Hannah Doherty Hudson

A 1944 map by geologist Harold Fisk charts a 40-mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Friars Point to Gunnison, Mississippi. Fisk used aerial photos and maps to estimate the past and then-present channels. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mississippi-rivers-hidden-history-uncovered-by-lidar?fbclid=IwY2xjawQYXkdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFCZ2JBT2tWdVlXMmEzNU5Uc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsbjW-Yuubr_o_Kfeh0Elzc94geDwfXIZmeNL7NyljEBAOEjH53m2QLSo1NF_aem__4NkCIJ_D8J6mI1e8eMByg

Rivers are living beings.

We are really going to regret the technology we have built.

Graphic showing six cropped woodcut images from the Nuremberg Chronicle depicting various female saints and historic women. A couple of the women hold books, and two hold swords. Another has a sword through her neck. Text alongsude them reads, "Which Nuremberg Chronicle woman are.you? 1 Outwardly calm but inwardly screaming. 2 Haven't slept in a week. 3 In pain but carrying on. 4 So over this nonsense. 5 Off with their heads. 6 Warrior queen." At the bottom, pale text says, "Images from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), Rare Book School, RBS 6734."

Which Nuremberg Chronicle lady are you?

Images from @rarebookschool.bsky.social, RBS 6734.

a barnes and noble display of emerald fennel movie branded copies of WUTHERING HEIGHTS. the sign over them reads: "It's Wutherin' Time!" -- Heathcliff

thought you probably needed to see this

still unclear to me how the species made it this far

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Copy of medieval miniature of dragon with tongue sticking out and wings raised on a brown rock. Original from Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XV 3, fol. 89

Same image showing all the medieval pigments applied

Here's a cute little dragon I painted on calfskin (copied from a 13th century bestiary) using traditional medieval techniques and pigments (labelled in second image) #medievalmanuscripts #medievalscriptorium #bookhistory

Graph. The left axis is height in cm, from "real short" (0 cm) to "yowza!" (25+ cm) -- the in-between numbers are labeled in 5cm increments. The bottom axis is decades of the 18th century. The graph starts at a moderately high height, about 15cm, in the early decades, drops to almost the scalp between about 1730-1765, and rises slowly to about 1770 and then very rapidly until it peaks at around 1779, then drops like a stone in 1780 and slowly subsides after that. The graph is illustrated with about a dozen and a half women's portraits collaged in at the appropriate dates, to illustrate.

Charting out women's hairstyle heights of the eighteenth century for a video I'm working on

🗃️🪡

#FashionHistory

English Debates TL; DR Is it important to read long texts? All the way to the end? Yes, cries of the chorus of those who bemoan the decline of reading. No, shout the techno optimists, who have their reading done for them. . .. Join us for a debate on the culture of reading with English professors Maurice Lee (Overwhelmed) and Deidre Lynch (Loving Literature). February 25th, 5 p.m. Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall Curated by Martin Puchner

Boston-area Bluesky, I will be in dialogue next Weds at 5 w/ Maurice Lee (author of the wonderful #19thc studies bk _Overwhelmed_), on a topic of interest to all of us who teach or wonder about our capacity to read texts exceeding a 300-character limit.
TL; DR
Here's the poster--please join us.

Mona Narain's 2/19 Abstract

Don’t miss out, ABO readers! Mona Narain, our scholarship editor, will speak on Charlotte Smith and Phillis Wheatley Peters' poetry at the next Columbia Seminar in #18C European Culture meeting this Thursday, 2/19, at 7:00pm (Eastern).
Zoom link: yeshiva-university.zoom.us/j/95230908037
Abstract 👇.

Gang.

GANG.

LLM DETECTORS ARE ALSO LLMs AND PRONE TO THE EXACT SAME ERRORS.

STOP USING THEM.

This is such a great and timely project -- excited to read this article today!

dramatically gesturing towards my computer screen as we speak!

!!?

At Austen conferences Mr Bennet appears to tell an over-speaker “you have delighted us long enough”

Cautionary tale: I asked Gemini to transcribe a 1-page PDF from The Morning Post from the early 1800s. I was interested in testing its accuracy.

It hallucinated a full transcription of book review that doesn't exist and then invented false citations when I asked where the review was from.
#AI

Save the dates for our upcoming #RSVPDigiEvents! More details will be shared as dates approach (so watch this space!). Registration links for each of these events can be found by scanning the QR code or visiting our website: rs4vp.org/digital-even... Hope to "see" you there!

Photo showing the inside of a book binding

Hidden in the binding of this 16th century French herbal, a book describing the uses of plants, are sheets of printed 'waste' used by the binder to bulk up the cover. This seems to be a frame for something never printed #fragments #bindings

Dr. Ann Blair - How Renaissance Scholars and Printers Decided on the Size of Books YouTube video by Harry Ransom Center

If you missed Ann Blair’s @ransomcenter.bsky.social Pforzheimer Lecture last night, you can check it out on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/live/u16QHaI...

I think you’ll agree that it’s both sharp and a lot of fun.

The paper astrolabe in the binding. Source: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg832/0560/image

And here is the paper astrolabe that is included into the binding of the so-called "Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch". This paper instrument left the highlighted lasting impression on the nearby blank pages. #bookhistory #histsci

2/2

Continuing (b/c I'm once more teaching my Austen class) my JANE AUSTEN GUIDE TO FACULTY MEETINGS
“Now and then, they were honoured with a call from her ladyship . . .She examined into their employments, looked at their work, and advised them to do it differently ” –Pride and Prejudice, ch. 30

For the #BookHistory and #GLAM crowds!

Letterpress marginal "No." with a hand drawn manicure below.

Talk to the hand

Always love it when #bookhistory and #romancelandia intersect.

This is so fascinating. Taking the sprayed edges trend into a new subgenre, too!

In 2010, it was 64% kindle, 16% B&N, 8% Fictionwise, 6% Direct Sales, 3% All Romance Ebooks & 3% other

In 2009 it was 41% direct sales, 38% Fictionwise, 14% All Romance Ebooks, 3% kindle, 4% other and less than 1% B&N

Any epub folks wanna feel OLD? Here is the moment Kindle became a THING. (I used to do graphs each year of which vendors our ebook sales came from.)

Starting a tech company, BOMBADIL, which is immensely powerful but not nearly as helpful as it could be

👀

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!

My least popular (and most correct) view is that cars should be automatically limited to the local speed limit. Put the pedal to the floor and you still can't go over 25mph in a residential area.

(15 in Manhattan btw)