Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

Unfortunately, I expect that the fact they won a pretty resounding fair use victory is going to be lost in much of the coverage. They lost on downloading & storing the LibGen dataset (straight infringement!), but the act of training on copyrighted material (+ making their own ebooks) was a win.

This is such a pity -- "Push It" has, hands down, the greatest hook of all time (and the original version is now only available on youtube?) www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCad...

I realized recently that in 10 years of teaching I don't think I've ever asked students to pay for a textbook for a class -- largely due to these excellent draft chapters of Jurafsky & Martin.

Berkeley Sociology is hiring faculty! Sept 1 application deadline. Two positions: (1) open area junior search. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05013, (2) associate or full professor in Anti-Black Racism and Social Inclusion aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05012 Please help spread the word!

I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards! (thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!) aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

One of the fun parts of policy work is that you have a handful of extremely important, esoteric, but load-bearing legal concepts (like fair use) that only ever make it into public consciousness when they're being targeted for destruction, and public opinion about them is entirely outcome-dependent.

Creative people and people of good will who are allies and advocates for creativity need to come to grips with the fact that AI training is generally fair use for the same deep reasons that critique, parody, teaching, scholarship, and other daily creative practices are fair use.

Go to WI and work with Lucy! And stay for the farmer's market, memorial union, orpheum, willy st coop, chocolate shoppe, american players theater, and the million other things that make Madison an amazing place to live. PhD app deadline in December.

I’m a week late with my #thanksbrett but just want to add my appreciation too — in thinking of all the careers that ODH has given space to and supported (including my own), words can’t suffice. @brettbobley.bsky.social maybe at least it’s now permitted to let us buy you a beer.

Flying back today from a circuit of some (not all!) of the great DH centers in Germany (Darmstadt, Bielefeld, Leipzig and Würzburg). Such great energy and amazing people moving the field forward at each one. I'm bringing back lots of ideas.

My course proposal for Cultural Analytics @berkeleyischool.bsky.social has been approved for Fall 2025! This is the fullest expression of my vision for CA: a radical interdisciplinary experiment for rethinking knowledge production at the intersection of the humanities and machine learning. (1/9)

I'm joining Wisconsin CS as an assistant professor in fall 2026!! There, I'll continue working on language models, computational social science, & responsible AI. 🌲🧀🚣🏻‍♀️ Apply to be my PhD student! Before then, I'll postdoc for a year in the NLP group at another UW 🏔️ in the Pacific Northwest

📚 Check out the newest JCA article by Li Lucy (@lucy3.bsky.social), Camilla Griffiths, Claire Ying, JJ Kim-Ebio, Sabrina Baur, Sarah Levine, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, David Bamman (@dbamman.bsky.social), and Dorottya Demszky. culturalanalytics.org/article/1316...

At Perseus, the vast majority of hits have always been from non .edu addresses. NEH means the Greek and Roman world is available to everyone, not just academics.

Among these is one working with me -- if you have a background in literary/cultural theory and are interested in the ways in which computational methods, including LLMs, are able to provide support for empirical sensemaking about literature, media and culture, please get in touch!

We just launched an open search for postdocs at the @berkeleyischool.bsky.social in a bunch of areas (social informatics, climate informatics, communications, econ, behavioral science, literary theory, algorithmic justice), all mentored by different faculty: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04845

The people at the NEH are among the most knowledgeable and professional public servants I know. They operate with a shoestring budget already. Just let them be.

If you're an international student at UC (or beyond), know your rights: www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sites/defaul...

It's been delayed a little, but here — at last — is the CFP for Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, to support research "at the intersection of AI and the humanities." Expressions of interest are due April 4th. Pls RT! www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

Not sure if I can imagine a bigger driver for protest turnout out than being commanded not to protest — happening in dozens of cities nationwide this friday! standupforscience2025.org

arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190 we're still tinkering, but couldn't wait to share.

Postdoc opportunity at the School of Information Sciences, Urbana-Champaign. Teaching one course a semester. Application deadline April 1, but they recommend conversation with potential faculty mentors in advance of that date. Renewable for a second year. Pls RT! ischool.illinois.edu/research/pos...

There's been a lot of work on "culture" in NLP, but not much agreement on what it is. A position paper by me, @dbamman.bsky.social, and @ibleaman.bsky.social on cultural NLP: what we want, what we have, and how sociocultural linguistics can clarify things. Website: naitian.org/culture-not-... 1/n

A new study by Ph.D. student @dan-hickey.bsky.social found that weekly rates of hate speech on X rose about 50% in the months after its purchase. 🔍 “We need to know when we’re getting content moderation right and when we’re getting it wrong," he said. More: www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2025/st...

I need an explainer for the Ross/Westlaw case that tells me what Ross was “training” — a generative QA system? A search engine? Is it just retrieving the bulk memos (that infringe on the headnotes?). Not clear to me how AI is implicated @bbutler.bsky.social @matthewsag.bsky.social

New @ai2.bsky.social paper accepted to #NAACL2025! We worked with Teaching Lab and ASSISTments to create a new dataset for evaluating VLMs. DrawEduMath includes 2,030 teacher-annotated images of students’ handwritten responses to math problems. Website: drawedumath.org

Two tenure-track positions in AI at the School of Information Sciences, UIUC. Artificial intelligence is broadly construed here to include AI policy, governance, ethics, AI for cultural heritage, &c. Review of applications will start Jan 6th. Please RT and share! #MLSky #NeurIPS

New issue of my newsletter: “Books, AI, and the Public Good: A New Grant” — A Mellon-funded project to develop an ethical, public-interest way to incorporate books into artificial intelligence

See this article by @rachaelgs.bsky.social and @authorsalliance.bsky.social emphasizing the need for researchers to work with their libraries (the ones who negotiate contracts with publishers) to not negotiate away their fair use rights

Article I co-authored in @pnas.org demonstrating Hollywood films getting more diverse. Funded by @mellonfoundation.bsky.social, research possible only b/c we helped @authorsalliance.bsky.social change copyright regs governing digital locks in computational research news.berkeley.edu/2024/11/04/w...

Go @naitian.org ! #chr2024

One last train ride away from #CHR2024 — looking forward to chatting with so many people there! Today, see @kentkchang.bsky.social talk about subversive characters in session 1B at 1:30pm 2024.computational-humanities-research.org/papers/paper...

There are many ways to identify texts that seem ahead of their time. Our CHR 2024 paper asks which measures of textual precocity align best with social evidence about influence and change.

🚀📢 BookNLP-fr is here! A major step for french computational literary studies by the Lattice Lab team—Frédérique, Olga, Martial, Clément, @tpoibeau.bsky.social and I! 🌍 The French expansion of @dbamman.bsky.social’s BookNLP project 📖 doi.org/10.48694/jcl... #ComputationalHumanities #NLP

Papers from our group! 🤓 - Queer culture in television: 2024.computational-humanities-research.org/papers/paper... - Acting in American film: naitian.org/once-more-wi... - Classification w/ LLMs in cultural analytics: 2024.computational-humanities-research.org/papers/paper...

The Berkeley Info School is hiring an open-rank tenure-track professor in "digital security, safety and trust". Please help get the word out, and if you're working in this space, apply! (Deadline Jan 3.) aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04668

Hats off to @naitian.org too for the perfect paper title (-- for research that analyzes the multiplicity of emotional performances of the same dialogue phrase in film)

🎬 Coming soon to a theater near you!🍿 Film is a semiotically rich medium: meaning is conveyed through the music, visuals, language, and more. A new paper from me and @dbamman.bsky.social explores what it means to computationally study performance in film. Website: naitian.org/once-more-wi... 1/n

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work with me at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for creative students with interests in #NLP and #CulturalAnalytics. Boulder is a lovely college town 30 minutes from Denver and 1 hour from Rocky Mountain National Park 😎 Apply by December 15th!

📣 I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students for Fall 2025 at the University of Maryland College of Information. Consider applying if you're interested in language, society/politics, and computers! Deadline Dec 3: ischool.umd.edu/academics/ph... And pls share with anyone who may be interested!

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join my group in 2025-2026. If you like the mountains and interdisciplinary research that blends data and culture, this could be a good fit! UW iSchool PhD apps due Dec 2nd: ischool.uw.edu/programs/phd... More info about my group: melaniewalsh.org/mentorship

Big new paper out today! In which we use the 2021 DMCA exemption for text and data mining to build a new large collection of film and measure representation for gender and race/ethnicity within it. (w/ @ucbscholcomm.bsky.social @richardjeanso.bsky.social @naitian.org) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I love concerts that are albums, *and* this particular album, but really did it have to be this one day?

Lucy is a rock star and you should all hire her!

My group just finished up a new paper that I'm excited to get out into the world: "On Classification with Large Language Models in Cultural Analytics" (to be published at CHR): github.com/bamman-group...

Wilkens et al. present methods for measuring character mobility in English fiction. Diachronically analyzing 13k+ books (1789-2000), they find that characters in fiction move less and follow more formulaic paths than in nonfiction. doi.org/10.48694/jcl... #LiteraryMobility #CLS #Fiction #English

Computational Humanities is now available! (OA version this winter.) Thank you to the amazing contributors, co-editors extraordinaire @dmimno.bsky.social and Jessica Marie Johnson, the team Minessota, and series editors @laurenfklein.bsky.social and Matt Gold! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791598...

Schmidt Sciences has announced a new funding initiative for work at the intersection of humanities and artificial intelligence. They're also seeking two-page concept papers to help inform the initiative (deadline Aug 23). 🧪 www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...