Joseph Jones
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jonesj.bsky.social
Joseph Jones
@jonesj.bsky.social
Librarian and Textician § Inopinum intactumque – Martianus Capella
The frivolous "ends" of formal schooling, as John Milton perceived in a pamphlet of 1644 addressed to Samuel Hartlib:
• Divinity • Law • State Affairs • dolce far niente
#outcomes
December 15, 2025 at 7:05 AM
Reposted by Joseph Jones
I really like the color and textures of this photo!

#278 taken 7:12 pm
#photography
#art
#abstract
#abalone
December 10, 2025 at 1:37 PM
@ayjay.bsky.social
———————
Enjoyed your "biography" of Book of Common Prayer
Looking forward to your "biography" of Paradise Lost
———————
oopsie alert to
@princetonupress.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Joseph Jones
“A Texas Still Life in Black and White”

Near Comanche, TX

#Scape #ClassicMono
November 7, 2025 at 5:28 PM
"whether caving is not endemic to every facet of the academic ecosystem" ... PS : this is not caving as in spelunking
#dorkakademia
It’s gothic nostalgia, isn’t it? All these shows about humanities profs with wood-paneled offices, fame, and enough autonomy to act like a diva. We’re doing it for the same reason cozy 1930s mysteries involved vicarages and viscounts with decaying mansions.
The Age of Unhinged-Professor Art
www.nytimes.com
October 19, 2025 at 4:48 AM
Happenstance know-nothing reading of
Fake Accounts / Lauren Oyler – 2021
———
Expecting jaded first-person narrator
to go subversive and to one-up
gauzy Felix after his preclusionary pop-off
———
Surprised to watch narrator spiral off
into trad & agentless oyly ponder
of self-subjection
———
#booksky
October 11, 2025 at 11:58 PM
Reposted by Joseph Jones
I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress.

Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...
September 11, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Joseph Jones
September 14, 2025 at 12:07 AM
"What we need now is
a history of collapse for the 99 per cent"
——————————
aeon.co/essays/the-g...
The great myth of empire collapse | Aeon Essays
Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides
aeon.co
August 10, 2025 at 9:47 PM
My review of
Why Religion Went Obsolete (2025)
—————————————————
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Aleph's review of Why Religion Went Obsolete
5/5: The purpose of this review is to extract a few nuggets and narrative strands from the massive surrounding overburden of numeric ore that an academic sociologist feels required to accrete.Genre ma...
www.goodreads.com
August 10, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Fun to see my experiential recollection
of the November 2024
turn to Bluesky
quantified
—————
doi.org/10.1016/j.jo...
Redirecting
doi.org
August 10, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Joseph Jones
New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky

rdcu.be/etk07

The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +
The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa
Nature Computational Science - Many humanists are skeptical of language models and concerned about their effects on universities. However, researchers with a background in the humanities are also...
rdcu.be
June 25, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Pungent page on persuasion
from Richard Russo
way back in 1997
#booksky
May 29, 2025 at 3:15 PM
"And since the only things that might be helpful are the things that cannot be said, I am without a strategy for the present circumstance."
William Henry Devereaux Jr
(as his creative writing seminar goes off the rails)
Chapter 9 of Straight Man / Richard Russo - 1997
#collegenovel #booksky
May 25, 2025 at 10:57 PM
In the dialectic of the academy
the supplicant purchaser
is seen to entwine with
the supplicant purveyor
at the vanishing point
of symbiotic stasis
May 15, 2025 at 5:26 AM
Ever more strongly suspecting
how spring 2025 will go down
in my personal history as the moment
where I regularly consider
what various AIs have to say
about new questions
arising for this librarian
towards the end of a lifetime
spent inside the question business
www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
Better at everything: how AI could make human beings irrelevant
The end of civilisation might look less like a war, and more like a love story. Can we avoid being willing participants in our own downfall?
www.theguardian.com
May 4, 2025 at 9:27 PM
… many artists say they are particularly concerned about AI’s ability to mimic certain styles, which artists have honed for years …

I howned mymesis
to the paint
of seaming so scharp
that I came to byleave
I was sum original
scissors-pasty romantiac

#whartz

www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
Viral AI-made art trends are making artists even more worried about their futures
ChatGPT-generated action figures and Studio Ghibli-inspired illustrations have dominated the internet in recent weeks, reigniting artists' concerns about their livelihoods.
www.nbcnews.com
April 25, 2025 at 9:48 PM
… I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit …
On Writing / Stephen King (born in 1947)
#booksky
April 13, 2025 at 9:22 PM
… The ‘easy’ way to go in academia today is to focus on simple(r) things – do what everyone can do, follow the steps of the ones who came before you, do some little, simplistic research that can be considered ‘just good enough’ to be ‘scientific’. …
aeon.co/essays/what-...
What it takes to be a glyph-breaker deciphering ancient languages | Aeon Essays
The heroic days of deciphering hieroglyphics and cuneiform make for great stories, but will we ever see that happen again?
aeon.co
April 11, 2025 at 10:40 PM
If you have a taste
for the ridiculous sublime
of anti-statist satire
hang out with Wang
astrapublishinghouse.com/product/gold...
#booksky
April 10, 2025 at 4:59 PM
L'origine du mal (2022)

... a Ripleyesque poser worms her toxic way into a fractured sort-of family that dwells in an isolated picturesque villa ... and sometimes she looks a lot like ... Donna Tartt ...

#filmsky #moviesky #cinema 🎬
April 2, 2025 at 3:08 AM
Cat's Eye Nebula
March 15, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Funny how « oneiric » is
so not a « dreamy » word
===
Έλληνες ≠ βάρβαροι
March 12, 2025 at 9:34 PM