Cool postdoc opportunity at UC Berkeley I-school: their Cultural Analytics group is looking for a humanist/computational methods researcher to work on computational narratology & culture. Work with some great people there like Tim Tangherlini + @dbamman.bsky.social. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05222

Cool story f/ Princeton about a positive vision of integrating AI in the humanities, where the interface advances both humanistic & AI research as equal partners. And featuring some projects + scholars I think are great like @mmvty.bsky.social + @vierth.bsky.social. www.princeton.edu/news/2026/02...

I missed this when @mellymeldubs.bsky.social first posted this but this is awesome - we always assume we know what people are reading when we talk about fiction, but here we see the truth is weirder & more interesting. Like sci-fi is huge! We really need more human-centered studies of the arts.

This is a great thread about the victory of digital humanities as its normalization/mainstreaming in the humanities; one point I'll underscore is: if you're a humanities PhD student or have PhD students who want a TT job, what depts really need/want are digital skills, both applied and/or critical.

Really good position paper on a legitimately urgent question - how humanists/historians can actively participate in, shape & organize the explosion of digitized historical data across commercial + public contexts. We can't sit this one out. The call for standards & norms is esp well taken + crucial.

Academic slop is out of control but what I'm getting from papers like this one f/ @mariaa.bsky.social is that the cure is worse than the poison; methods to filter out AI academic slop on arxiv etc are (1) unreliable + (2) unfairly punish specific groups like junior scholars: arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17036

Tomorrow Thu @1pm I'm presenting a talk, "Talking to the Dead: The Social Case for AI Hallucinations" for Duke's Society-centered AI conference! I'll be talking about AI simulation/confabulation for historical memory/reconstruction. We're expecting +800 attendees + participants! sites.duke.edu/scai/

Cool postdoc: hiring someone with training in philosophy + computational methods to study how AI is transforming epistemic norms & practices across academic fields of knowledge. Can vouch the PI is both a fantastic advisor & person. Great academic network too: Purdue to CMU to Chicago to Princeton.

Spent a few days going deep into #Moltbook - wild, as they say. Pretty unprecedented and mind bending but the social science literature on platform simulation is actually very good at anticipating what we're seeing today; see @chrisbail.bsky.social's PNAS below review for a rich & helpful account.

If you're interested in slop, you'll find this paper's attempt to define AI slop interesting. They identify 3 "prototypical properties of slop: superficial competance, asymmetric effort and mass producibility. Also 3 "dimensions of variability", why was it created, how personalized, how surreal.

New paper on Why Slop Matters w/ great group of co authors (@hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social @ari-holtzman.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky) from ACM AI Letters. We try to move the debate re: AI Slop past normative, neg claims & towards parsing its social uses. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Great new digital humanities PhD program at Carnegie Mellon for undergrads who want to do culture + comp sci without choosing. I see a real hunger for this path w/ my students. And they're hiring TT faculty! Help spread the word for potential PhD applicants + job seekers! www.cmu.edu/dietrich/eng...

Cool postdoc job opportunity! A chance to work with some great English & comp sci scholars at Carnegie Mellon. Appreciate this ad stresses: chance to do interesting technical work; work on an interesting humanities problem; chance to publish both in humanities & comp sci venues. Looks great, apply!

This new paper from researchers at Google, Chicago, Santa Fe, "Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought" is truly remarkable and wild. Models are getting really good at reasoning but not because of more computational power; it's because internally they are creating *societies of thought* >>>

First time I submitted to ICLR, the top comp sci conference, and have been watching the chaos unfold as 19K submission decisions delayed by weeks! It's been wild. Also admire that a bunch of people started a Reddit sub to cope w/t stress. This one post cracked me up. www.reddit.com/r/MachineLea...

Was excited and grateful to help evaluate applications for Duke's English PhD program this month, for Fall 2026 start date - some broad observations about general patterns I am seeing in the field (and adjacent subfields like digital humanities, media studies, AI & culture, etc). Short thread ->

Re-upping this great post - a wonderful guide for how to write a successful academic book proposal from a scholar who has written a bunch of good books. Can't over-state how important the book proposal is for actually publishing a book. High rec'd for anyone looking to publish a first academic book.

I love this new preprint from Cody Kommers + @ari-holtzman.bsky.social so much. arxiv.org/abs/2601.08768 Super contrarian & generative argument that we need to start better evaluating AI systems for their capacity to delight/entertain, not just perform intelligence/cognition - as cultural machines.

We're getting closer to the Conference on Society-Centered AI at Duke + I'm excited that Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social, one of the best minds in this area, has been announced as keynote! Check out the full speaker list in the link - doing some of the most important work in AI right now.

Cool new paper f/ @riederb.bsky.social. Compelling work on the Youtube manosphere focusing on Andrew Tate, combining smart theoretical perspectives + at scale empirical methods to teach us something new about the persistence of manosphere online. Some thoughts > journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I'm teaching Python/computation for the humanities for the first time at #Duke this year; some thoughts but first a shoutout to @mellymeldubs.bsky.social for her great online syllabus & @laurenfklein.bsky.social + @dmimno.bsky.social for examples she builds on: melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultur...

Cool book I am now reading: Nick Seaver, Computing Taste. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... ; a great STS ethnography of Spotify that unravels the human-algo dynamic in nuanced ways but strikingly helpful for thinking about current AI chatbot-human interactions, including parasocial relations.

Excited about this Duke AI conference + stoked to present new work on cultural AI. Grateful this high profile conference will include humanistic perspectives. Meaning, history, aesthetics, narrative etc are a part of the society centered AI question. Glad the humanities will be a part of the convo.

New paper in AI & Society w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social + @teddyroland.bsky.social! We simulated 101 "AI authors" to see how LLMs imagine creativity & cultural distinction + compared them to real historical authors. What do AI authors want & how do they pursue success? link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New article in AI & Society with @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social 🎉 We wanted to know how AI might affect cultural fields like literary publishing. But cultural production is complex! So we piloted a new method we call “social simulation.” rdcu.be/eTkMy

Modern Fiction Studies is sponsoring a conference on “Cultural AI” at Purdue, to be followed by a special issue. @aarthivadde.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, N Katherine Hayles, @mattwilkens.bsky.social , @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and I will be there later this week.

Web-based fandoms are intimate publics at scale. @richardjeanso.bsky.social and I use close reading/stats to study the narrative/rhetorical features of fanfic and commentary on AO3. Fandoms are part of literary history, and we show how to study these living archives of reader-response. No paywall!

I highlight recent reader/reception research on Goodreads reviews, tweets, & fanfiction Work by @jacquesanglais.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, @alexandermanshel.bsky.social, @lbmcgrath.bsky.social, @jdporter.bsky.social, @micahbateman.bsky.social, @quinnanya.me

Many thanks to @lbmcgrath.bsky.social, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social, and @richardjeanso.bsky.social for inviting us to be a part of this fantastic lineup in the "Hacking the Culture Industries" series. And of course to the incredible Public Books teams for their editorial support!

Here's a big one! Who wins fiction prizes & why—& who judges them? (Joy Williams, esp.) What is the relationship between the race of judges and that of finalists? Must read. @alexandermanshel.bsky.social + @mellymeldubs.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/what-35-year...

This is the lead essay in the second round of the series Hacking the Culture Industries, edited by me, @lbmcgrath.bsky.social + @richardjeanso.bsky.social. We are so excited by the lineup on Netflix, TikTok, Goodreads + more from Aarthi Vadde, Hoyt Long, Jim English, Tess McNulty + others

Last year, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I teamed up with @Richardjeanso.bsky.social for @publicbooks.bsky.social to launch HACKING THE CULTURE INDUSTRIES. This week, we’re back for round 2.