Richard Jean So

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)

This is awesome thanks, one of my students is a C19 PhD student.

ohhh this is so great!!! thanks

Oh cool, thanks, this looks excellent.

Yeah the clean-ness is everything, so students don't have to spend 10 hours cleaning data which really kills the fun of the work.

Oh awesome, I did not know but amazing and convenient!

Oh this is amazing, thanks, I had no idea but very cool

That's right this dataset is amazing esp for literary and cultural analysis, thanks my dude

I know the Old Bailey corpus which is great, thanks

Thanks this is awesome

Mainly automated text analysis methods, so language based corpora would probably be most convenient.

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

A ton of great people are on this paper; just who I am aware is on Bluesky: @ruthahnert.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social @mmvty.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @hoytlong.bsky.social @ryanheuser.com @mattwilkens.bsky.social Sorry for missing others! And thanks to Cody Kommers + Drew Hemment for leading!

For what we are now coining "the interpretative turn" for AI research, I think about this a lot: how improving AI decision making often requires a first order step of *interpretation*, before any decision-making optimization can even occur. Meaning has to be adduced before it can know what to do.

This paper has 38 authors on it which was cool bc we cover a lot of ground from different disciplines to tackle a shared question: how to enable greater capacity for gen AI pluralism, context awareness, etc. For the human interaction component, I learned a ton from co-authors in HCI, in particular.

Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...

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...

Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar - School of Information University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

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

AI and the humanities: Across the Princeton campus, an era of collaboration is underway. Princeton has firmly established its presence at the forefront of AI research — including transformative work in humanities scholarship.

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

Conference on Society-Centered AI - #SCAI2026 Register now for the Conference on Society-Centered AI at Duke on Feb. 12-14, 2026. Learn from top researchers in artificial intelligence.

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.

I love it! As we keep writing on this topic, we keep wondering if writing on slop is itself a version of (academic) slop, so I am with you all here 100%. But yeah, we hope we say a few interesting things regardless!

I could not agree more, in bold again: Janice Radway, READING THE ROMANCE. The original & best study of reader reception of mass culture that is both critical of culture industry & respects the preferences/desires of ordinary people. So glad this book is getting its due again, 20 years later.

100% - we'll be asking *why they like slop & *how do they use it + from there we can be skeptical & parse the culture industry dynamics of desire you describe so well. In the end tho, I'm a Stuart Hall moderate - I do think we can *partly trust what people say about themselves, "they're not dupes"

Thanks Dan & yes I agree - in a longer version we're doing, we have more nuance (this paper is more contrarian) - we account for slop as optimizing for virality, attention etc. That said it's partly an empirical question, which we're testing now. I think we underestimate the human appetite for slop.