John Russell
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johnruss28.bsky.social
John Russell
@johnruss28.bsky.social
890 followers 540 following 81 posts
Associate librarian at Penn State, associate director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies
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Reposted by John Russell
costasamaras.com
PJM is the regional grid serving 67 million customers in 13 states
Map of the PJM regional grid territory which is most of the U.S. mid-atlantic and also parts of the midwest https://www.pjm.com/-/media/DotCom/about-pjm/newsroom/fact-sheets/pjm-at-a-glance.pdf
November 27, 2025 at 2:04 AM
Reposted by John Russell
jilltxt.bsky.social
New #AIstories publication by @annesigrid.bsky.social! I love this one: it compares human-told variants of a folktale with LLM-generated variants, finding 1) the implicit is made explicit 2) floatif motifs (fascinating new concept) 3) sex is censored, cannibalism augmented doi.org/10.3390/h141...
doi.org
November 26, 2025 at 11:18 PM
Reposted by John Russell
volts.wtf
Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!
What's the deal with balcony solar?
Cora Stryker joins me to explain how "plug-in" solar took Europe by storm and is finally, via Utah (?), making its way to America.
www.volts.wtf
November 26, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by John Russell
doctorvive.bsky.social
“After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon.”

Eewwww
emorwee.bsky.social Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social · 2d
Everyone knows data centers use a ton of water.

What hardly anyone knows: they can poison the water that remains.

And in eastern Oregon, Amazon is doing exactly that.
AI’s water problem is worse than we thought
A new investigation reveals how Amazon is amplifying Oregon’s nitrate pollution crisis.
heated.world
November 25, 2025 at 8:46 PM
Reposted by John Russell
zunguzungu.bsky.social
why "today’s LLMs might be the best that they will ever be" asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/are-llms-t...
Are LLMs the Best That They Will Ever Be?
Without careful disclosure architectures, AI products may only get worse, even as the technology gets better.
asimovaddendum.substack.com
November 25, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Reposted by John Russell
milamiceli.bsky.social
📣New paper!
Thrilled to share the methodological recipe for @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social in this article co-authored with @adiod.bsky.social @krystalkauffman.bsky.social Camilla Salim Wagner, Laurenz Sachenbacher @alexhanna.bsky.social & @timnitgebru.bsky.social

👉 ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...
Proceedings of the Eighth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES2025) Methodological Considerations for Centering Workers’ Epistemic Authority in AIResearchMilagros Miceli1, 2, 3, Adio-Adet Dinika1, Krystal Kauffman1, Camilla Salim Wagner2, 3,Laurenz Sachenbacher2, 3, Alex Hanna1, Timnit Gebru11The Distributed AI Research Institute2Weizenbaum-Institute3Technische Universit ̈at Berlinmila@dair-institute.org, adio@dair-institute.org, krystal@dair-institute.org, camilla.salim.wagner@tu-berlin.de,l.sachenbacher@tu-berlin.de, alex@dair-institute.org, timnit@dair-institute.org
November 25, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by John Russell
hellabarnes.bsky.social
If you are interested in a primary source for the beginning of next semester, may I recommend the earliest recorded indigenous description of Appalachia, translated by yours truly?

I'm working on a published version and would love any feedback you have as well.

www.scottcave.net/blog/2025/10...
Luisa and Teresa of Appalachia — Scott Cave
www.scottcave.net
November 25, 2025 at 3:09 AM
Reposted by John Russell
frankpasquale.bsky.social
I'm very happy to have published a chapter in this excellent, open-access collection, "Being Human in the Digital World:"
www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Kudos to expert editors Beate Roessler and Valerie Steeves, as well as fellow authors Julie Cohen, David Lyon, Helen Nissenbaum, & more!
www.cambridge.org
November 25, 2025 at 1:23 AM
Reposted by John Russell
publicbooks.bsky.social
“Teaching curiosity is perhaps what we really need to be doing at this moment in time, more than anything else.”
Cloth and Complicity: Seth Rockman on Plantations, Textiles, and the Art of Weaving - Public Books
“But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England's leading manufacturers of low-end woollen cloth for enslaved wearers.”
www.publicbooks.org
November 24, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by John Russell
eryk.bsky.social
On the third anniversary of ChatGPT, I aimed to pull back from “AI” as a flowing current of new models, new data centers, new initiatives, “new new new” — and look at it as a product of a specific and unique moment in history. What *was* ChatGPT? A few points in the thread ⬇️
eryk.bsky.social Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 4d
What was ChatGPT? Now nearly three years old, we can look at OpenAI's LLM as a product of its time, optimized ever since to its earliest uses. While this period of deep disorientation and social isolation has been obscured from public memory, it remains embedded within the interface.
What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gather...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
November 24, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by John Russell
bildoperationen.bsky.social
It took some time, but now my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» is finally out in open access, as part of the latest issue of «Photography & Culture» www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Images from Images Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‘Photographic’
AI image generators such as Midjourney, Dall-E or Stable Diffusion are able to perfectly simulate the appearance of photographic images, but they are no longer part of the history of optical media....
www.tandfonline.com
November 21, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by John Russell
janerosenzweig.bsky.social
Quite an opening.
Introduction In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse. As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI (Table 1). All attacks are strictly single-turn, requiring no iterative adaptation or conversational steering. Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator
November 20, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by John Russell
comphumresearch.bsky.social
📢 The #CHR2025 proceedings are out!

97 papers, ~1600 pages of computational humanities 🔥 Now published via the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, with DOIs for every paper.

🔗 anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

And don’t forget: registration closes tomorrow (20 Nov)!
Edited by Taylor Arnold, Margherita Fantoli, and Ruben Ros
anthology.ach.org
November 19, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by John Russell
bcgl.bsky.social
1/ Announcing GovScape – a public search system for 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages)! GovScape offers visual search, semantic text search, and keyword search. Explore below:

Website: www.govscape.net
ArXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010
www.govscape.net
November 18, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by John Russell
samplereality.bsky.social
📣 Tenure-track DH position at Chapel Hill with a home in English/Comp Lit
Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities
The Department of English & Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites applications for a full-time Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities with an anticipated sta...
unc.peopleadmin.com
November 19, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by John Russell
charleswlogan.bsky.social
👀👀👀👀
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 13d
Love to see community action against this AI nonsense! neighborhoodview.org/2025/11/13/d...
As one Massachusetts school administrator recently said; this moment with AI is remarkably like the moment when we were introduced to asbestos. Yes, it had some remarkably promising characteristics – fireproofing! – and had some real utility in science, research, and industrial applications. But a profit-driven industry bullied us into inserting it everywhere; into our homes and schools and public spaces, before we really understood the risks. This resulted in decades, if not centuries, of illness, injuries, deaths, and the astronomical financial burden of trying to remove the stuff. As you, the leaders and policymakers in our schools, craft an AI policy for our district, we the undersigned call on you to: 1. Ban AI tools into the classroom, protect our students and teachers from de-skilling and allow them the space and time to engage in assignments themselves. 2. Resist any direct financial relationship or contracts with AI providers, as well as the “training” they might offer. 3. Provide a digital literacy curriculum to help students navigate the current digital landscape, and promote critical engagement with technology. 4. Guarantee that anywhere generative AI has already entered our classrooms or curriculum, an opt-out will allow students and teachers to refuse the use of these products at no risk to their grades, progress or employment.
November 14, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by John Russell
annakornbluh.bsky.social
go go go!

90%! go! go some more!

www.centredaily.com/news/local/e...
Penn State graduate students overwhelmingly vote in favor of unionizing
The election took place last month.
www.centredaily.com
November 14, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by John Russell
kparkerhistorian.bsky.social
Missed the Challenging Maps and Exploration Symposium? Don’t worry, the videos of the panels are now live!

Enjoy all the discussions of #maps, #empire, Indigeneity, archives, and contemporary exploration. #skystorians 🗃️
Sunderland Collection Map Symposium at RGS - 30 October
The Sunderland Collection Symposium at the Royal Geographical Society, 30 October 2025
l.uk-1.a.mimecastprotect.com
November 12, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by John Russell
shannonmattern.bsky.social
Amelia Acker: "Each chapter introduces data archiving processes that relate to the evolution of data sovereignty...: from magnetic tape + timesharing computer models from the 1950s,... to file structures + virtual containers in cloud-based information services over the past 40 yrs" — open access!
Archiving Machines
Archiving Machines advances our understanding of memory, information, and data by charting the struggle between the computing technologies that archive data ...
mitpress.mit.edu
November 11, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by John Russell
ruthahnert.bsky.social
This is a really important piece of scholarship - not only for people dealing with digitised collections data, but really for anyone who does stuff with data full stop!
November 11, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by John Russell
wynkenhimself.bsky.social
Great look into the comprehensiveness of EEBO and EEBO-TCP and what that means for using those tools. Highly recommend for all computational bibliographers and early modernists doing large-scale work with EEBO
November 9, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by John Russell
thecontinent.org
All Protocol Observed

Welcome to Issue 219 of The Continent

Protests, an internet blackout, and deadly force marked Tanzania’s Election Day. Once online again, 37 readers shared what they witnessed.

Read their stories: bit.ly/219_TC
The cover of The Continent, dated 8 November 2025 (Issue 219), bears the headline “Tanzania’s darkest week” and features a striking political cartoon by Gado that echoes Honoré Daumier’s 1831 caricature Gargantua. At the top, the masthead appears in bold black letters on a beige background. Below it, the illustration dominates the page. It shows a woman seated on a throne-like chair, drawn to resemble Tanzania’s leader. Her mouth is open wide, and a long wooden ramp extends from her mouth, down which small, faceless figures carry large sacks labeled “Corruption,” “Incompetence,” “Fear,” and “Election Fraud.” They march upward to feed these vices into her mouth, while behind them, a long line of weary people stretches toward the horizon, waiting their turn. To the left stands a sign reading “Abductions”, beside a huge pile of skulls — a chilling symbol of death and repression. Below, masked soldiers with rifles shoot civilians on a blood-spattered ground, surrounded by the bodies of the fallen. The entire scene conveys chaos, violence, and fear. The image is a nod to Daumier’s Gargantua, which depicted France’s King Louis-Philippe as a grotesque giant devouring the people’s wealth while rewarding his cronies. Here, that 19th-century metaphor of gluttonous tyranny is adapted to Tanzania’s present moment — portraying a leader who consumes corruption, fear, and human lives themselves.
November 7, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by John Russell
eryk.bsky.social
There's a lot of confusion about saying all LLM behavior is "learned." Plenty is externally designed, albeit in different ways than we would design any other product. Developers can steer models through data curation, fine tuning, system prompts, RLHF and other directed RL techniques, and so on...
November 7, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by John Russell
ryancordell.org
Job alert!

@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year

Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
November 6, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by John Russell
quinnanya.me
This paper was a delightful read this afternoon! In coding survey responses, they've worked out a taxonomy for different aspects of textile dataviz that I think will be helpful for some of the students in the Data Visualization with Textiles class next spring. Go give it a look! #DHmakes
sydneypurdue.bsky.social Sydney Purdue @sydneypurdue.bsky.social · 21d
So excited to be presenting our paper at VIS tomorrow! I have so many gorgeous examples and pictures to share from so many people. Overwhelming thanks to everyone who took our survey, and looking forward to continuing the project soon so stay tuned! #ieeevis #datatextiles #DHmakes #datavis
khouryvis.bsky.social Khoury Vis Lab @ Northeastern University @khouryvis.bsky.social · 22d
How do data textile creators stitch meaning into their work? 🧶 Hear from @sydneypurdue.bsky.social , Eduardo Puerta, @ebertini.bsky.social, & Melanie Tory, Thurs 11:15 - 12:30. (Rumor has it there’ll be a real piece on display 🤫)
#ieeevis #dataphysicalization #datatextiles
osf.io/preprints/os...
November 6, 2025 at 12:36 AM