The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Delighted to announce the publication of 'From Questions to Knowledge', my new and updated statistics and data analysis handbook. www.danielnettle.eu/2025/09/14/f...

Cool new paper (and a thread about it) by @babeheim.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of Go games! Check out these colourful decision trees 🔥 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

My copy of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution has arrived! Looks gorgeous – and massive. And somewhere on page 554 (which is roughly the middle of the book 😅) you can find my chapter. Big thanks to the editors for organizing this!

1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market? Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

"Is it getting harder to make a hit?" – asks this new paper. Short answer: yes. "The inequality in song lifetimes has increased rapidly since the turn of the millennium. Top-10 songs are lingering on the chart for longer and longer" epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10....

For decades, linguists assumed kids drive language change through ‘imperfect’ learning. New research by Raviv, Blasi & Kempe (Psychological Review) show that instead, adolescents and young adults are more likely to spread, normalize, and cement linguistic shifts. www.mpi.nl/news/young-c...

Great news from the @erc.europa.eu today: I received an ERC Starting Grant to study the cultural evolution of literature 🔥 www.eva.mpg.de/press/news/a...

Humans are in fact a venomous species (Figure 6 from "A global database on blowguns with links to geography and language" Aguirre-Fernández et al doi.org/10.1017/ehs....)

🪦 New in @pnas.org: we analyzed 38 million U.S. obituaries to ask what signals a life well lived: What values are people most remembered for? How do legacies shift with cultural events? How do age and gender shape what it means to have lived well? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

I happened to accidentally find this edited volume on quantitative approaches to literature, from 1969. Never heard of it - even though it was co-edited by one of the big figures in narratology: Lubomir Doležel (another surprise). The minimalist plots here are ⚡️

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

I was looking through an old laptop and came across a thing on overused academic book cover art I put together years ago that I thought might raise a chuckle or two 🗃️ web.archive.org/web/20180222...

Vanessa Villalba-Mouco and I wrote a little preview piece for Cell on the new mtDNA and proteomics results from the Harbin skull. It is free for 50 days at this link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

RStudio + SageMaker + LLMs? Yes! 🚀 Discover how to seamlessly integrate Amazon Bedrock LLMs using the gander R package – all within a managed RStudio environment on AWS. Say goodbye to on-prem headaches! Check out the blog post here: tinyurl.com/yv5ndpzp

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪

New #rstats blog up! solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07... This is the first in a brief series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code. Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social and @stephenjwild.bsky.social for their helpful reviews.

Put your manuscript about computational poetics in the trustworthy hands of @artjomshl.bsky.social

✍️ 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

Institutional Books: Massive Historical Text Corpus - 983K books, 242B tokens, 386M pages - 19th-20th century texts in 254 languages - Refined OCR with quality scores & metadata - Noncommercial early-access release huggingface.co/datasets/ins...

Another cool workshop from the Workshops for Ukraine series – on how to use LLMs via R. Really handy for the R-team, like myself

Great new paper by @harinlee.info & colleagues: big data, cultural evolution, music!

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

I'm quite intrigued by this upcoming book about (among many things) cultural evolution. From publisher's website: "Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems."

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Besides the gorgeous journal cover, the article it links to uses 724 classic Chinese poems to estimate the range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise over 1400 years. These animals are threatened by human activity, have intelligence comparable to a gorilla & are critically endangered.

We are recruiting two postdoctoral scholars for a research project in human collective intelligence and creativity at UC Davis and Cornell. Joint project with @enfascination.com, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @oferon.bsky.social & Dalton Conley. Please forward this thread to relevant people. 1/n

Thank you @stefanmilo.bsky.social for having us on your channel! :)

We’re thrilled to announce EHBEA2026 will be in the beautiful and historic city of Leiden!

Woooow! Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) is such a vivid childhood memory for me. I even had episodes 1 and 2 on a pirated VHS tape. Now, 25 years later - new WWD 🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 I looked at 400+ years of cumulative cultural evolution in the Game of Go from feudalism to superhuman AI. Did AlphaGo etc. completely disrupt human play? No! More like human-machine convergence, rather than revolution. Check out these decision trees! osf.io/preprints/ps...

The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal). New paper (w Greg Bryant) on a weird social phenomenon, with a general model of how such phenomena evolve as ways to distinguish subcultures. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Just published @hsozkult.bsky.social: Conference report · "Linked Open Data and Literary Studies" www.hsozkult.de/conferencere... @luntner.bsky.social @viktor.im @kuremhs.bsky.social @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @temporal-communities.de Slide sets: www.temporal-communities.de/events/2024/...

🚨 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/

You’re welcome…

You can get my book even though it still says "pre-order"! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... (for a 30% discount, use code P327 on the PU Press website)!

This week I had a pleasure to present my research at Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. What a wonderful place, really! I preached my usual gospel about the cultural evolution of the arts. Mostly – about the decomposition analysis of literature (see royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...)

How can we link archaeological artifacts to evolutionary processes? In our last paper, we show how navigating the epistemological issues and pitfalls of phylogenetic reconstruction reveals universal principles of evolution—variation, transmission, and selection. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Very happy supervisor with the publication of Pietro Nickl's article on global trends in online headlines: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ukraine already won a great defensive victory. Even if Russia wins the war, Ukraine is likely to win the peace. 80 years ago, Finland lost 13% of its territory. 12% of the population fled with what they could carry. Maybe 20 people stayed to become Soviet citizens. www.politico.eu/article/ukra...

"Urban Highways Are Barriers to Social Ties" out on PNAS! The 1st large-scale measure of how highways weaken social connections between the communities they separate. This barrier effect is strong in the 50 largest US cities--especially for low-income Black communities. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🌍 Join us in Copenhagen - fantastic city for work-life balance and awesome science. I am hiring PhD students & Postdocs in my group at SODAS Univ of Copenhagen to explore AI, network science & the science of science. 📍 Start: flex summer 2025 📌 Info&Apply: www.robertasinatra.com/2025/03/02/p...

Great London, great.

Trump is implementing Putin's playbook. People should protest now, while it's still possible.

Two positions in the Media Research Methods Lab: PostDoc Computational Social Science in “Social Media Observatory”: lnkd.in/dtvMnmFg (English: lnkd.in/d5HTWbHg) PhD student in Computer Science/Computational Social Science in research group “Communicative AI”: lnkd.in/d7FUscM8: lnkd.in/dy-etJUD)

“Dress Code Drama at the Oval Office” by Zez Vaz: open.substack.com/pub/zezvaz/p...