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fivefteditrix.bsky.social
Freelance editor, mostly of scholarly things; v. occasional feral Victorianist. Focusing on the mournful signage.
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UIP is looking for a new publicist -- could it be you⁉️ illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

I'm sure many of you have already seen this newish preprint on the deleterious cognitive effects of using AI for writing tasks, but just in case: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088.... If you've been paying attention, you know/can intuit a lot of it, but it's something tangible w/ which to counter enthusiasts.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Are they, like, holding out for E. Gordon Gee, or what?

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Speaking of which: We at Fortress Press are eager to read (with human eyes 👀) proposals including but not limited to: late antique and medieval Christian history; Jewish Studies; Islamic Studies; and Religious Studies broadly conceived. Please reach out if you’re working on a project!

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

OUP, btw, was the first of the large UK UPs to cut its in-house copy editors. This was and remains a strong signal of its general attitude to quality assurance, imo. People need to understand that as publishing labour goes, so go their own publishing processes, and choose their options accordingly.

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

When I say "please don't publish with the big British houses if you can help it, because they're going hard for LLM nonsense that disrespects everyone's labour and expertise," this is the kind of nonsense I mean (h/t @shannanclark.bsky.social): www.alpsp.org/news-publica...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Co-signing! That people commonly make this claim is, of course, partly the fault of institutions that pressure scholars to frame every bit of writing they do as high stakes, a novel "intervention," instead of treating scholarship as the accretive process it is. But it's still a silly tack to take.

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Among other things, this thread is useful for dispelling the persistent assumption that university presses are out here making a killing because they're pricing paperbacks ten dollars higher than folks might like. . . . Please do read for a view of the actual economics.

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

It's rough being a humanities editor rn. At a conference last weekend, someone asked if, that being so, I was thinking of diversifying into business. I said no: for one thing I'd spent 10 yrs on it. For another, it feels vital now to support humanist scholarship people can teach & read & learn from.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

The hist and lit depts at my alma mater have retained unfashionable bib & methods course requirements at honours undergrad and MA levels partly for this reason. As Dr. Gower says downthread, that doesn't solve the AI problem, but it does mean those depts deal w/ fewer AI misconduct cases than others

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

One reason the "oh, but we need to make our work accessible to the public" line often taken by institutional humanists annoys me is that it presumes "the public" needs things streamlined when in fact there are plenty like Mom who actually enjoy meeting this work in its original form & terminology.*

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Trying to find a suitably gentle way of explaining to an author that they might be able to fight me on suggested stylistic adjustments, but they cannot really fight The Chicago Manual of Style.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Early reviews of @nathankhensley.bsky.social's latest are in: my mother calls it "brain-straining" (complimentary) on a level w/ A Thousand Plateaus

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

It's time for me to embarrass myself by putting this out there: if your college or university in the greater Los Angeles area needs an instructor for anything to do with music history or medieval studies, I'm available to teach this fall.

submitted 18 days ago • 2 comments