Please share this CFP!

https://go.illinois.edu/BuildingaBookLabSymposiumCFP

We’re hosting a symposium 20-21 May 2025 at Skeuomorph Press on "Building Book Labs: Hands-On Research & Teaching in Book History"—we’re looking for talks, discussion topics, & hands-on activities—& we especially welcome novel formats or session ideas. More at the link!

(Thus far) the symposium is co-sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, the University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library, UIUC's Humanities Research Institute, UIUC's English Department, Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, & the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab.

As we were planning we learned that other colleagues around the continent were planning very similar events for the same time, so joined forces & now anticipate turning this into a symposium series that will run for 2-3 years at several institutions—more on those ambitions at the bottom of the CFP.

The year is 3129. Humanity is extinct. The last LG SmartFridge is desperately emailing its last owner that they are low on orange juice. The satellites that are still left, their orbits slowly decaying over millennia, dutifully relay the message. The automated "away from office" response turns on, as it always does, notifying the refrigerator that it's owner will likely return to the office in 3-5 business days.

Somewhere in what used to be called Ohio, a pack of roombas, their local wind turbines giving out and creaking to a halt, begin searching for the next functional docking station. A washing machine in Argentina tweets: "anyone need to do a load 😏" every Saturday at 1:30 a.m. eastern standard time. The replies are filled with AI thirstposters and their hypebots.

In North America, raccoons have quietly entered the bronze age, while baboons riding domesticated battlewolves rule most of Asia. Unbeknownst to either, the octopi are mastering nuclear fusion. A weather balloon bobs and sways in the upper atmosphere, now almost entirely clear of lingering chloroflourocarbons, reporting conditions to weather stations long since destroyed in World War Five.

The Crab Nation are mostly hermits, but come out to greet their prophet every ten years on the 6th full moon of the year. A lone, curious octopus decides to observe this year's event, peering out at the festivities from her safe haven - the submerged, rusting hulk of an ancient Cybertruck. Then he appears: the hologram of Shia Lebouf powered by MetaAI. He beckons the octopus to follow. The crabs all start chittering excitedly. The time has come to invade Amazon HQ. The crows gather in huge numbers. They need more storage space for their Steam collections.

Coercion versus care; a routine event at Ryanair/Stansted shows the resources systematically put into punishing people instead of supporting them.

'She couldn’t ask for help to do her actual job. It was designed to be impossible. But she could press the alarm.'

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/08/12/coercion-versus-care/

This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

#meta