preprint announce: The proportion of books by dead writers in the publishing record can tell us something about the strength of the political censorship. Tested for translations of children's books from foreign langauges in USSR during the Cold War. hal.science/hal-05701575v1

Our paper 'Carving Stories at Their Natural Joints' is out in Psychological Review (@apajournals.bsky.social). It means a lot to me, especially because I got to collaborate with many researchers from different disciplines whose work I truly admire.

Want to play with corpora of the French 3rd Republic ? Want to join a nice team ? Want to do something else than LLM and have fun with smaller models as well ? Want to work with people in the humanities and the digital humanities ? Well, this might be for you 😄: jobs.inria.fr/public/class...

🗓️ We are thrilled to announce the Call for Papers for the conference+journal track of the 6th annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies, July 8-9, 2027, in #Groningen, #TheNetherlands! #CCLS2027 #CfP Submit your article by February 1, 2027! 🥳🥳🥳 jcls.io/site/cfp/

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

"Les Mots sans les choses. Philosophie, éthique et impact des grands modèles de langue" vient de paraître aux Editions Rue d'Ulm. Que changent ces modèles à nos façons de penser et d’écrire, et quelles conséquences pour la société et notre autonomie ? presses.ens.psl.eu/les-mots-san...

Canonicity is central to literary studies, and most researchers have some intuition about which authors or texts are canonical. But how can we measure canonicity in a truly systematic manner? A new article by @agneshilger.bsky.social, @janaeckardt.bsky.social and me tries to theorize this question.

Taking a Step Back: Theoretical Fundamentals of Canonicity and Its Empirical Reconstruction

Abstract. Canonicity is central to literary studies. Even if scholars are not explicitly concerned with it, canonicity shapes their selection of texts and authors—and that, in turn, may reinforce the ...

doi.org

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

Fiction has undergone a huge demographic transformation over the last 50 years. Men lost ground, which women gained. But the way some have written about it, you’d think men are, as a NYT headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up. sinykin.substack.com/p/where-have...

Where Have All the Literary Men Gone?

Not too far....

sinykin.substack.com

Interested by a corpus of 19th/early 20th c. French for your research? Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo! 📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597 📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178

Freshly out in @pnasnexus.org: "On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems" The first major publication of project @lostma.bsky.social , where we lay down our methodology for studying the transmission, evolution or disparition of texts. /1 #science 🧪

On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems

Abstract. Knowledge of past cultures relies heavily on surviving written material. Over the centuries, texts were copied, altered, and often lost, leaving

academic.oup.com

Small new paper ! 🎉 Genre is a problematic notion in CLS: bibliographically unstable, heterogeneously annotated, yet central to many experiments Our new #NLP4DH paper (ACL 2026) proposes a method to retrieve genre tags automatically in a huge novel archive, from a small seed list only.

Attending #ACL? Come join us at NLP4DH 2026 on Saturday from 10am to 5pm! Great selection of papers from across the DH & NLP spectrum this year. Schedule: www.nlp4dh.com/nlp4dh-2026/...

NLP4DH - Schedule

NLP4DH 2026 Schedule

nlp4dh.com

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

Our paper with Damien Tricoire & Julian Csapó discussing if Diderot was the author of anticolonial passages in 'Histoire des deux Indes' is out in DES! doi.org/10.61147/des... (1/6)

Ghostwriting and collective authorship in the Enlightenment: Diderot, d’Holbach’s coterie and the problem of authorship in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes

In recent decades, researchers have developed enormous interest in the role of Denis Diderot in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's major historiographical work, the <i>Histoire des deux Indes</i> (HDI). Schola...

doi.org

Happy to announce that our article 'The style of scorn: computationally operationalizing the relationship between anger and complexity in 'Ik Ga Leven' by Lale Gül' (together with @jorisvanzundert.bsky.social) is out now with Digital Scholarship in the Humanities! OA link: doi.org/10.1093/llc/...

Kicking off the second day of #MappingtheCanon, @jbarre.bsky.social tells us more about the link between genre traditions and the canon.

Let the mapping begin! #MappingtheCanon

PhDone ! 🎓 Immense gratitude to my jury (including @evelyngius.bsky.social @matthieuletourneux.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com ), my co-directors @tpoibeau.bsky.social & Thomas Conrad, and everyone who supported me along the way ❤️

Very excited about a very special event: in two weeks, some of the most interesting quantitative work on the literary canon and canon formation comes together in Darmstadt 🧵

🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6

Je soutiens mon Doctorat le 5 juin à l'ENS à 14h, salle des Résistants (45 rue d'Ulm) : « Modéliser la littérature de genre. Méthodes computationnelles et évolution des genres dans la fiction de langue française » une aventure qui se termine ! 🎉

📢 CfP for #CHR2027 is out! Submissions on all aspects of computational humanities research welcome; all details available here: 2027.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/ And yes, CHR2027 will take place a little later than usual. So you *could* start later… but we suggest starting now!

Google dropped 4 different Gemma open-weight models! I'm most excited that they're finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. huggingface.co/collections/...

#jobklaxon PhD Fellowships available at @psl-univ.bsky.social! Come & work w/us in CultureLab (w/ @jbcamps.bsky.social @oliviermorin.bsky.social et al not bsky). Deadline 31/05 Starting 01/10 Duration 3 yrs (fixed-term employment with benefits) Salary: sad. www.culturelab.psl.eu/en/news-cult...

#jobklaxon 10 postdocs available at @psl-univ.bsky.social in #AI. Working language: English. Btw. #digitalhumanities also happen under the AI hype these days, so get in touch and walk by this very building on your way to work. Join me in being #touristatwork #juniorProfInParis

Out in Evolutionary Human Sciences! With @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @jbcamps.bsky.social, @remcosleiderink.bsky.social & Anne Chao New work on unseen species models for cult heritage to the question: how many stories were _shared_ between medieval French and Dutch literature? lnkd.in/exyAWtir

I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines". www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

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...

frontiersin.org

From time to time I mutter about a secret project that involves benchmarks and historical language models. Here's a formal announcement of the Schmidt Sciences grant. Other PIs include @dmimno.bsky.social , @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, and @mattwilkens.bsky.social. And +

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Memorization vs. generalization in deep learning: implicit biases, benign overfitting, and more

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the memorization

infinitefaculty.substack.com