the contents of this folder.
Meet one of the delightful felines of notable theologian, Mary Daly.
Thinking back to weird covid times when I had to get creative to digitally capture the physicality of materials for an online book studies class using a light pad, a sideways table lamp, a stack of book supports, and a hovercam.
Paper from the Douglass Morse Howell collection, MRBC MS 38, SCSC
An elephant wearing a gold banner using its trunk to give something to a person in a crowd.
Please enjoy Lal Tikon, the prophylactic peddling pachyderm. She distributed condoms and family planning pamphlets throughout India in the late 1960s.
Sophia Smith Collection topical files, Smith College Special Collections
A damaged children's book
Welcome any opportunity to teach a little bit of book history.
Poke-A-Dot: Who's in the Ocean by Melissa & Doug (2023), personal collection.
Two large posters on off white paper with blue ink reading: NO TYRANTS! & NO KINGS! In large wood type font. There is a large image cut of a wooden printing press with a banner of text above it reading “THE TYRANTS FOE THE PEOPLES FRIEND”
I heard the NEA is only considering proposals related to 1776 & the USA’s 250th birthday & I was feeling intensely patriotic, so I’m printing these really big posters inspired *directly* by the Founding Fathers
The cut was carved from the masthead of a 19th century newspaper
