Now May 2025

Spring 2025

Here’s some of what I’m currently doing, as of Spring 2025. (More specifically, I’m writing this on 2025-05-08):

• Wrapping up co-teaching a course on Literature and the Natural World. This is the second teaching internship I’m doing in my Ph.D. program. Among other things I’m learning, it’s been fascinating to see how student writing has changed after the rise in generative language tools.
• Diving deep into the realm of how to make Modern Language Association (MLA) style citations with Pandoc and CSL.
  • It turns out that some things work far better when your bibliography is stored in CSL YAML than Biblatex, especially now that MLA uses a mental model of “containers”.
  • I’ll almost certainly write one or several blog posts about this. I’ve made local edits to the MLA CSL file you can download from the main CSL styles repository, making it so the titles of special journal issues are included correctly in the citation. Additionally, MLA’s way of storing some information will make it difficult to cite in APA or Chicago style… and this ease of switching is one of the main draws of using this software. So I’m also devising an opinionated set of terms to help make sure that my bibliography file can output to the citation styles I’m likely to use when writing for LIS journals.
• Continuing to read (and take notes on!) the books on my exam lists.
• Beginning to get into the wide world of Korean dramas, now that we’ve finished our Star Trek “ViewingAlpha”. So far, Crash Landing On You, Business Proposal, Forecasting Love & Weather, The Potato Lab, and Mr. Queen have been engrossing and often a ton of fun.
• Figuring out new tricks with Liquid on this website.
  • For instance, I taught my note on the Binti trilogy how to count & display pages across all the included books, just by updating that single line that starts with progress_current.
  • It’s super nerdy—but this sort of handy, predictable, debuggable automation is precisely what still makes computers good sometimes!

Kudos

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