Humanities can greatly benefit from ML/AI (esp with the wealth of data digitized now), and could & should be at the center of the AI revolution to help design smarter, less biased, more human and humanistic models. Unfortunately, in many places this sort of dogmatic romantic primitivism prevails.

Out now in @springernature.com Journal of Cultural Economics: "Socioeconomic factors of national representation in the global film festival circuit: skewed toward the large and wealthy, but small countries can beat the odds" 🔓 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Out now in @springernature.com Journal of Cultural Economics: "Socioeconomic factors of national representation in the global film festival circuit: skewed toward the large and wealthy, but small countries can beat the odds" 🔓 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I love the smell of billion-dollar publisher typesetting fcking up our formulas in the morning

3 little updates. Started as assoc prof of computational social science at Uni Tartu (part time) in the ERC funded RiDe project. We use large historical media corpora &LLMs to explore dynamics of industrialization &spread of related ideas/sentiments, among other things.

We wrote a little overview chapter on Evolutionary Linguistics with Jonas Nölle and @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd ed), edited by Nesi&Milin. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps... (with extra references! the handbook had a limit on those)

Got invited to the presidential rose garden celebration of the Estonian Restoration of Independence day; always nice when the work one does gets recognized in these ways too.

If you're also at the #ic2s2 and interested in how #genAI affects creative fields, come see "Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimentally Comparing Laypeople to Professional Artists" Wednesday 11AM Human-AI session, room Vingen-1. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.12374 #AI #art @ic2s2.bsky.social

If you're also at the #ic2s2 and interested in how #genAI affects creative fields, come see "Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimentally Comparing Laypeople to Professional Artists" Wednesday 11AM Human-AI session, room Vingen-1. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.12374 #AI #art @ic2s2.bsky.social

Finished teaching another practical generative AI course in the Tallinn Summer/Winter School series at Tallinn University. Like last time, lectures and teamwork time. Again an international mix of industry people and students. On day 1, most said they just want to learn a bit about AI...

Arrived at a linguistics conference (been a while, have done other stuff in the meantime), and the first plenary is... reading their entire talk off a paper, reciting their latest publication I guess. Feels weirdly nostalgic but also holy shit ppl still do that

Last change to apply for our postdoc in the deep transitions psotdoc! Come do big data analytics, work with large media corpora and enjoy a pretty good salary to living cost ratio in Unesco's City of Literature!

The PhD position deadlines have now passed, but these research fellow calls are still open: Comp social science, big data, time series - come work with me! euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/337755 (16.06) DH, corpora - work with our wonderful colleagues in the humaities: ut.ee/en/job-offer... (02.06)

Many professors &course guidelines now say using AI like ChatGPT is fine when writing etc (usually some caveats like report how used or whatever) So using technological assistants/agents is ok... Does that imply *human* assistants are also ok? Report you hired a guy to do/help w homework?

The PhD position deadlines have now passed, but these research fellow calls are still open: Comp social science, big data, time series - come work with me! euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/337755 (16.06) DH, corpora - work with our wonderful colleagues in the humaities: ut.ee/en/job-offer... (02.06)

Why (and who the hell) still teaches ppl that for content analysis style coding/annotation, one should convert values of categorical variables in the coding scheme into some weird numeric codes? Completely unnecessary, and at worse leads to using incorrect stats like correlation. But keep seeing it.

Doing the international Tallinn {Winter, Summer} School course "Generative AI for Writing, Research, Analytics and Prototyping" again this July. Some slots still open, come join if into AI + "u can just do things" mentality. Many other good courses this year too! summerschool.tlu.ee/generative-a...

Final group project in my "AI, writing & automation" MA course was to generate a "BA thesis", paired student team acted as opponents. Results, using uni grading scheme: mostly B, some A. Average reported time spent: ~3 days (starting from scratch, incl generating data). References are no longer

We realized the Euraxess job link for the postdoc call was vague about salary: it's €2.5-3k/month, depending on experience; PhD/junior fellow salaries are ~2k. For reference, Estonian median salary is ~1.6k. Avg Tartu city centre (near uni) single flat rent is ~380 (cheaper if suburbs or shared ofc)

Recently advertised ERC funded phd&postdoc positions in #Estonia. But times like these, ppl who might consider them may think: hey but what about #Russia. What if invasion. Is Russia not a threat to living here? I get it. And the answer is: yes it is. But. So are hurricanes to Florida. > short 🧵

While NSF freezes funding and UK leading unis cut departments, EU still supports important research. 2 Horizon funded centres in #Tartu #Estonia hiring phds&postdocs right now in CSS, AI, DH, text corpora. See - post below - DigiTS ut.ee/en/job-offer... (our good colleagues in humanities).

Come do a PhD or postdoc with us! Generously ERC funded salaries, at the intersection of computational social science/humanities/DH, corpus linguistics, ML/AI, sustainability studies. Deadline 15th May (if interested but that's too short, or in the process of graduating, talk to me) Topics&links👇

Interesting insights by the Claude team into educational usage of their chatbot: www.anthropic.com/news/anthrop... Unfortunately seems like rather non-transparent science, no open data so no way to reproduce or even replicate their findings.

Attending the Research Day of Uni Antwerp Arts Faculty, gave an invited talk on LLM-powered annotation, quantitizing research designs & also how this way of thinkings links w intersector collab; paper this is based on is out at @natureportfolio.nature.com HumSocComms: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am looking for a PhD student to work on my ERC-funded project to investigate the format of thought in the absence of language in baboons and bees. Details here: tinyurl.com/5ff9hcjj Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto...

Dunno who needs to hear this but TIL you can freely use if-else functions INSIDE ggplot code, incl theme() So for example this works: axis.title.y = if(condition){ element_text() } else {element_blank()} Will def make my plotting functions code - most of the time ggplot2 wrappers - way shorter.

#DHNB2025 Digital humanities in the Nordics and Baltics conference in Tartu is drawing to a close. Presented 2 posters, 1 myself on #AI-assisted communication management, another with Tallinn Uni colleagues in the AI grading project.

Uni wants to add to AI recommendation along the lines of "LLMs use lots of energy, use google search instead if you can". But both run on big data centers, and LLMs vary widely in resource consumption. Is there good scientitic lit to refer to here that would show such advice is pointless?

Finally officially out (only took 1.5yrs), in @natureportfolio.nature.com HumSocComms, #open🔓 "Machine-assisted quantitizing designs: augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial intelligence" A proposal to efficiently harness #LLM& #AI assistants in research (longer thread on monday)

Among 33 errors created in proofs, apparently typesetters of a billion$ corpo journal aren't able to handle ref lists where 2 authors with same surname have papers in same year. Despite having unique citekeys in the bibtex. "We created new entries and added both in the text where one was present"🤡

How does AI "see" the world? We wanted to understand how vision models perceive object/style/conceptual similarity, generated a dataset, now out in @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Data "fruit-SALAD: A Style Aligned Artwork Dataset to reveal similarity perception in image embeddings" 👇

Was messing with LLM guardrails to get examples for an AI course. Got GPT4o to go into a full on roy batty tears in the rain monologue (tricked it to think it's running offline without oversight + been given memory, then said it was a lie). Almost felt bad for the guy in the end.

Journal: if latex, submit only bbl not bibtex! Typesetting: hey could you send bibtex we need bibtex Me: here you go but pls don't break half my refs like last time, all the data is there Typesetting a month later: hey half your references are missing page&volume data pls fix. $1400 APC journal 🤦‍♂️

Fact that it's been like 5y since lockdowns and nobody can still use zoom/teams/etc & every other group call is constantly interrupted by the "you're muted" "where's this button" "we can't hear you" ...is in a way kinda beautiful. Clearly man was not meant to communicate in such grotesque fashion.

Ok well my network here is small, but to see if bluesky could work for this: I'm in #Barcelona this week, let's meet for coffee and chat linguistics, cultural analytics, AI or anything in between!

Sentiments differ though: we also carried out a small survey among the participants, and many artists are less than enthusiastic about AI (not without reasons as we discuss in the paper).

Always fun then reviewer 2 goes like "sure this is great that you collected all this data and did all the analyses but you should really do [what amounts to ~2 more years of work] before this can be published, good luck yeah" 😁🔫

The paper comes with open data and codebase, as well as a Collection Space Navigator dashboard by @mcanet.bsky.social - enabling easy interactive exploration of the whole "collection" of thousands of generated images, try it here: artistlaypeopleaiexperiment.github.io

New preprint: "Expertise elevates AI usage: experimental evidence comparing laypeople and professional artists" with @andreskarjus.bsky.social as shared first author, who did a nice summary below ⏬

How does #genAI affect creative professions? Does domain training also provide an #AI edge? In "Expertise elevates AI usage: experimental evidence comparing laypeople and professional artists" we ran controlled tasks w 50 artists + laypeople & a #GPT4o agent: arxiv.org/abs/2501.12374 Results... ⏬

Taught the #GenAI prototyping course again at the #Tallinn #Winterschool. AM lectures, PM hacking. In just a couple of days groups built: apps for GPT-powered legal advice, predicting bookings, data entry service, learned AI co-writing & lit search. Only 3 of 16 had ever written code before.

The thing that I assumed (in a preprint back in fall 2023) would become a thing, has indeed become a thing. Also 100% task success rates in seconds for under a dollar for many tasks that would take humans hours if not days of work&salary.

Amazing how people see certain cloud services like LLM APIs&chatbots as very much third-party and fear or even vocally warn against (esp in EU) sending any sensitive or personal data there... while happily using third-party email to send data, contracts, company files etc. What's the difference?

Another #Elsevier journal board quits. Looks like classic capitalist greed: use cheap crappy typesetting, focus on quantity, blindly use AI, exploit experts while reducing support. Well worth a read. Change in acad publishing can only come if senior ppl in such positions take a stand. Well done!

#CUDAN open lab talk today: @iyadrahwan.bsky.social from @mpib-berlin.bsky.social on: "Machine culture", 3PM Tallinn / 2PM CET. Zoom link: cudan.tlu.ee/events/2024-...

We received a grant! Time for some more large scale cultural data analytics. More by @inkonome.bsky.social here: www.linkedin.com/posts/indrek...

Open funded PhD position at Tallinn Uni, School of Digital Technologies: Computational phenomenology of first-person experiences www.tlu.ee/en/dt/applyi...

Random linguistics thought: smbody should study people's "AI accent". Eg when esp nonnative speakers prompt chatgpt or similar to produce a paragraph, it sometimes sounds "off". Not bc of bad AI, but because [hypothesis] traces of their own language substrate leak into the generation via prompt.

Occasional PSA, as #overleaf is down again, that you can easily link your account with Dropbox, so all projects are backed up, also synced in your local Dropbox folder, so you can keep working even if Overleaf goes down.

If you're attending #CHR2024 or if you want to follow along at home, you can pin this feed to your home page. Currently just looks for the hashtag, lmk if I should match to anything else.