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On the whole, I’d like this blog to be about more than this blog, but today I am indulging a bit. I want to talk about how I write em dashes. Such a simple thing, yet in a Markdown authoring environment, it is not simple, at least when I am the author. I prefer to press the hyphen key twice to...

This is how I explain my industry to people outside it. Academic publishing is pretty monopolistic. In a lot of fields, academics more or less have to publish in certain journals to get attention and security, and most of those journals are still owned by big companies that charge extortionate...

I wrote the first half of what follows—my perspectives—before I did any systematic reading. I wanted to capture my state of mind as a teacher and programmer who is skeptical of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), because I was curious if that perspective would change. Then I read fifteen...

Python is lovely to write and tricky to install. As a beginner, every time I reinstalled Python, I would get into a bramble of environment variables, bash profile scripts, and Python helpers like pyenv, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper, and pip. But eventually I figured out a way I like and that...

Before I started working on web applications, I mainly used Python to curate digital collections and metadata. Some people call it data wrangling, as if academic libraries were Texas cattle ranches full of mooing CSVs. Others call it data manipulation, data management, or just scripting. I am...

Many people working in academic libraries and university presses find themselves adjacent to both tech and the academic humanities. In particular, they may work closely with a team that uses Git and GitHub to manage projects that include text in English or another human language. While Git and...