Just published from Columbia UP! Congrats @johannawinant.bsky.social !! cup.columbia.edu/book/lyric-l...

Looking forward to presenting next week at The Ohio State University. english.osu.edu/events/micha...

Out for the holidays! "The Semantic Space of Good and Evil" - a computational humanities piece with Michael Witmore. doi.org/10.1093/llc/...

Ugh! Reviewing for a journal and had my first encounter today with an AI-generated submission -- fake quotes, fake sources, completely vague argument, the whole nine yards. So poorly done. What a waste of my time!

Also, of course, left unsaid here is that there's much more to personhood than mere legal status. AI just ain't people, my friend. We were all comforted on this score long ago by Walt Whitman's "Song for Occupations"

📆 Save the date! 📆 Mikko Tolonen @tolonen.bsky.social (@helsinki.fi) is going to give our Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies! 9 May 2025, Blackwell Hall, Weston Library, 17:00–19:00. More information: tinyurl.com/3cjmx4zj

Thrilled to say @ucdpolitics.bsky.social is making a permanent hire at Assistant Professor in any field across politics and international relations. Details here: my.corehr.com/pls/coreport... Join us!

If not for the sunk cost fallacy, how could anyone make it through middle age?

The Beastie Boys’ ‘So What’cha Want’ -by The Muppets

My essay on links, AI chatbots, and Alexander Pope's Dunciad is up at Aeon today! aeon.co/essays/when-...

[email protected] and I co-wrote this piece on why you are (probably) doing AI criticism wrong as a humanist and why we, in Critical AI Studies, need to do better methodologically than 'So I asked ChatGPT a question and now I have thoughts...' Now available on arXiv at doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Funded PhD Studentship @UCL History and @wellcomecollection.bsky.social on project titled 'Translating Monstrosity: Constructions of Difference in #earlymodern England and France'. Deadline Jan 31st 2025. Project & application info: www.ucl.ac.uk/history/oppo.... #histmed #histsci #HSTM #bookhistory

From 2,000 years ago ~ remarkably-conserved frescoes from the Villa of Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus. The villa was rediscovered in 16C just outside Rome & was probably part of the dowry Livia brought to her marriage in 39 BC (Palazzo Massimo Museum)

Reading the new Computational Humanities collection and found this footnote. lol. that was me! Ps: can I include this in my annual review under “recognition”?

The joy when someone cancels their meeting with you so you can get more marking done! (Seriously, it's an unexpected gift) #AcademicSky

Computational Humanities is now available! (OA version this winter.) Thank you to the amazing contributors, co-editors extraordinaire @dmimno.bsky.social and Jessica Marie Johnson, the team Minessota, and series editors @laurenfklein.bsky.social and Matt Gold! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791598...

Periodic reminder that Journal of Open Humanities Data is a thing. I've published in and reviewed for this title. Very good way to present your dataset to the world. openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com

Where the streets are paved with…bones! An example of animal bone (cattle & sheep) flooring from Park End Street in Oxford - 12 examples of bone flooring have been found in the county of Oxfordshire! 17th cent. On display at Museum of Oxford!

Hard to know if it's just the influx of new joins or the new visibility offered by "starter packs", but I'm encouraged by finding lots of once-familiar names and faces now on here-- as well as new ones!

Really rewarding paper to read, pressuring the norm of uncritically using cosine similarity as a proxy for semantic similarity. Rewarding, but also makes me sweat a little. arxiv.org/pdf/2403.054...

Carreg Cennen. Spectacular.

Was it this one on generative AI, LLMs and the transformer from the FT? If not, it’s an excellent read anyway. ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

This is huge news. The microfilm (& OCR?) of EEBO and The Eighteenth Century (ie ECCO) is available via Internet Archive! I need to dig derper but I wonder about the reactions from libraries, Gale, and ProQuest. H/T to David Smith @dasmiq.bsky.social for sharing news. archive.org/details/bim_...

How is agency distributed between characters in fiction writing? In a new PNAS paper, I present a large-scale analysis of the interaction networks of 87,531 fiction works written between 1850 and 2010. What I found is an “agency gap”… Here's a rundown of my findings: 1/ www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Today Nomic released version 3.0 of GPT4All, the easiest and best way to run LLMs on your own computer. If you've never run a private local LLM, try some of the llama3 or mistral derivatives, and chat locally with your own documents. Open source LLMs have gotten crazy good. www.nomic.ai/gpt4all

Spinoza voice: “why yes, the Bible IS a historical document”

swag

I’m really impressed by llama3 in ollama for Humanities applications. Thinking of adding a prompt collection to aiforhumanists.com, would people contribute?

As someone who works in digital asset management and digital archives, I can say with authority that the reason geese are so mean is that they have to keep migrating every goddamn year

If anyone's wondering whether an embedding model will cheat by lazily learning that "paragraphs mentioning 'Philip Marlowe' belong together" — yep, it will cheat! Randomizing personal names makes contrastive tuning harder and, I would assume, more robust.

What this article gets right is that, especially as AI continues to improve and infiltrate new domains, the value of authentic human connection will be amplified.

Does anyone have an good examples of IIIF being used to annotate parts of an image, create URIs for those parts, etc? The example on the IIIF demo page appears to be not working.

For those asking bout digital access to the new POETICS TODAY issue on AI, with excellent pieces by @hannesbajohr.de, @ritaraley.bsky.social, and numerous others, including 👀 myself: read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-toda...

Companion piece to Jentery's "Before You Make a Thing," this is not just an incredible list of prototyping techniques, it also makes an argument for prototyping as a critical methodology for understanding the world.

The medieval version of “learn to code” was “learn Latin”

Modes of Transportation xkcd.com/2940

Cool notebook here from @danielvanstrien.bsky.social, explaining how he uses LLMs to generate synthetic data for fine-tuning sentence similarity models. He's had great results, improving accuracy from 78.17% -> 93.40%. The reasons why it works are also interesting: github.com/davanstrien/... 🤖

Looking forward to this volume. I have an essay in it on the criminalization of early modern migrants. punctumbooks.com/titles/cross...

We're ready...I hope... maybe? And ready or not, the conference is here! #keystonedh24

"Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto" advocates for the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching. It is structured as a manifesto comprised of 10 major statements which are explored via case studies. Open Access, download or read online library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

just finished teaching "Literature and AI" where students were invited to both use AI and write about the experience for every assignment. I can confirm: Students have thoughts.

Reading eye opening quotes from undergrads re ChatGPT. They're confused as prof policies are all over the map, scared of being falsely accused and obsessively avoiding words they think are linked to ChatGPT, frustrated they're not learning a skill they know will be useful... Profs we gotta step up.

The last paragraph of Middlemarch makes me cry like a baby every time I reread it. So much of this novel is about people failing to live up to expectations, but it ends by asking us to think about the hidden and “incalculable” impacts of our lives on everyone else’s. 🛖

Check out Collin Jennings's new book, Enlightenment Links: Theories of Mind and Media in Eighteenth-Century Britain, new from Stanford UP this year. Brilliant contribution at the intersection of DH, book history, and 18C studies

OK Portland, I get it. 🌸🌸🌸🌸

The challenge: distilling the rapidly evolving field of Quantitative Text Analysis into one overview paper. The outcome: our latest publication in Nature Reviews Methods Primers. I hope reading it offers you as many insights as co-writing it brought me! Read it here: rdcu.be/dErq6

I am looking for peer reviewers! I need a few more folks to review the smart, creative pieces that are coming in for On Gathering. If you work in DH, scholarly communications, or adjacent areas & are interested, lmk! It won't be a heavy lift, promise. journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/news/106/