scott b. weingart

😂 Ah techy and vibey, two of my favorite genders.

But seriously that means a lot coming from you, thank you for saying so!

Incidentally, for this and every government job: don't assume the first person reading your application is a domain expert. Spell out very clearly how your experiences match the requirements.

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)

As a contextual note, (federal) US funded the humanities at levels between 1/10th and 1/1000th of the 40ish peer nations we looked at. I think there was maybe one country that funded less per capita than we did.

Almost everyone I know, me included, hates it when our expertise becomes unexpectedly, suddenly, and globally relevant. I suppose that's because it usually means something big and normal just broke, since true unexpected discoveries and delights are rarer.

We're especially looking for folks experienced in records management, metadata standards, & digital preservation.

Most state records these days are digital. If you like the challenge of how a government preserves, organizes, & makes accessible its vast digital self, this'd be a great fit.

Maybe the last generation felt they needed to separate themselves, but this one doesn't feel the need to think about the humanities at all? Not the most comforting thought.

(Indeed we're already close to the spirit of that with e.g., your Schmidt project and with LLM survey responses.) But the framing is just entirely different, often disconnected from "the humanities."

physicists already deal with instruments whose physical presence interfere with their own observations, and thus require adjustments. It's not hard to imagine a world where someone claims a new "cultural observatory" based around LLMs with LHC-like aspirations and funding.

I can't not pull LDA into this. A *very* crude generative language model whose reversal was used (by us!) to trace and tease apart cultural trends. I suppose the difference here is LDA wasn't so big that it developed its own gravitational warp field. But (if I'm already using the physics metaphor)

So—stop me if you've heard this—this Greek philosopher gets half-sick of all the shadows he sees projected onto the cave wall. He leaves the cave only to discover they were being projected by other, bigger shadows. All turtle-shaped, see? And they were standing atop other turtle shadows. So the phi⸻

I suppose it feels more like what was framed as the Auxiliary Sciences of History, many generations earlier.

Are you (or anyone else) seeing otherwise? I'm genuinely curious about what feels like a vacuum. There are plenty of CS/CSS folks doing cultural analytics-y things with LLMs, but it just doesn't feel like it's being framed as Humanities 2.0 in the same way.

Instead I'm seeing, in what I think is a structurally similar space, "a new enclosure of culture." "We have distilled the essence of culture into this magic lamp. You may coax out whatever corner of it out you desire, with the proper incantations." But it's less about *knowledge*, per se.

Ted, your sight these days is a lot broader than mine. One category I'm *not* seeing is "a new science of culture" (the space e.g., network science, culturomics, CSS occupied ca. 2010). They often intentionally framed themselves as tackling humanities-domain problems outside the humanities.

if quantitative social science is automatable, it's because many of the fields in question have already reorganized their research in such a way to be indistinguishable from machine output, and already optimized for machine measurement.

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

It always makes me so happy to share someone’s dream job

!!! You finally snagged Idris Elba???

We're especially looking for folks experienced in records management, metadata standards, & digital preservation.

Most state records these days are digital. If you like the challenge of how a government preserves, organizes, & makes accessible its vast digital self, this'd be a great fit.

Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 - Richmond, Virginia, United States Title: Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 State Role Title: Library Specialist III Hiring Range: $78,000 - $88,000 Pay Band: 5 Agency: The Library of Virginia Location: The Library of Virgini...

Apply to join my team by 3/16!

Be the Library of Virginia's born-digital collections coordinator, leading planning and management of electronic gov/manuscript records. We're looking for a techie archivist type who can help improve access to our born-digital wonders.

$78k-$88k in Richmond VA.

One e.g., been researching an early 20c NYC rabbi, and LLMs helped me unexpectedly connect him to marriage laws in India, which so far as I can tell is a true, meaningful connection that's been wholly unremarked upon in the literature.

Which is all to say I agree with the spirit of your comment, but also I've been just staggered by unexpected connections those models have made, which have sent me down very fruitful research rabbit holes I would not have otherwise found.

In this case, it's maybe an advantage of the human mind that's it's so limited in memory that it has to be choosy of where it focuses, so it's not making connections between everything at once (like AI can), forcing that discernment.

Making unexpected connections between disparate things is something AI is very good at, because it sees more at once than we do. It's not good at discerning which connections are worth pursuing, and can't take that nugget and do original research (archival/etc.).

The Criminal Justice team at Arnold Ventures is looking for a pending/recent PhD with strong causal inference skills, for a remote, part-time consulting position.

This is a great opportunity for someone considering a transition from academia to the policy space.

Deadline: March 15

Please share!

Do You Agree? Do You Strongly Agree? The Effect of the Number of Response Categories on Response Processes and Verification of Substantive Hypotheses Abstract. This study investigates how the number and labeling of response categories in survey scales affect respondent behavior, psychometric properties,

This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...

Doctors and dentists agree that every day you avoid posting about the mess of the world adds an hour to your life.

You know now that you mention it, I think Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books also had an "electric monk."

CatholicBot can reach the kingdom of heaven five times more efficiently than even the saintliest human. By our projections, assuming we attract an angel investor, heaven will reach capacity in a mere 2.3 million years—well under schedule and for a fraction of the previously-planned matter budget.