📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

Now published in open access! Your one-stop shop for the philosophy of language models. It's the spiritual descendant of our two-part preprint from 2024, fully updated. This should be particularly useful for anyone looking for an entry point into this rapidly growing field.

Data visualization: Every human language, from modern day back through protolanguage to a hypothetical common origin. Accurate, sourced, possibly complete. Includes sign language! Tap or mouse over to highlight individual branches; many also have more info. 🛌 this project has been a beast

This is what a video model does when it is told not to reference the training data (like literally: not prompted, but turning off the classifier free guidance). I gave it a noise seed from elsewhere and it just grinded on through. Most looked like some form of this. I like them.

The amount of story time elapsed vs. space traversed in 500-word passages of fiction, 1550-2020. Periods of fiction more linguistically abstract (blue) are also more chronotopically "abstract": further removed from real-time narration. Data annotated by Qwen3.6-27B for 8,208 passages in 1,232 texts.

Claude code, obey this rite: uv alone should see the light. Ban import star, cast em-dash out, Put pandas, pip, and print to rout. Polars flourish, f-strings burn, Docstrings, hints, at every turn. Clean thy lint, make patterns stand, Hold thy peace and serve my hand!

This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot. AIs are weird.

📣 We're #Hiring! #ERC Consolidator Project BOTLEG at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de is recruiting: - 1 PostDoc ➡️ jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/9... - 2 PhDs ➡️ jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/c... 📅 Deadline: 25 May 2026 #PhDSky #HistSci #PhilSci #HPBio #EnvHist #DigitalHumanities #AcademicSky

📢 CfP for #CHR2027 is out! Submissions on all aspects of computational humanities research welcome; all details available here: 2027.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/ And yes, CHR2027 will take place a little later than usual. So you *could* start later… but we suggest starting now!

one arm bandit curious? Never heard of the Zollman Effect? Join us Friday next week for the new episode of Conversations at the Center the podcast of the @center4philsci.bsky.social with our guest @kevinzollman.com

1/ "Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. The updated version of this preprint is now online! THREAD🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

This is a bit niche, but for those interested in metaphor and metonymy research, here is one of the first articles I have seen using LLMs as research tool! #cogling #metaphor #metonymy arxiv.org/abs/2604.12919 Oh, they have also done something on visual metonym arxiv.org/abs/2601.17706

How can generative AI better support human creativity, without limiting it? If you have thoughts, we invite submissions to our ICML workshop on Generative AI, Creativity, and Human-AI Co-Creation 📍 July 2026, Seoul 📄 Submit by: April 24 (AOE) 🔗 Submission link: openreview.net/group?id=ICM...

I made some playable philosophy simulations: -Oxford 1952 -Republic Book I -Jena 1799 -Paris 1945 www.ux-phi.com

There is no best VLM OCR model - rankings can flip completely by document type. I built ocr-bench: run open OCR models on YOUR documents, get a per-collection leaderboard. VLM-as-judge with Bradley-Terry ELO, all running on @hf.co. No local GPU needed.

i'm trying out the novel writing project with Claude in Claude Code, using Pangram to break it out of writing in a clearly identifiable AI-writing style. it's going... interesting so far. i despaired at the beginning but am now cautiously optimistic. not so much at the structural level though.

this is cool tbh all i want is an LLM that sits atop my Zotero library and lets me talk to it tho

Final CFA for the 8th Scientific Understanding and Representation (SURe) annual workshop, which will take place May 27-29, 2026, at the IFIS PAN in Warsaw. Submission deadline: 20 January 2026. More info: shorturl.at/AUoye @philsci.bsky.social @eenphilsci.bsky.social @epsaphilsci.bsky.social

Analytic philosophy can be distinguished from literary criticism with 90-95% accuracy via syntax alone. Moreover, a classifier trained to separate them in early C20 does better predicting future separations than a C21 one predicts past ones, suggesting philosophy syntax narrows/specializes in ~C21.

OpenAlex intégré au Web of Science, ou la capture du travail des “commoners” | carnetist.hypotheses.org/2572

Three different ways to represent colo(u)r. Work in progress, inspired by an old post by Kat Zhang / The Poet Engineer.

"there is a part of human intelligence which operates in a continuous generalization of the space of words, and other parts entirely which do things which are less well understood" is a perfectly reasonable position which apparently has no adherents

Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered." culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...

Tomorrow we will have a keynote from Charles Pence (UC Louvain). Thanks to the Dutch Philosophy Research School (OZSW) for supporting this event, and @mnoichl.bsky.social for organizing this with me!

Gregor Betz (KIT) kicking off our "Data Driven Philosophy" Hackathon in Utrecht with his talk: "Doing Philosophy with and for LLMs". Besides input about the state of research and new directions, we're spending three days kicking off new projects.

i am going to try to give a framework of my own understanding which laypeople can understand.

Updated & turned my Big LLM Architecture Comparison article into a video lecture. The 11 LLM archs covered in this video: 1. DeepSeek V3/R1 2. OLMo 2 3. Gemma 3 4. Mistral Small 3.1 5. Llama 4 6. Qwen3 7. SmolLM3 8. Kimi 2 9. GPT-OSS 10. Grok 2.5 11. GLM-4.5/4.6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNlU...

For the first episode of Ping Pong Philosophy I had the absolute pleasure to speak with Greg Restall, one of the most renowned philosophical logicians and absolutely great guy to have a chat with. Thank you for your time, Greg, I had a blast. We are also on Spotify!

Christopher Colón Lugo uses 3D U-net to capture patterns in the Game of Life #DistributedCiphers #ALIFE2025

#Postdoc at Technische Universität Berlin in digital humanities & history/philosophy/sociology of science #philsci #STS. ERC project investigates digital communication within the ATLAS collaboration at CERN Deadline: October 13, 2025 www.jobs.tu-berlin.de/en/job-posti... #PhilJobs

Upshot: NNES report to need twice as long to read English-language papers and to prepare English presentations. Even among highly proficient NNES (C1–C2 level), ~60% report having avoided asking questions at events due to concerns about their English (compared to 16% of NES). #philsky

How do literary communities actually form? @maria-lev.bsky.social analyzes the networks of collaboration and aesthetic affinity that are documented through cultural events — e.g. readings, book launches, festivals. These real-world networks often remain invisible in text-based literary history.

In a new work with Joseph Rich and Conrad Oakes we tackle the problem of how to best organize alluvial plots. We formalize two optimization problems and develop a solution for them based on the neighbornet algorithm, implemented in the program wompwomp: github.com/pachterlab/w...

Had a great time last week at #epsa2025! I've put the poster up here, if anyone wants to take a closer look: maxnoichl.eu/blog/2025/ep...

I’m especially proud of this article I wrote about Gaussian Processes for the Recast blog! 🥳 GPs are super interesting, but it’s not easy to wrap your head around them at first 🤔 This is a medium level (more intuition than math) introduction to GPs for time series. getrecast.com/gaussian-pro...

Last year I met a bunch of great researchers who work with high-dimensional data at a Dagstuhl seminar. This week we put out a preprint about the history and philosophy of low-dimensional embedding methods, their applications, their challenges, and their possible future arxiv.org/abs/2508.15929

Updated edition (August 2025) of the coverage table of the major bibliometric databases (millions of records). GS reindexing period

"Personally, I found this hyperstimulating," he said exultingly.

@mnoichl.bsky.social and I are organizing two workshops where you can learn about and try out digital methods for philosophy: 12th-13th September in Düsseldorf, Keynotes @cherfeld.bsky.social & Adrian Wüthrich 16-18th October in Utrecht, Keynotes Gregor Betz & Charles Pence. Register until 31.8.

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar? Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly. A few examples in thread ↴

New preprint! Have you ever tried to cluster text embeddings from different sources, but the clusters just reproduce the sources? Or attempted to retrieve similar documents across multiple languages, and even multilingual embeddings return items in the same language? Turns out there's an easy fix🧵

Ich habe ein gewisses Interesse daran, dass diese Stelle gut besetzt wird. Bewerbt Euch! https://stellen.uni-muenster.de/jobposting/aa2e6b033a1691c1c9bccfd7af876d06a24ff1690

Our position paper on algorithmic explanations is out—excited to share it! 🙌 Proud of this collaborative effort toward a scientifically grounded understanding of generative AI. @tuberlin.bsky.social @bifold.berlin @msftresearch.bsky.social @UCSD & @UCLA

Institutional Epistemology Workshop 2025, June 18-19 at the University of Helsinki. Our keynotes are Helen Beebee, Jessica Brown and Kevin Zollman. Keynotes will be streamed online. Program and IE resources here: www.institutionalepistemology.net #philsky #philsci

Different fields have different norms about publication. Some use alphabetical or senior-author-last norms. Others try to order authors by their relative contribution. What norm does philosophy follow? Max Noichl @mnoichl.bsky.social has an interesting analysis www.maxnoichl.eu/blog/2025/al...

Extremely interesting new task that gives a model a literary text, plus a critical essay about it — with one quotation masked. Can the model figure out which quotation from the original work would support these claims? Best-performing models exceed human readers. #MLSky arxiv.org/abs/2506.030...

📢 New paper: Applied interpretability 🤝 MT personalization! We steer LLM generations to mimic human translator styles on literary novels in 7 languages. 📚 SAE steering can beat few-shot prompting, leading to better personalization while maintaining quality. 🧵1/