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Sonja Drimmer

@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social

11K followers 910 following 4.7K posts

Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, UMass Amherst. http://sonjadrimmer.com/about-forte (She/her)

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · Apr 1

For the latest issue of Artforum I wrote about the culture of “AI” in my sector of academia, arguing that a focus on what it does distracts attention away from examining the exploitative conditions that the hopeful rhetoric of its promise upholds. www.artforum.com/features/gen...

MACHINE YEARNING

Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research.

www.artforum.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 14h

It does not. All it does is prevent Google from giving you its AI summaries. It doesn’t not provide you with slop generated webpages.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 14h

Right?!!

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 15h

It was so meaningful, it subscribed to the ethos of encouraging curiosity, and there were no strings attached whatsoever (at least not ones I was aware of as a student). Just money for books.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 15h

When I was in grad school a family donated to my dept $500/semester for each grad student to buy books from a local independent bookstore. I got to start my own library of books I could annotate and branch out into an area I wasn't originally studying (in which I ended up minoring). It was awesome.

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Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

Rachel Banner @ishmaelcallme.bsky.social · 16h

Written by a fellow PASSHE public regional prof, love to see it: “These are small but significant reminders that the university is not doomed to permanent privatization.”

Universities Are Selling Themselves Off Piece by Piece

American higher ed has become a mesh of corporate contracts and outsourced services. From dining halls to student records, private vendors now run many institutions’ most basic operations — atomizing ...

jacobin.com

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Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

audie verde @audieverde.bsky.social · 1d

I have been watching the devastating videos from friends and colleagues. Some folks are still missing in cold waters. The few news and info sources for locals are also the same ones being cut by federal funding. People should know this is happening

KTOO Public Media @ktoopublicmedia.bsky.social · 1d

The U.S. Coast Guard commander for Western Alaska compared the devastation in Southwest Alaska villages over the weekend to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

(From @alaskapublic.org)

Officials say storm 'completely devastated' Western Alaska communities

A Coast Guard commander recounts scenes of Alaskans swimming in floodwaters in the middle of the night, in search of debris to hold onto.

www.ktoo.org

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

Ha! It would definitely be a change of pace around here.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

Just bookmarking two or three trusted sites and using real cookbooks from now on. Good work, internet!

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

A fun fact is that you cannot search for recipes in Google anymore. All of the results will be slop. Same template for every recipe, random photo of a woman (always a woman!), dodgy instructions.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

I am wearing a housecoat with deep pockets. This too is excellent.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

I grew up not really believing that this is a thing people do.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

A friend is coming over to pick rosemary from our back garden for the dinner they’re making tonight and I feel like this is the coolest thing for me, someone who is living in a house for the first time in her life.

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Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

So Mayer @suchmayer.bsky.social · 2d

This is another form of censorship and book banning to my mind: you force an ersatz simplification on young readers while making the original harder & harder to obtain, then tell them the ersatz is better than the real thing (bc it is programmed propaganda pablum).

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

No, resurrecting the corpse of Anne Frank so 12-year-olds can gossip with her is not how you “make history come alive.” It’s how you destroy history so that someone can come in, rewrite it, and then author a future to their liking.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

I believe in you!

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

There I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint!

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

I mean, you’d have come so far.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

Around the 3lb mark I’d start to regret my decisions, but that wouldn’t stop me.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

Honestly 6.5lbs of gummies doesn’t sound outrageous to me. I could see myself eating that many sour patch kids, no problem.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I actually admire Pinder.

Dot Porter @leoba.bsky.social · 2d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

Where are your gloves?

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 5d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

Anne Trubek @atrubek.bsky.social · 2d

Whatcha reading?

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

Etter’s Ripe and Malm’s Fossil Capital.

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Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · Sep 2

Again, Google Scholar is a bad product. It is written by people who valorize computer science papers and preprints above all else. It regularly fucks up book citations. It won't allow transgender scholars to fix their old metadata. The team is led by a petulant man who refuses feedback.

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · Aug 31

I just did, as an experiment, a google scholar search on an important well-covered topic. It put an undergrad honors thesis as the #1 response. It's fine thesis (on a quick skim), but there are hundreds, thousands, of peer reviewed books and articles on this topic.

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Reposted by Sonja Drimmer

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 2d

We need to stop using Scholar yesterday.

Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 2d

I weep.

Google Scholar Homepage with an AI assistant

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you, Eileen!

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you for sharing!

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