James Truitt
@linguistory.bsky.social
95 followers 37 following 180 posts
Digital archivist at Swarthmore College. Testing out bluesky; more active on Mastodon as @[email protected] Good at regular expressions; still working on irregular ones.
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linguistory.bsky.social
I'm so close to being done with grad school I can taste it.

Just four more weeks, 2.5 more statements of competency, and an intro and conclusion to my portfolio. Then I can coast through my metadata class to graduation
Reposted by James Truitt
tedmccormick.bsky.social
University leaders: [terminate programs, close campuses, cave in to political pressure from demagogues]

Faculty, students, staff: you’re killing the university

Management consultants: looks like you got a real comms challenge here
Reposted by James Truitt
amandamull.bsky.social
There is a local hospital system here that does a gun safety PSA with the tag line “kids are safe when a gun is locked in one” and I just want to say that it’s important to hire good copywriters
Reposted by James Truitt
scottbot.bsky.social
I just received the sickest burn of my life.

My Afghan meal tonight arrived with two sauces, herb-based and yogurt-based. "What exactly are these?" I ask.

The waiter looks me straight in the eye, speaking slowly to be sure I understand. "That's green sauce," he points, "and that's white sauce."
Reposted by James Truitt
caitlindeangelis.bsky.social
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago



31
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.
Reposted by James Truitt
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
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.
Reposted by James Truitt
jedbrown.org
It is not "attribution and sourcing" to generate post-hoc citations that have not been read and did not inform the student's writing. Those should be regarded as fraudulent: artifacts testifying to human actions and thought that did not occur.
www.theverge.com/news/760508/...
For help with attribution and sourcing, Grammarly is releasing a citation finder agent that automatically generates correctly formatted citations backing up claims in a piece of writing, and an expert review agent that provides personalized, topic-specific feedback. Screenshot from Grammarly's demo of inserting a post-hoc citation.
https://www.grammarly.com/ai-agents/citation-finder
linguistory.bsky.social
Tempted to wrap up this whole section on research with "Without survey research, we never would have gotten the MPLP paper, and archivists might still be physically processing at the item or folder level today"

#GradSchool #GradSchoolGripes #MPLP
Reposted by James Truitt
ndrew.bsky.social
every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”
Reposted by James Truitt
conure.cc
the cost of denying another's humanity is paid with one's own
Reposted by James Truitt
scottbot.bsky.social
My life improved last year when I started pronouncing AI as the name Al (AL) in my head whenever I saw it. In case you need that.
Reposted by James Truitt
faisalhamadah.bsky.social
Non-ironically my favorite genre of writing these days is a syntactically awkward student paper that is nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
The palpable relief of reading a syntactically awkward student paper nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on after having to consume the stale cardboard generalities of a Chat GPT essay.
Reposted by James Truitt
thatandromeda.bsky.social
If I had so many RETVRN vibes I would also have read anything whatsoever about Julius Caesar, but perhaps that is just me
Reposted by James Truitt
emilymbender.bsky.social
Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem.

>>
Comment by Tom Diettrich on a linkedin post reading:

"You can't "test-in quality" in engineering; you can't "review-in quality" in research. We need incentives for people to do better research. Our system today assumes that 75% of submitted papers are low quality, and it is probably right (I'll bet it is higher). If this were a manufacturing organization, an 75% defect rate would result in bankruptcy. 

Imagine a world in which you could have an AI system check the correctness/quality of your paper. If your paper passed that bar, then it could be published (say, on arXiv). Subsequent human review could assess its importance to the field. 

In such a system, authors would be incentivized to satisfy the AI system. This will lead to searching for exploits in the AI system. A possible solution is to select the AI evaluator at random from a large pool and limit the number of permitted submissions. I imagine our colleagues in mechanism design can improve on this idea."

Original:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381685800549257216/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A7381685800549257216%2C7382628060044599296)&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7382628060044599296%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7381685800549257216)
Reposted by James Truitt
joshuaraclaw.com
It’s fun that in Yiddish a lokshn kugel (לאָקשן קוגל) is a noodle pudding but an erd kugel (ערד קוגל) is just the planet earth
linguistory.bsky.social
"Sometimes you don't have access to the LIS literature, or time to pick out the duds and synthesize the rest, and in those times 'what are other people doing' is often a good shortcut"
linguistory.bsky.social
Restraining myself from ending my portfolio section on doing lit reviews by saying "Okay, but forget that, as a practicing professional you need to read blogs and talk to people"

#GradSchool #GradSchoolGripes #MLIS
Reposted by James Truitt
anthonymoser.com
This is the thing about ai. The benefits are nebulous hypotheticals but the costs are very high and immediate
Reposted by James Truitt
pookleblinky.bsky.social
You'd get book 5 of a series at a yard sale, and then simply never find that series or even its author again for years.

Your reading *had* to be eclectic because you were stuck with whatever you had, and what you had was scrounged up like a post-apocalyptic scavenger.
linguistory.bsky.social
Like, my friends, aren't we just talking about data at this point?
linguistory.bsky.social
Just tried to find the Rules for Archival Description by googling "RAD Canadian." Needless to say it did not work
linguistory.bsky.social
Like, yes, TEI is an XML schema… but outside of a little header like HTML has, it's not really used for encoding metadata *about* a text, it's used for encoding the text itself.
linguistory.bsky.social
Discussions of metadata standards in my MLIS classes keep gesturing to TEI. I have used TEI, and would have said it's no more a metadata standard than HTML is. At first I thought it was just one prof being obtuse, but I keep seeing it (ex: scalar.usc.edu/works/intro-...). Am I missing something?