I’ve just completed a period of intense conferencing. Three in-person conferences in five weeks. Plus a number of Zoom talks on top of it. For me, it was wonderfully social and intellectual. In addition to getting to meet and see work by a new generation of grad students and assistant profs, whom I’d not “discovered” …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
3 June 2023: We apologize for the interruption
I’d been noticing that a subset of the substack crew would use their weekly social media posts as the basis for blogging. That sounded nice. I missed blogging! Then I went on vacation, came back and the semester turned into a sprint, and I stopped posting much on social media. So I guess I’ll just …
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24 Feb 2023
Starter Pack I now have a starter pack I send to welcome BIPOC people, especially femmes, who are questioning whether they might be autistic, filled with essays, memes, hashtags, and online assessment tools. Many people with all kinds of disabilities are doing the same thing, even when we also pursue an official diagnosis—the first hints …
10 Feb 2023
New Text Here’s a new interview with me about Diminished Faculties. And I have a newish piece with Mehak Sawhney on machine listening and the will to datafy. I’ll get it up on the site, but if you’re at a university, your library should get Kalfou. Happy to email PDFs to people, too. Just ask. …
3 Feb 2023
Let’s get back to it. There’s catching up to do but in the meantime, I invite you to join me in the middle. Here are some thoughts from the past week. Reproducibility As part of my Interfaces seminar this term, I am having students do their projects around a process I called “hermeneutic reverse-engineering” (this …
It’s been awhile
Today I returned to my office at McGill for the first time since February 2020. There was stuff in the fridge that I’d left in 2020. The most frightening thing was some store bought hummus that had not developed any visible weird molds on it. I did not taste it–it is almost more disturbing that …
McGill faculty: if you don’t provide Covid accommodations to your disabled, high-risk, or ill students, nobody will
Here are some things concerned faculty ought to know about McGill’s return to campus happening next week (or in three weeks, depending). Faculty need to step up and be the ones to provide accommodation for students who need it. The university is NOT currently accommodating students who are high risk or who live with people …