Emily Higgs Kopin
@ehkopin.bsky.social
texpat in philly, working in digital archives, libraries, and preservation. 20% professional, 80% nonsense. 🐶🐱🎮📖🧶💾
Pinned
MILF (metadata I'd like to fix)
Happy New Year to all my kindred spirits who bought an 8 lb Napa cabbage for a two-person household with concrete plans for only half a pound of it
February 16, 2026 at 10:27 PM
Happy New Year to all my kindred spirits who bought an 8 lb Napa cabbage for a two-person household with concrete plans for only half a pound of it
Thinking about this re: transcripts of our digitized a/v collections from the archives, and how to approach assessing gender & race bias in our transcription processes. assessment!
I've transcribed dozens of interviews. With rare exceptions, everyone speaks with those um/uh tics, little restarts, hesitations, and most of us speak in sentence fragments with emphases, tones, pauses that create coherence not replicable in print. Spoken and written are distinct. Translate fairly.
February 16, 2026 at 9:35 PM
Thinking about this re: transcripts of our digitized a/v collections from the archives, and how to approach assessing gender & race bias in our transcription processes. assessment!
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
Their "student experience" was adversely affected by the pandemic emergency? Everyone's fucking life experience was adversely affected, and millions died. The rhetoric of this being a customer service dispute is offensive.
February 16, 2026 at 5:43 PM
Their "student experience" was adversely affected by the pandemic emergency? Everyone's fucking life experience was adversely affected, and millions died. The rhetoric of this being a customer service dispute is offensive.
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine. It was absolutely fine.
February 16, 2026 at 9:15 PM
He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine. It was absolutely fine.
Another thing I will share about this, before I go home and play the horse girl video game demo, is that it's impossible to situate this data in the context of our larger impact + ethical commitments if we don't measure things. I know how many academics think "assessment" is a dirty word.
I will share more of our findings as we get into data analysis, but we're reviewing energy usage & climate impact metrics for our cloud-hosted digital collections at MPOW, and the results have been really misaligned with what our expectations were. I strongly encourage other folks to do this.
February 16, 2026 at 9:04 PM
Another thing I will share about this, before I go home and play the horse girl video game demo, is that it's impossible to situate this data in the context of our larger impact + ethical commitments if we don't measure things. I know how many academics think "assessment" is a dirty word.
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
"come try Horses of Hoofprint Bay we have 25 positive reviews on our demo already", says video game horse expert
store.steampowered.com/app/4335510/...
store.steampowered.com/app/4335510/...
February 16, 2026 at 5:34 PM
"come try Horses of Hoofprint Bay we have 25 positive reviews on our demo already", says video game horse expert
store.steampowered.com/app/4335510/...
store.steampowered.com/app/4335510/...
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
at digital library conferences, over-speakers are pelted with curly brackets by a mutant JSON schema
At @imc-leeds.bsky.social over-speakers are chased off the dias by someone dressed in full armor, wielding a sword ⚔️
At Wordsworth conferences, a laughing band of dancing daffodils rush the stage and carry the over-speaker off on a couch
February 16, 2026 at 2:45 PM
at digital library conferences, over-speakers are pelted with curly brackets by a mutant JSON schema
I will share more of our findings as we get into data analysis, but we're reviewing energy usage & climate impact metrics for our cloud-hosted digital collections at MPOW, and the results have been really misaligned with what our expectations were. I strongly encourage other folks to do this.
February 16, 2026 at 3:10 PM
I will share more of our findings as we get into data analysis, but we're reviewing energy usage & climate impact metrics for our cloud-hosted digital collections at MPOW, and the results have been really misaligned with what our expectations were. I strongly encourage other folks to do this.
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
the thing is that there are lots of modest, tedious, repetitive tasks in many of our jobs and lives where we might be happy to pay a fee for an ethically developed standalone tool to do only that task. but we can’t have that because it won’t make people rich enough
Every time I try to question my kneejerk skepticism on LLMs because they seem like they might have some potentially interesting use cases, some company shoves them into a product I use all the time, and it absolutely sucks shit.
February 16, 2026 at 7:08 AM
the thing is that there are lots of modest, tedious, repetitive tasks in many of our jobs and lives where we might be happy to pay a fee for an ethically developed standalone tool to do only that task. but we can’t have that because it won’t make people rich enough
Re: conference papers + time, I need people to know that you can speak up in the moment, even from the audience. I’ve done it before in egregious instances and some people thought I was out of line and that was fine. We need way more “you’re going to get in trouble“ “ok” across the board
February 16, 2026 at 1:35 PM
Re: conference papers + time, I need people to know that you can speak up in the moment, even from the audience. I’ve done it before in egregious instances and some people thought I was out of line and that was fine. We need way more “you’re going to get in trouble“ “ok” across the board
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
i love how every guy on the us curling team looks like he works in IT
February 16, 2026 at 12:53 AM
i love how every guy on the us curling team looks like he works in IT
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
douglas adams was our most accurate futurist
We are at an airport restaurant. A robot just drove up to us with our food, said, "Hi! Here I am!" and then drove away with our food.
February 15, 2026 at 10:10 PM
douglas adams was our most accurate futurist
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
When I have a civil & unequivocally polite conversation with one of my behateds, I imagine each deliberate & modulated word I say is a sporangium filled poisonous spores. Maybe that can help you this week.
February 16, 2026 at 2:16 AM
When I have a civil & unequivocally polite conversation with one of my behateds, I imagine each deliberate & modulated word I say is a sporangium filled poisonous spores. Maybe that can help you this week.
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
So the results of my 3 months as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victoria include 7 prototype apps/interfaces/sites, 3 presentations and a video (with a podcast to come), 12 blog posts, 3 GitHub repos containing 15+ notebooks and 12+ datasets, and assorted userscripts […]
Original post on hcommons.social
hcommons.social
February 15, 2026 at 4:30 AM
So the results of my 3 months as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victoria include 7 prototype apps/interfaces/sites, 3 presentations and a video (with a podcast to come), 12 blog posts, 3 GitHub repos containing 15+ notebooks and 12+ datasets, and assorted userscripts […]
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that …
simonwillison.net
February 15, 2026 at 5:22 AM
Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/
Neighbor shot four times on our street corner this morning, right after I got back inside with the dog. Don’t know his condition. Very shaken up
February 15, 2026 at 3:04 PM
Neighbor shot four times on our street corner this morning, right after I got back inside with the dog. Don’t know his condition. Very shaken up
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
The billboards are so fucking ubiquitous that everyone thinks they’re some big organization! But literally it’s just one lady!
bsky.app/profile/isaa...
bsky.app/profile/isaa...
I have a lot of friends and family that work in multiple different Jewish organizations from federations to bnai briths to shul boards and I have not met a single person at any level of any organization from intern to CEO that has anything but total disdain for JewBelong
February 13, 2026 at 7:54 PM
The billboards are so fucking ubiquitous that everyone thinks they’re some big organization! But literally it’s just one lady!
bsky.app/profile/isaa...
bsky.app/profile/isaa...
Sorry I missed your call, I was thinking about how many Neopet species names are literary references
February 15, 2026 at 4:50 AM
Sorry I missed your call, I was thinking about how many Neopet species names are literary references
son, we’re not disappointed, we’re just angry
February 14, 2026 at 11:16 PM
son, we’re not disappointed, we’re just angry
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
I just saw an elderly couple in this movie theater buy two individual tickets to two very different movies, high five, and then walk in opposite directions down the hall. Happy Valentine’s Day to true love
February 14, 2026 at 5:54 PM
I just saw an elderly couple in this movie theater buy two individual tickets to two very different movies, high five, and then walk in opposite directions down the hall. Happy Valentine’s Day to true love
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
Archival faculty/instructors: Nominate a student for the Theodore Calvin Pease Award ("recognizes superior writing achievements by students of archival studies. Entries are judged on innovation, scholarship, pertinence, and clarity of writing. ") Nominations due: 02/28
Theodore Calvin Pease Award | Society of American Archivists
Society of American Archivists
www2.archivists.org
February 14, 2026 at 4:54 PM
Archival faculty/instructors: Nominate a student for the Theodore Calvin Pease Award ("recognizes superior writing achievements by students of archival studies. Entries are judged on innovation, scholarship, pertinence, and clarity of writing. ") Nominations due: 02/28
Husband is teaching Romeo and Juliet right now, and his students are insistent that the play is both “deranged” and ”very gay.” so actually undergrads are still more literate than the average American adult
February 14, 2026 at 5:02 PM
Husband is teaching Romeo and Juliet right now, and his students are insistent that the play is both “deranged” and ”very gay.” so actually undergrads are still more literate than the average American adult
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
Today’s the last day for deals
December 12, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Today’s the last day for deals
Reposted by Emily Higgs Kopin
Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox
February 14, 2026 at 2:21 PM
Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox