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Finding Files on Windows
I am not a Windows native. It is a foreign land. The only time I use Windows is to play a game, and so my usage looks like this: turn...
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LLMs Are Not a Cheat Code to Life
Let’s begin with a fundamental truth: writing is hard. Good writing is really hard. Why is good writing hard? It’s not because it is full of complex and beautiful sentences...
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So You Want a Letter of Recommendation
There are things I wish students knew before they emailed me or dropped by my office to ask me, awkwardly — and I get the awkwardness, to write them a...
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Empty Envelope
These photos reveal how the package from Sage arrived:
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Cost-Conscious Audiobook Options
Someone asked me about audiobook options recently. I have been a paid subscriber to Audible in the past, both before and after its acquisition by Amazon, and I have also...
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Paths to the Future
Some time ago I sat down to try to think of a way to visualize how choices work. I sketched out a branching network, much like the image below whose...
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On English Departments
The place of English departments has already changed to a large degree, with many faculty simply not aware of it. Undergraduate enrollments are down across the country, perhaps due in...
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Chronotopes & Text-Worlds
To my mind, there are clear echoes of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes in text world theory (see Ernestine Lahey’s terrific encapsulation linked below), and so it was good to see that...
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Python Movie
The Python documentary is on Youtube.
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Increasing Costs of Watching
I am old enough to remember helping my father adjust the directions of the television antenna in order to achieve the clearest picture when watching broadcast television. I remember the...
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Mapping Culture with AI
One of the best responses to what AI brings to the table, amidst all the other hand waving or wringing, is Ted Underwood’s observation that we have an opportunity to...
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Just the Comments, Please
If like me you read a lot of manuscripts in Word and then meet with manuscript authors to discuss their work and if like me you prefer to make compelling,...
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Customizing an LLM
There are a few of ways to customize an LLM to allow you to bring your own library of sources to bear on a problem. This could be anything from...
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Running an LLM Locally
I spent a portion of today following Cody Wabiszewski’s guide on how to download and run the Dolphin Llama 3 model. His directions are quite good, but they miss a...
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AI for Research
Now that the spring semester is wrapping up, as well as the cold that hammered me in the last half of the last week of classes, I am turning my...
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Global Souths Faculty Roundtable Notes
I was asked to be a part of a faculty roundtable for this year’s Global Souths Conference, a conference hosted by graduate students in UL-Lafayette’s Department of English. This year’s...
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2024-25 Holidays
With a number of Jewish holidays coming up, I thought it would be useful to look up other holidays which might also affect students ability to work. (In some cases...
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Folklore Podcasts
Someone recently asked about folklore podcasts. Following my folkloristic ideals, as well as allowing for the fact that I can only carry so many podcasts on my listening list, I...
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Institutional Repository circa 2010
Back around 2008 I became interested in establishing an institutional repository for the university where I worked. By 2010, having spoken to a wide variety of stakeholders both within and...
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Structure of Scientific Publications
I have over the past two decades teaching in university settings regularly been called upon to teach either a specialized research methods for folklore studies or one for all the...
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Fall 2024 Courses
Here are the courses I am teaching this fall. The 432 is a regular feature now in our folklore course offerings and I have taught it with a focus on...
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A Star to Steer By
This semester I am teaching a class on Project Management in Humanities Scholarship. I have seen enough graduate students stumble when shifting from the managed research environment of course papers...
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Test File
This is for the text analytics class: here is the file you are looking for.
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Raising a World Builder
A recent comment I made on the current state of education in the humanities on LinkedIn drew a fair amount of attention. I’m not linking to that comment here as...
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Telling Stories with Data
In Fall 2023 I led a course on digital storytelling. In preparing for the course, I wanted to see what others were doing, and so I searched for course listings,...
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Copyright and AI
Some time last year, comments were requested on the matter of AI and copyright. I submitted the following.
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A Statistical Ouroborus
I’m preparing to teach text analytics, the first time such a course has been offered at my university. I came across this great moment in John Scalzi’s Redshirts where statistical...
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How to be bored
In a response to a video by Parker Settecase on the utility of boredom and of capitalizing on it by using a notebook, theorangecatmom noted:
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Digital Folklore Podcast Interview
I was interviewed by Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus of the Digital Folklore podcast and it was a blast! We had a wide-ranging conversation and they ended up pairing me...
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Speaking Subjects, Subjects Spoken: Using TED Talks to Understand Discursive Gender Formations
K.M. Kinnaird, Allison Chaney, and I have submitted our latest work with/on TED talks to the Journal of Cultural Analytics. For those interested and wanting to know more about what...
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Sensemaking
Humans can’t feel wetness. There are some insects (and maybe other animals?) that can because they possess hygroreceptors. Humans do not. Our brain translates differences in temperature and pressure and...
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Historic Visualizations
One of the reasons many of us make things is to understand them, to understand not only how the parts and pieces fit together and how they accomplish what they...
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Digital Folklore Podcast Interview
I was interview by Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus of the Digital Folklore podcast and it was a blast! We had a wide-ranging conversation and they ended up pairing me...
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Curricular Outcomes
In one of those necessary moments of trying to be more programmatic — that is, trying to remind ourselves why we do what we do in order to prompt ourselves...
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Now Playing on Medium
If you are interested in your writing having an audience, if you are interested in dialogue and not monologue, if you want to have some effect in/on the world, then...
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LANA Talk Text and Slides
My thanks again to the organizers of this year’s Louisiana Aging Network Association conference for the invitation to spend time with all of you. For those interested in materials from...
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My (Re)Turn to Narrative
My first serious research project as a folklorist was an attempt to understand the constructed spaces of Urban Appalachians. I received a lot of nice attention for it, and Erika...
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MLA, CCCC, and ChatGPT
The MLA and CCCC have formed a commission, of some sort, to develop a policy, of some sort, with regards to ChatGPT. They are asking people to take a survey....
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Getting the Story Right
NucleCast Episode on Narrative(Click to embiggen.)
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One Hour a Day
(Click to embiggen.)
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1000 Reads!…?
Your research items reached 1,000 reads (Click to embiggen.)
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Convergences
Earlier today I was watching a documentary on a climactic event in the middle ages that, as they so often do, changed the course of history. The documentary’s argument relied...
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Developing Your Net Presence & Portfolio
Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrel del Caso (Click to embiggen.)
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How Platform Businesses Work
I don’t know that the term enshittification adds anything to the debate, but I understand why Cory Doctorow is trying to come up with a term that encapsulates most of...
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Ajami
A friend of mine pointed me to reporting by Futurity on the discovery of Ajami, a form of Arabic script modified to capture local spoken languages in Africa. It has...
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Researcher Positions
I’ve seen a number of almost/somewhat generic researcher positions that I think humanities majors with some computational abilities could not only manage but make a real difference. The convergence of...
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It's Recommendations From Now On
In “The End of Social Media and the Rise of Recommendation Media,” Michael Mignano describes the transformation of many so-called social media platforms into recommendation media platforms (Mignano 2022). He...
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TikTok and ChatGPT in the News
The lead article in this news-roundup isn’t about ChatGPT at all, but rather about the current trend among state governments to ban TikTok on state-issued devices and for public universities,...
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A General Index of Science
A little over a year ago Cory Doctorow echoed out to a larger audience a report by Nature on Carl Malamud’s development of “a full-text-searchable index of 100,000,000 scientific articles.”...
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CSS Colors by Name
I prefer to keep things simple, so when I am working in/on CSS I tend to use the more limited palette of named colors precisely because they are named and...
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Army Dayz
At some point I knew I needed to account for the two years I spent working for / in / with the Army. Army Dayz offers a chronology with some...
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Scholarly XML for VS Code
Scholarly XML is an extension for Visual Studio Code with a validator and autocomplete for features typically needed by academic encoding projects. It checks if XML is well-formed, validates a...
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Midjourney AI Image Creation
I asked Midjourney to create an image of “people and books in a network stretching as far as the eye can see”:
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Story Circles
For those interested in the various abstractions about the “shape of stories” post Freitag’s triangle (or pyramid), I sat down one day to try to graph three of the more...
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Open Source / Public Domain Materials
If you’re in need of free to use, and possibly free to adapt – what the legal types call derive – images and possibly audio, there are two places you...
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Install Briss with Homebrew
If like me you found yourself in need of the PDF-cropping abilities of Briss, but have faced the wall that is Java on Apple Silicon, fear not. Homebrew has your...
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Han Shot First
The mid-1970s was a golden time for Saturday morning science fiction, with ARK II and Land of the Lost combining with the animated Star Trek series to fill millions of...
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The Waning Reluctance of John Wick
The most riveting scene in John Wick is the moment when the Russian mobster Viggo Tarasov tells us John Wick’s story:
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Remembering Lévi-Strauss
As structuralism / grand theory re-emerges in the context of the humanities, I remembered that years ago I had compiled a small reader focused on Lévi-Strauss. I have scanned the...
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Nonfiction Books I Wish I Still Had
A list of books I loaned out years ago, and apparently never got back, reminded me of some beloved non-fiction books that I am considering re-purchasing:
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Installing Git
It’s good to be reminded that things are not easy when it comes to things like analytics. For those already deep into it with well-established setups, it’s easy to forget...
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Hundred-Page ML Book Companion Website
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book has a nice companion website.
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Jakobson's Response to Saussure's Cours
From Ladislav Matejka’s “Jakobson’s Response to Saussure’s Cours”:
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Blogging's Dimming Past Future
As part of a larger effort of getting rid of things I don’t need, which includes materials and links and notes that I have stashed all over my computer’s hard...
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Working through the Textacy SVO
If you have landed here, then you have been intrigued by the possibility of handing over having Textacy do the work of delivering subject-verb-object triples out of your text data....
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Jupyter Notebook Colored Dialogue Boxes
Many thanks to Daniel Kotik for the following HTML that can be dropped into a Jupyter notebook markdown cell:
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Prefixing Information
Why It Is Better Not to Prefix Information
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Stuff in Space
A short list of sites where you can see what’s happening in orbit:
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On Deception
In my current work, I was recently asked to explain how deception works in the current technological / social media environment. Below is my thinking so far.
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Defense Contexts
There are a lot more sources than these, but these are the ones I consistently consider in order to keep up with the (textual) context within which the Army operates....
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This Work
The way this work unfolds is often just through sheer aggregation. As you collect more and more examples, you begin to build patterns in your mind that emerge as intuition....
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Old Research Statement (prior to 2022)
My work in cultural analytics / folklore studies is focused on understanding the role that discourse plays in the nature and spread of online and offline texts. My principle interest...
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Of Portals and Platforms
A few months ago I mused elsewhere online that civilization would end in portals. That observation came after a period of travel in which I had not only to wade...
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Research Mindset
In a recent article in Inc, Maria Haggerty concludes that the single most important quality to look for in individuals who may be, or are, high performers are:
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Stevie Awards
The Stevie Awards are, according to their website, “the world’s premier business awards … created in 2002 to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of...
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Quitting Academia
Malcolm Glaskill’s “Quitting Academia” is perhaps a predictable entry in a genre that is well-established but still stunning for its sweep and its honesty about not everything being good in...
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The Role of Research in Business Success
In Why Corporate America Gave Up on R&D, Kaushik Viswanath interviews two of the authors on “The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth”. They argue...
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Designing a Course on Digital Folklore & Culture
Designing a Course on Digital Folklore & Culture
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Quarantine Day 33
Quarantine Day 33
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In the Balance
In the Balance
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Old Research Page
Old Research Page
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Notes from the Homeland (Quarantine Day 1)
While we may never know when COVID-19 first appeared, we can definitely date the moment here in the homeland when people realized that maybe they should take it seriously. It...
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The Gift of the Past
The Gift of the Past This Christmas my mother wanted to give my daughter a locket that had been her mother’s. A marvel of the jeweler’s craft, the locket offered...
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The Last "Return"
A number of responses to some of the fury over inconsistencies or, in some cases, betrayals of whatever we now want to call the Star Wars, er, multiverse?, have insisted...
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Tei Notes
Towards a TEI for Folklore Studies
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TextCMS
The idea of a “trusted system” probably can be attributed to David Allen as much as to anyone else. Certainly the idea is his within the current zeitgeist. Even if...
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Lyrics from Graduate School Days
It’s true. As a younger man, I sat in my little apartment in Bloomington, Indiana and I strummed my guitar and aspired to write songs. Before that, I remember writing...