Posts!
2026 was the summer of ice cream. Where we ate it; how I made it; what we made; and how not to cook!
We went to Europe – Lithuania and Germany – in June, to visit colleagues and to attend the By the Book Publishing Studies conference. Here are some reflections on the trip, and thoughts (again) on scale in publishing.
Some thoughts leading to a panel presentation I’ll be doing at the Thinking Through Printing Symposium in Toronto this June. This is yet another attempt at articulating the ‘imaginary text’ idea
Some musings about the I in AI, and what we are prepared to allow that to mean. I try to frame it in terms of relationality and evolution over time.
Earlier this year I attended an all-day symposium on ‘Teaching and Learning with AI’ hosted by my Faculty. I was left with many feels, which I’ve attempted to articulate here. Much of this isn’t so much about ‘AI’ itself as what I’m calling the ‘pop culture of AI’ and where it’s taking us.
Updated for 2025, I’m sharing my gluten-free bread recipe, which I’ve been making weekly for about three years now. This is perfected and refined, and I think pretty damn good.
An update and rewrite of my basic article-typesetting Typst template, for making nice-looking PDFs with Pandoc and markdown. This version works with Typst v0.13 and Pandoc 3.6.
This is a long, rambling post in which I try to sort out how giant ‘long-tail’ platforms like Spotify occupy a particular role in a larger cultural plurality. And the perils of forgetting that there is a larger context. (Updated Aug 1)
A deep repost… I dug this out and posted it again, though it was written originally in 2013 or so, because the idea keeps coming back to me.
Yet another reflection on the experience of cycling among cars, inspired by a piece by John Watson on the cycle blog/website The Radavist. This is more about my experience of cycling than my experience of cars and drivers, but there’s some of that too.
In which I find myself returning to an early-2000s paradigm of client-server apps instead of the web, because the web today is not the web of yesterday.
My last post on Typst for a bit, I promise. This is an attempt to do a basic tutorial on producing nice PDFs from markdown, using Pandoc and Typst.
More adventures in open-source typesetting with Typst. This time: typesetting an actual book, with open-source tools. Plus: ghosts, dandies, and beheaded queens!
I want to sing a bit of praise for our heatpump. It’s two years since we’ve had it, and I was reflecting today on how much I appreciate its quiet, stable service to our home. People wonder whether these things will do the trick, so here I offer up my experience.
In honour of International Women’s Day, a review of Nancy Stock-Allen’s excellent biography of type designer Carol Twombly, whose career spanned the whole first period of digital typography.
This coming June, at the DHSI, I’m renewing my course: Text Processing Techniques and Traditions – or, Why the History of Computing Matters to DH. In which we zoom in on the continuities between print culture and modern computing, rather than seeing these as distinct lineages separated by a conceptual break. While re-writing the course, I wrote a short reflection on what it’s about.
I have been playing with Typst, a new, open-source typesetting tool that replaces LaTeX and also plays very nicely with modern digital publishing pipelines. In this post I offer some potted history and some reflections on why it might matter.
To satisfy my obsession with the weather, I made a little Javascript visualization of Environment Canada’s weather data: it creates a nice chart summarizing temperatures and precipitation over a year. Here’s the write-up.
I thought I’d have a go at some music criticism after listening to this album for the first time in about a decade. Keep Your Silver Shined is Virginia-based folksinger Devon Sproule’s third studio album, from 2007. I was very much enamoured of it when it was new, and listening to it again now I find it’s not only held up, but has even improved with changing contexts.
The Mellon Foundation invited me to their “all-projects” meeting in New York this fall, bringing together the Public Knowledge program’s grantees to report out briefly on their work on scholarly communications and digital monographs.
An old friend and I did a road trip around the Olympic Peninsula and talked of many things.
Why write? A long and winding rant exploring the idea of writing in our day and age, with views on LLMs, the humanities, the fediverse, and various other things.
This fall I’m on sabbatical and it’s time for me to talk about one of my major projects this coming year: the digital remediation of SFU’s world-class collection of 15th- and 16th-century editions from the press of Aldus Manutius, the foremost publisher of the Italian renaissance.
For Labour Day, I offer my well-evolved gluten-free bread recipe. I’ve been making (and tweaking) this weekly since 2020, and it’s pretty damn good now: a blend of oats, buckwheat, tapioca, and sorghum, held together with psyllium husk. All good ingredients, good for you, and entirely yummy.
On the occasion of—well, on the occasion of a bunch of things, but for starters—learning of Penguin’s publication (in 2002) of a new translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I began reading Proust, for real, this year.
Tree of Heaven. Ghetto Palm. Ailanthus altissima. It turns out I’ve been living under, and around, these notorious and beautiful trees for years. Recently I learned to see them, and to appreciate their incredible determination to survive, no matter how hostile the ground.
I was recently asked about what led me to the Digital Humanities in the first place? I realized the serious answer to that question is MOOing, back in the 90s. It’s not something I’ve thought much about in recent years, but I thought it was worth writing about now. Part one of at least two…
Mekka Okerke asked, “Do bicycles create empathy? Or do people that care about other people, tend to care about bikes?” An interesting question, but to answer it, we need to address the depth of car culture today.
It took some brain-numbing trial and error trying to get the remote git repo on my Reclaim server to become the deployment site folder on my website build locally, so that then I could build this site directly into it and have that be the actual site for deployment.
Welcome to my new blog. This is built using Eleventy, using as simple and low-tech an approach I could muster: markdown content, a handful of templates, and a simple git push direct to my webserver (at Reclaim Hosting, natch).