Small new paper ! 🎉 Genre is a problematic notion in CLS: bibliographically unstable, heterogeneously annotated, yet central to many experiments Our new #NLP4DH paper (ACL 2026) proposes a method to retrieve genre tags automatically in a huge novel archive, from a small seed list only.

Attending #ACL? Come join us at NLP4DH 2026 on Saturday from 10am to 5pm! Great selection of papers from across the DH & NLP spectrum this year. Schedule: www.nlp4dh.com/nlp4dh-2026/...

📣 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!

Our paper with Damien Tricoire & Julian Csapó discussing if Diderot was the author of anticolonial passages in 'Histoire des deux Indes' is out in DES! doi.org/10.61147/des... (1/6)

Happy to announce that our article 'The style of scorn: computationally operationalizing the relationship between anger and complexity in 'Ik Ga Leven' by Lale Gül' (together with @jorisvanzundert.bsky.social) is out now with Digital Scholarship in the Humanities! OA link: doi.org/10.1093/llc/...

Kicking off the second day of #MappingtheCanon, @jbarre.bsky.social tells us more about the link between genre traditions and the canon.

Let the mapping begin! #MappingtheCanon

PhDone ! 🎓 Immense gratitude to my jury (including @evelyngius.bsky.social @matthieuletourneux.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com ), my co-directors @tpoibeau.bsky.social & Thomas Conrad, and everyone who supported me along the way ❤️

Very excited about a very special event: in two weeks, some of the most interesting quantitative work on the literary canon and canon formation comes together in Darmstadt 🧵

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

Je soutiens mon Doctorat le 5 juin à l'ENS à 14h, salle des Résistants (45 rue d'Ulm) : « Modéliser la littérature de genre. Méthodes computationnelles et évolution des genres dans la fiction de langue française » une aventure qui se termine ! 🎉

📢 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!

Google dropped 4 different Gemma open-weight models! I'm most excited that they're finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. huggingface.co/collections/...

#jobklaxon PhD Fellowships available at @psl-univ.bsky.social! Come & work w/us in CultureLab (w/ @jbcamps.bsky.social @oliviermorin.bsky.social et al not bsky). Deadline 31/05 Starting 01/10 Duration 3 yrs (fixed-term employment with benefits) Salary: sad. www.culturelab.psl.eu/en/news-cult...

#jobklaxon 10 postdocs available at @psl-univ.bsky.social in #AI. Working language: English. Btw. #digitalhumanities also happen under the AI hype these days, so get in touch and walk by this very building on your way to work. Join me in being #touristatwork #juniorProfInParis

Out in Evolutionary Human Sciences! With @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @jbcamps.bsky.social, @remcosleiderink.bsky.social & Anne Chao New work on unseen species models for cult heritage to the question: how many stories were _shared_ between medieval French and Dutch literature? lnkd.in/exyAWtir

I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines". www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

From time to time I mutter about a secret project that involves benchmarks and historical language models. Here's a formal announcement of the Schmidt Sciences grant. Other PIs include @dmimno.bsky.social , @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, and @mattwilkens.bsky.social. And +

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

New article! "Toward an Ontological Representation of Fictional Characters" by @antoine-bourgois.bsky.social, me, @oseminck.bsky.social & @tpoibeau.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/chr.... Nothing fancy here — only sweat & tears. 🧵

📢 Postulez aux masters en #humanitésnumériques de l'École des chartes - @psl-univ.bsky.social . L’École propose deux masters qui forment au traitement des sources (objets, textes, images) par les technologies numériques. Candidatures : 17 fév.-16 mars. ▶️ En savoir plus : https://urls.fr/tr9XN4

This call is currently open for a Humanistica-satellite event, that might interest people in computational humanities (and not only). It is supported by CultureLab and welcomes long papers as well as lightning talks and posters.

You like Automatic Text Recognition (ATR/OCR/HTR) ? You like challenges ? Well, we open a competition for ATR/OCR of medieval manuscripts, in cross-lingual & diachronic settings for the Latin script. 📆 20/01 Registration 📆 21/03 Test set released 📆 3/04 Deadline for results Link cmmhwr26.inria.fr

New Publication: "Understanding Conversational AI: Philosophy, Ethics, and Social Impact of Large Language Models" (270 pages, Ubiquity Press, open access). Feel free to read it and share it widely! www.ubiquitypress.com/books/m/10.5...

Amazing papers at #CHR2025; particularly enjoying the computational literary studies. An observation: questions about genre as a confounding factor seem to keep coming up. I do wonder if (and I'm also guilty of this) CLS can fixate on the x-axis of history and we ought to give genre more attention.

@jbarre.bsky.social, @oseminck.bsky.social, Antoine Bourgois, and @tpoibeau.bsky.social built a detective detector, tracing the different archetypes in French detective fiction #CHR2025

Luxembourg is a good place to talk about Canonicity with Yuri #chr2025

I added a new post on my research blog last week. I wanted to react to a post from Dan Cohen that I've seen circulating on BlueSky last week about Gemini 3, and figured I would add my critical 2 cents to the mix! alix-tz.github.io/phd/posts/025/

New article in #JCLS 4(1)! 🎉 Visser Solissa, van Cranenburgh & @fpianz.bsky.social present a model for detecting syuzhet—the ordering and disclosure of events that shape a narrative—and formalize event annotation in fiction across multiple languages. #CCLS25 #ComputationalNarratology

🚨 huge dataset for CLS -> 650K "contemporary" & multilingual books tagging @tpoibeau.bsky.social + we need to bring Antoine Mazière around here

📢 The #CHR2025 proceedings are out! 97 papers, ~1600 pages of computational humanities 🔥 Now published via the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, with DOIs for every paper. 🔗 anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... And don’t forget: registration closes tomorrow (20 Nov)!

🗓️ The #CHR2025 programme is online! Browse what’s on the menu here: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/programme/ Proceedings are coming soon as well. Don’t forget: registration closes on 20 November! #computationalhumanitiesresearch

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

What happens when we model the detective archetype at scale? 🕵️‍♂️📚 Our new paper, accepted for #CHR2025 combines literary history and computational modeling to trace how the figure of the detective evolves across 150 years of French fiction. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00627

Awesome! Our new paper in #DHQ has just been published! It discusses three measures of #keyness (or #distinctiveness) when applied to #subgenres of the #French #novel. The twist is that we perform a #qualitative #evaluation of the measures by relating each list […] [Original post on fedihum.org]

It's been brewing for months: @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social releases CoMMA (Corpus of Multilingual Medieval Archives) ! 📚 2.5bn tokens of mostly Latin and French texts 🕰️ 800→1600 CE 📜 23k manuscripts 🖥️ 18k on the reading interface: comma.inria.fr 🔍 Paper: inria.hal.science/hal-05299220v1 (1/🧵)

And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...

✍️ Our paper is finally out! All poetic forms come from somewhere, but figuring out their relationships is hard. We use sequence alignment on scansion (010.10) to measure metrical similarity between poems. This allows us to detect related forms across languages and times 1/ tinyurl.com/metronome25

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky rdcu.be/etk07 The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

I had fun presenting some of my PhD obsessions about the french detective novel in Würzburg. Thank you @fotisjannidis.bsky.social for the invitation ! The whole team is impressive, brand new building and talented people, the future of DH is actually here 🤩

"Tell, Don't Show" was accepted to #ACL2025 Findings! 

 Our conceptually intuitive, lightweight approach for literary topic modeling combines the new (language models) with the old (classic LDA) to yield better topics. ✨📚 arxiv.org/abs/2505.23166

New little paper “The times are a-changin’: présent vs passé simple in French novels (1811–2024)”👉 hal.science/hal-04984105 With Simon Gabay and @floriancafiero.bsky.social #dhbenelux2025 In french fiction, use of past tenses (especially the passé simple) collapsed over the last 150 years.. so why?

🚨New pre-print 🚨 News articles often convey different things in text vs. image. Recent work in computational framing analysis has analysed the article text but the corresponding images in those articles have been overlooked. We propose multi-modal framing analysis of news: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20960

🚨 Our Call for Papers is out! 🚨 We continue our tradition of providing a dedicated platform for presenting computational work that bridges formal methods and traditional inquiry in the arts and humanities. Check out the website for all details: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

Excited to share our preprint "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research” We're open to feedback—read & share thoughts! @laurenfklein.bsky.social @mmvty.bsky.social @docdre.distributedblackness.net @mariaa.bsky.social @jmjafrx.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social

New cultural evolution modelling paper with @bdecourson.bsky.social on @pnas.org! "Weak individual preferences stabilize culture" A quick 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

[clearing throat]