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plach.bsky.social
pam lach
@plach.bsky.social
2.6K followers 2.2K following 2.1K posts
Digital Humanities Librarian/DH Center Director living/working on unceded Kumeyaay land (San Diego). US historian (PhD) + info scientist (MSIS). Podcast teacher. Still masking. Dogs are my jam. @ach.bsky.social‬ Co-VP. she/her
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plach.bsky.social
pam lach @plach.bsky.social · Oct 11
I love my colleagues and collaborators. But I HATE their file names.
Cartoon of two stick figures, one sitting at a computer and the other standing behind them, looking over their shoulder and saying "Oh my God." A callout appears over the computer showing a long list of similarly named untitled documents. The caption reads: Pro tip: Never look in someone else's documents folder.
plach.bsky.social
Every #DigitalHumanities space should have a disco ball IMO. In all seriousness, what better way is there to emphasize the importance of play and infuse joy in our work? 🪩👯
plach.bsky.social pam lach @plach.bsky.social · 15h
Years after being gifted a disco ball, our #DigitalHumanities Center is now ready for a dance party (we just need some lights)🕺
A large mirrored disco ball rotates on a motorized tripod in our DH Center. Proof of concept of the disco ball being lit up, using a phone’s flashlight. The ball casts patterns of light on the tiled ceiling
November 26, 2025 at 1:40 AM
plach.bsky.social
Years after being gifted a disco ball, our #DigitalHumanities Center is now ready for a dance party (we just need some lights)🕺
A large mirrored disco ball rotates on a motorized tripod in our DH Center. Proof of concept of the disco ball being lit up, using a phone’s flashlight. The ball casts patterns of light on the tiled ceiling
November 26, 2025 at 12:22 AM
plach.bsky.social
After so many days of rain, this little guy is happy to once again nap in the sun
A black dog with a light brown beard wearing a grey turtleneck sweater with red and blue stripes rests on a grey patio chair. His head is resting on the metal chair arm, a look of utter bliss on his sleepy face.
November 23, 2025 at 6:35 PM
plach.bsky.social
What an honor to share my 1st #DHmakes project w @scholarslab.bsky.social! This is a career high for me. It’s been so enriching exploring the world of data physicalization + critical making. I’ve discovered a crafty side I didn’t know I had AND it’s been transforming how I teach #DigitalHumanities 😍
literaturegeek.bsky.social Amanda Wyatt! Visconti @literaturegeek.bsky.social · 3d
Thanks @plach.bsky.social! for letting @scholarslab.bsky.social display a poster of her 1st yearlong data physicalization: embroidery+beading representing her insomnia, wakefulness, sleep over the course of 2024 (check her #DHmakes posts for 2025's version, w/iterated method+data granularity)
Photo of a wall exhibit label and poster showing a photograph of Pam Lach's 2024 "Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization", a tight circular spiral of embroidered Z's in white and various blue threads, with orange and clear beads, on a black-blue galaxy-ish fabric background. The poster text says "Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization / By Pamella Lach (2024) / A yearlong, embroidered visualization of personal data: nightly sleep amounts (thread color) & types of wakefulness/insomnia (bead color)." Exhibit label text in next photo's alt text. Photo of an exhibit label that says: "#DHmakes Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization Pamella Lach 2024 Materials: thread, fabric, beads Methods: embroidery, physical data visualization The photographed embroidery on this poster is a data "physicalization": data visualized via physical means, such as this project's hand-embroidered fabric. Data artist & digital humanities scholar Pamella Lach added stitches throughout 2024, tracking the entire year's data on her sleep & insomnia. Thread color represents quantities of sleep; bead color represents type of wakefulness and insomnia. A 2025 version builds on this method with added complexity & granularity of how data was captured & how those details are represented visually. "#DHmakes" is both a hashtag & a community of scholarly practice. On social media, folks in digital humanities, libraries, academia, and other learning-work who craft or make use the tag to share everything from failed first attempts at new hobby methods, to advanced professional work. Beyond social media, #DHmakes is a community that's published peer-reviewed journal articles, run scholarly conference panels & workshops, hosted a public methodological talk series, built a group project representing many kinds of data art & craft, & more. Read more about #DHmakes & how to get involved via the QR code. Scholars' Lab's Makerspace can help you explore making, crafts, & building-both as means of teaching & research, and for pleasure, advocacy, & art."
November 23, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by pam lach
literaturegeek.bsky.social
Thanks @plach.bsky.social! for letting @scholarslab.bsky.social display a poster of her 1st yearlong data physicalization: embroidery+beading representing her insomnia, wakefulness, sleep over the course of 2024 (check her #DHmakes posts for 2025's version, w/iterated method+data granularity)
Photo of a wall exhibit label and poster showing a photograph of Pam Lach's 2024 "Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization", a tight circular spiral of embroidered Z's in white and various blue threads, with orange and clear beads, on a black-blue galaxy-ish fabric background. The poster text says "Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization / By Pamella Lach (2024) / A yearlong, embroidered visualization of personal data: nightly sleep amounts (thread color) & types of wakefulness/insomnia (bead color)." Exhibit label text in next photo's alt text. Photo of an exhibit label that says: "#DHmakes Sleep/Insomnia Data Physicalization Pamella Lach 2024 Materials: thread, fabric, beads Methods: embroidery, physical data visualization The photographed embroidery on this poster is a data "physicalization": data visualized via physical means, such as this project's hand-embroidered fabric. Data artist & digital humanities scholar Pamella Lach added stitches throughout 2024, tracking the entire year's data on her sleep & insomnia. Thread color represents quantities of sleep; bead color represents type of wakefulness and insomnia. A 2025 version builds on this method with added complexity & granularity of how data was captured & how those details are represented visually. "#DHmakes" is both a hashtag & a community of scholarly practice. On social media, folks in digital humanities, libraries, academia, and other learning-work who craft or make use the tag to share everything from failed first attempts at new hobby methods, to advanced professional work. Beyond social media, #DHmakes is a community that's published peer-reviewed journal articles, run scholarly conference panels & workshops, hosted a public methodological talk series, built a group project representing many kinds of data art & craft, & more. Read more about #DHmakes & how to get involved via the QR code. Scholars' Lab's Makerspace can help you explore making, crafts, & building-both as means of teaching & research, and for pleasure, advocacy, & art."
November 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM
plach.bsky.social
Nothing tops a winter sunset in SoCal 😍
Sunset facing southwest. Puffy clouds glow bright pink, framed by various trees in silhouette Puffy clouds glow orange in the setting sun above the tops of trees
November 23, 2025 at 12:56 AM
Reposted by pam lach
notalegalrecord.net
I used to handle interlibrary loans for a public library. ILL is a magnificent expression of the idea that readers deserve books, and books deserve readers. It’s libraries everywhere pooling their resources for the benefit of everyone.

Killing IMLS could have killed ILL.

This is great news. 📚
November 22, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by pam lach
danmcquillan.bsky.social
Resisting GenAI and Big Tech in Higher Education - Tuesday 25th Nov, free registration, great panel, big focus on climate justice. Register here: lmula.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Resisting GenAI and Big Tech in Higher Education Tuesday 25th November 2025 8am - 9:30am PST | 11am -12:30pm EST | 4pm - 5:30pm GMT | 5pm - 6:30pm CET Virtual on Zoom – REGISTER HERE: http://bit.ly/4qE27dB Generative AI is permeating higher education in many different ways—it is increasingly embedded in university work and life, even if we don’t want to use it. But people are also sounding the alarm: Gen AI is disrupting learning and undermining trust in the integrity of academic work, while big tech’s energy consumption, use of water, and rapid expansion of data centers are exacerbating ecological crises. What can we do? How do we resist? Come learn about the environmental, social, economic, and political threats that AI poses and how we can individually and collectively resist and refuse. Learn about how some are challenging the narrative of inevitability. Join this interactive discussion with international scholars and activists on resisting GenAI and big tech in higher education. Inputs from multiple scholar-activists include: Christoph Becker (University of Toronto, Canada), Mary Finley-Brook (University of Richmond, USA), Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Sinéad Sheehan (University of Galway, Ireland), Jennie Stephens (National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland), and Paul Lachapelle (Montana State University, USA). This event will be recorded and is co-sponsored by: Climate Justice Universities Union and Climate Campus Network
November 21, 2025 at 2:02 PM
Reposted by pam lach
rhappe.bsky.social
I keep thinking the *process* of researching is as important as what you discover.

It forces you to consider what impacts and relates to what you are looking for and the context of what you find impacts its meaning.

Knowledge is not a box of cereal that you can just grab a handful of. #KM
angryblacklady.blacksky.app Imani Gandied Yams @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 5d
Well slap my ass and call me Suzy
us.theconversation.com The Conversation U.S. @us.theconversation.com · 5d
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 1:40 PM
plach.bsky.social
Anyone else frustrated w the way univ admin seemingly co-opted the notion of being “values driven”? They love to tell us we’re doing things rooted in our mission/values but that rings hollow to me—corporate speak they deploy instead of supporting meaningful, slow, small-scale, people-centered work
November 21, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Reposted by pam lach
littlebadger.bsky.social
This week, I withdrew from a speaking engagement at a public university because they sent me a list of prohibited “words & concepts.” I will not humor this censorship. It does a disservice to the stories I’m discussing & the audience, who deserve unfettered access to information & conversation.
“Prohibited words and concepts: Equity, diversity, & inclusion; anti-racism; Bias; Critical race theory; implicit bias; oppression; intersectionality; prohibited discriminatory practices; racial privilege; promoting stereotypes based on personal identity characteristics.”
November 20, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by pam lach
booksofm.com
If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.
November 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM
plach.bsky.social
Funny how, in our time of institutional austerity in which our instructional budget is getting slashed, we can’t hire more faculty/staff, and course caps are rising, there’s still plenty of money for AI initiatives 🤔
November 20, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by pam lach
quinnanya.me
Happy publication day to possibly my favorite book chapter I've ever written, "Stop Lying to Yourself: Collective Delusion and Digital Humanities Grant Funding"!

Ever notice how once you get one grant, you end up looking for another & do things you never actually wanted? Yeah. It's about that. 🪰🕷️🐴
November 20, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by pam lach
mjdonnay.bsky.social
📣 Really proud to announce the publication of Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship, an #OpenAccess collection of essays co-edited with @amsichani.bsky.social and published by @uolpress.bsky.social that examines the role of failure in #DH and research more broadly

@sas-news.bsky.social
Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship - University of London Press
Failure is ordinary. From technological failures and computational obsolescence to rejected applications and challenging collaborations, failure is an unavoidable part of any scholarly endeavour. This...
uolpress.co.uk
November 20, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by pam lach
roopikarisam.bsky.social
Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.
November 19, 2025 at 1:03 PM
plach.bsky.social
AI is a bubble but by all means let’s create a high-paying administrative position for it 👀
plach.bsky.social pam lach @plach.bsky.social · 7d
Not my alma mater creating a Vice Provost for AI and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer 🙃. Bonus: they poached the Dean of the the School of Library & Information Sciences for the position. Tell me again that the new school won’t be an AI school 🫠
November 18, 2025 at 6:52 PM
plach.bsky.social
Not my alma mater creating a Vice Provost for AI and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer 🙃. Bonus: they poached the Dean of the the School of Library & Information Sciences for the position. Tell me again that the new school won’t be an AI school 🫠
November 18, 2025 at 6:45 PM
plach.bsky.social
I've been working w a Chicana/Chicano Studies class this semester. They're develping StoryMaps on Latinx/e foodways. In today's opening discussion, the instructor reflected on how our DH Center is intentionally designed to facilitate learning as an example of how we interact with built environments🤩
November 18, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Reposted by pam lach
kst.bsky.social
The Mapping Deportations project has an animated timeline of who gets deported in the US. In the 1910s the US starts deporting more Mexicans than any other group & doesn't let up through the present day. You can follow which groups are the targets of immigrant panics pretty clearly.
Mapping Deportations – U.S. Immigration Control since 1790
mappingdeportations.com
November 16, 2025 at 9:23 PM
plach.bsky.social
Thanks to the fantastic team at @asulincolncenter.bsky.social, esp Jordan & @emgrumbach.bsky.social, for a wonderful visit. It was incredible being in community w you, exploring the possibilities for digital storytelling in times of crisis. The best part: meeting Liz, my DH bestie, in person😍
plach.bsky.social pam lach @plach.bsky.social · 13d
How do we tell stories in times of crisis? Join me at 2pm MST today, in person at ASU or on Zoom, to consider "The Stories We Still Need: Podcasting for Urgent Times"

asuevents.asu.edu/event/storie...
November 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by pam lach
iansociologo.bsky.social
If you haven't joined your local AAUP, now is a great time to do so.
veenadubal.bsky.social Veena Dubal @veenadubal.bsky.social · 11d
BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!!

We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org
November 15, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Reposted by pam lach
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by pam lach
olivia.science
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 11:42 AM
Reposted by pam lach
thetattooedprof.bsky.social
Texas A&M is no longer a "university". It's a Vacation Bible School with a football team and parking problems.
brookenewman.bsky.social Brooke Newman @brookenewman.bsky.social · 12d
Message to all faculty: your expertise is no longer trusted or valued at this so-called “university.”
A thread by an A&M professor describing how the new rules will impact faculty. Syllabi must be fed into AI to be checked for content not aligned with approved syllabi; students will be encouraged to report faculty for inaccurate content; and young people are now being told they get to decide what a professor should teach.
November 14, 2025 at 12:49 PM