Some colleagues have asked me about Schmidt Science's Humanities AI grant program, which has given significant funding to humanities researchers. They also have an open call for grant apps right now. This is a great funding opp for humanists; some thoughts: www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

Excited to announce, w/ @hoytlong.bsky.social, @ari-holtzman.bsky.social & Emily Wenger, that we won a Schmidt Science AI grant to build AI systems for storytelling + narrative world making. How do you get AI to tell immersive, believable, interesting stories? www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-humanit...

I love this so much; I read the review and it was kind of astonishingly thoughtful. That there are a lot of people out there reading & writing about demanding academic books on douban/goodreads simply because they feel like it - "criticism in the wild" - fills my heart with great joy and hope.

Elated to speak at this Rutgers conference on Networking Black Print: Rethinking Black Bibliography (4/9-4/10) for a panel on Black DH; amazing group of scholars speaking + hands-on tutorials re: a new Black print database. If in NY/NYC area, come by! globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/event/networ...

In addition to @aarthivadde.bsky.social's WE THE PLATFORM, I'm excited about this forthcoming book f/ @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social CONTENT MACHINES (dropping around the same time Fall 2026), which with Vadde's is going to open up lit studies to a lot of cool new questions about culture & platforms.

This book is going to be incredible + open up an entire new field of research/inquiry for the literary & cultural studies discipline (grad students take note!). It models an entire new form of cultural criticism that combines close reading + historicism + theory + platform studies. Read her thread!

We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:

Great 2-year postdoc for a digital humanities/I school/computational culture scholar to work on computer vision + film/TV w/ great colleagues @ Distant Viewing Lab @nolauren.bsky.social (U of Richmond). These guys are doing cutting edge stuff, apply! richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

Excited to give a keynote talk on "Surprise Machines: Creativity, History and AI's Generative Failures" for the Central New York Global DH Working Group's AI & Creativity workshop this Sat 3/28 (tomorrow)! If you're in the Syracuse-Ithaca-Geneva area, come by! www.cnycorridor.net/calendar/cre...

there’s much to debate, from the participants’ effective close reading skills to the graders’ through the metricized performance descriptors in the rubric. But the “experts’” reported lack of enjoyment strikes me as natural, once the creative aspect of close reading is grappled with—which the paper

One of the ?s I have after reading this thread: does AI assistance limit the maximum amount of pleasure a person might have close reading over time, i.e. maybe it increases enjoyment in the short term, but could stunt the growth of enjoyment and ability over time?

Excited to share this new paper - accepted at CHI - testing the affordances of AI assistance for literary-cultural interpretation or "close reading" w/ @jiayinzhi.bsky.social @mnlee.bsky.social + @hoytlong.bsky.social. Can AI help students/people interpret cultural objects? arxiv.org/html/2603.06...

Hey just want to re-up this thread because I got a ton of amazingly helpful responses - the response thread is like a syllabus! - as we get to the end of the semester and students in these kinds of classes start exploring final projects. Thanks for all the great ideas + suggestions!

Day 2 of what has been an extraordinary conference so far! Still to come, Scholars & Creative Writers panels this afternoon - if you're in the Duke area, please drop by - this has been a really great & atypical & generative mix of people talking about the contemporary novel in the digital age.

Excited to be talking at this symposium on fiction in the digital age at Duke Thu-Fri; it'll bring together writers, critics & scholars to talk about literature in a post-text world @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social @lbmcgrath.bsky.social + other great people will be speaking. fhi.duke.edu/event/sympos...

𝑪𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑰 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑 𝒖𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒕 𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆? In our new #CHI2026 paper, we studied how AI assistance affects close reading poems — not just how well people interpret poems, but also the pleasure derived from close reading. closereading-ai.app #AI #HCI #closereading #humanities #culture #poetry (1/13)

This cultural analytics workshop at Berkeley on multimodal models to study film, theater, etc looks GREAT & features some great scholars like @nolauren.bsky.social @peterbroadwell.bsky.social, breaking ground w/ what computation can do for cultural analysis: www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/cultu...

Here's the talk I gave at Duke's Society-Centered AI (SCAI) conference in Feb 2026, on "The Social Case for AI Hallucinations" — on why AI "confabulations" might actually be a resource for historical recovery. Not all AI hallucinations are errors - some can have affordances. youtu.be/p-S-KPI7YFQ?...

New paper w/ @teddyroland.bsky.social on "How fiction powers generative AI systems." We designed a computational experiment to test the impact of the vast amount of fiction in LLM training data on how LLMs communicate, w/ implications for both AI design + literary theory. arxiv.org/abs/2603.01220

I find this delightful and fascinating, and I love that left to its own devices, Llama in particular "daydreams" about literature (vs. Qwen's daydreaming about MC math questions, which resonates and feels intuitively true). Lots of cool & deep questions to ask of an epistemological sort as a result.

Cool job alert for a historian/humanities person with technical skills/training to work on a meaningful, public-facing project that will have positive social impact. Also work with a very smart and cool person/scholar. (Also having just moved down to the region, Richmond VA is a great place to live)

Half way done teaching Intro to Python for humanities - been great! Anyone have ideas for public datasets focused on culture for students to work on for final projects? @mellymeldubs.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @mariaa.bsky.social

I'm excited to be a co author on this new paper, "Computational Hermeneutics," with a bunch of other great scholars from the humanities + computer science. In it, we lay out concepts for evaluating gen AI's capacity for interpretation esp ambiguity, context, etc. www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

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!