I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’

📖 ToolFindr - Lightweight Explorer for Discovering Research Tools in Digital Humanities

I have recently found "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com, and I think it should become a #corpuslinguistics and #digitalhumanities must-read starting book. Plus it's free under CC by-nc-sa! vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...

Extreme speech thrives in encrypted spaces, but killing encryption won’t stop it, says a group of researchers who have studied the problem from multiple angles. We need context-driven governance, not backdoors, they say.

“Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and phony citations. Already, the community of Wikipedia volunteers has mobilized to fight back against AI slop” www.theverge.com/report/75681...

I love this!

Many VLM-based OCR models have been released recently. Are they useful for libraries and archives? I made a quick Space to compare VLM OCR with "traditional" OCR using 11k Scottish exam papers from @natlibscot.bsky.social huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/ocr-time-capsule

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

I believe it is worth interrogating the fundamental forces re-shaping our information spheres away from liberal democracy towards myth, manipulation and magical thinking empowering autocracy and nihilism. Here’s how it all falls apart—a 🧵 in 6 figures ⬇️ www.protagonist-science.com/p/how-social...

Stuffing ai into everything “isn’t just a forecast, it’s a libidinal fantasy — a capitalist dream of replacing relationships with code and scalable software, while public institutions are gutted in the name of ‘innovation.’”

🤷🏿‍♂️

"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'." MBA-brain is real.

Is 😵‍💫 one token or two? To a human, it's one. To a corpus tool, it’s often split (😵 + 💫). And 𝙊𝙉𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙀 ≠ online. This preprint shows how emojis & homoglyphs challenge tokenisation and distort linguistic evidence. 🔍 arxiv.org/abs/2507.01764 #Emoji #Homoglyphs #CorpusLinguistics #AcademicSky #LangSky

Fellow academics, can anyone help with obtaining an #endorsement on arXiv? I have a preprint I'd like to upload to Computer Science > Computation and Language (cs.CL), but need someone to endorse my account. Here's the endorsement link: arxiv.org/auth/endorse... #corpuslinguistics #linguistics

Memes can serve as strong indicators of coming mass violence

Finally, a Replacement for BERT (Blog about ModernBert) huggingface.co/blog/modernb...

📒The scientific program is out! Click on the link below to have a look at the speakers and the workshops of our Summer School! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ www.summerschooldigitalhumanities.unimore.it/2025-edition...

Our Summer School is beginning now with the institutional greetings.

Postdoc position open in Zurich -- Prof. Martin Tomasik and I have a joint SNF project on interpretable neural network approaches for large scale, complex item / temporal structure, online learning / cognitive development data. Please retweet. tinyurl.com/PostdocGNNSNF

⏹️ Ending the experiment too early 🎯 Running experiments until you get a hit 🍒 Cherry-picking your results 🔧 Tweaking your data ➗ Not adjusting for multiple comparisons www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Academics and Universities have got to formulate a coherent approach to AI and guide their students. Cries of despair and digitally illiterate pronouncements will not reverse the effects of technical innovations.

Designing a Good Research Practice Roadmap - a presentation by Fiona Ramage @fionar.bsky.social youtu.be/dnzRQPOxz1o?... The event was organised by Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea

With Canada’s election just days away, the continued appearance of deepfake ads reveals a serious flaw in Meta’s ad-review system. If fraudsters can repeatedly bypass detection, it suggests the platform’s current safeguards are not equipped to catch even basic forms of manipulation...

"Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter," @bencollins.bsky.social told WIRED.

Delighted to share my newly published review of "Data Analytics for Discourse Analysis with Python" (Tay 2024). The work addresses urgent, discipline‑wide concerns in #linguistics, and writing about it was both a privilege and a joy. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kyHu1L-nh...

Do you want all your Facebook and Instagram photos, posts and data to be used by Meta to train AI? If not, then *now* is the time to object. This article explains how. datenschutz-hamburg.de/news/meta-st...

#ICYMI folks w/deep experience re:crisis web archiving (@sucho-org.bsky.social)+building tools for it (@webrecorder.net) made a free zine teaching how anyone can archive the things you love on the web before they go away: zinebakery.com/homemade-zin... & why you shouldn't expect others will do so

Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it and learn how you can help. www.muckrock.com/news/archive...

LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.

Meanwhile, in 🇪🇺 @ec.europa.eu expands scrutiny of X. The earlier investigation is expanded to changes to algorithms/ recommendations, X's handling of the AfD/Musk live stream, and clarify vitality dynamics. And to keep data for probing, akin to the request to TikTok www.politico.eu/article/euro...

Amazing book by @joanwestenberg.com I just discovered, and one I'll be adding to the #digitalhumanities module next semester. www.permissionlessbook.com

If you're interested in how large language models work and what those workings mean for how we should talk about LLMs, I strongly recommend reading the first seven (very readable!) pages (through section 6) of this paper by @mpshanahan.bsky.social: https://buff.ly/3ZEY5Vo #AcademicSky #EduSky

Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.

Study (2017): Social networks collapse in two stages – first, loosely connected users leave; then social contagion triggers rapid disintegration. X (formerly Twitter) may face this: losing key influencers (‘Super-Connectors’) could push it past a tipping point. #SocialMedia @netzpolitik.org

this is exactly right, NLP was one of the routes by which people from humanities disciples particularly linguistics (disproportionately female) "smuggled" themselves into computer science at later career stages, so of course it was not considered "serious"

fascinating, and I'd say I agree with this. Can someone suggest references on this topic? I'd like to know more about it

Lovely piece of work linking corpus linguistics, the history of medicine and ancient history. Neat.

On Digital Rights Bytes we're answering questions about right to repair, ownership of digital media, and more. Got additional questions? Let us know with the hashtag #DigitalRightsBytes!

Keynote by @laurenfklein.bsky.social! 🎉 "When Theory Leads: Towards a Humanities-Forward Model of Computational Research" This talk is a response to the idea that humanities people can only contribute to LLMs by improving model output as "AI tutors," "prompt engineers," "consultants." #chr2024

the launch of the Computational Humanities Research Journal is a major talking point at #CHR2024. promises to play a central role in the community, clearly moving in a very important open niche. fair winds to her and her editors! @folgertk.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social +Kristoffer Nielbo ⛵

Discourse Studies has just published a really interesting set of papers on topic modelling and corpus linguistics, by @corpusling.bsky.social @mtaboada.bsky.social, Jaworska, Schweinberger, Murakami, Hunston and Thompson: journals.sagepub.com/home/DIS

Citing a non-deterministic, "hallucinating", and non-reproducible LLM output is wild. While the norms and best practices are evolving, citing them seems the wrong way. (even wilder when some people add "ChatGPT" as their co-authors)

1st post on bsky - about bsky! I was fascinated with academic starter packs and made an interactive network to see academic communities and how they connect - a map of knowledge! link to an interactive & searchable network: ketikagarg.github.io/blueSkyAcade...

Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now After a machine learning librarian released and then deleted a dataset of one million Bluesky posts, several other bigger datasets have appeared in its place—including one of almost 300 million posts. 🔗 www.404media.co/bluesky-post...

Scientists, academics, researchers: We’re excited to share that @altmetric.com is now tracking mentions of your research on Bluesky! 🧪

📢NEW: 'Open' AI systems aren't open. The vague term, combined w frothy AI hype is (mis)shaping policy & practice, assuming 'open source' AI democratizes access & addresses power concentration. It doesn't. @smw.bsky.social, @davidthewid.bsky.social & I correct the record👇 nature.com/articles/s41...

On Bluesky, privacy, AI, data scraping, and more. ⚠️ foul language here and there insights.priva.cat/p/privacy-di...

Open Access Alert!! Religion and AI: An Introduction. Read my new book for free! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon...

Interesting podcast of the day: BBC Global Story podcast: How social media shapes the way we speak youtube.com/watch?v=p-N3...