James E. Dobson
@jeddobson.bsky.social
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Author of The Birth of Computer Vision (Minnesota), Critical Digital Humanities (Illinois), and co-author of Moonbit (punctum) and Perceptron (punctum). American Literature, ML/AI/DH
I am absolutely gobsmacked. And trying not to pass out from hyperventilating. Thank you @barackobama.bsky.social — you just made my secret dream for DATA EMPIRE, spoken aloud to NO ONE, come true.
Barack Obama@barackobama.bsky.social · 7d agoIt’s that time of year again: here are some of the books I’ve enjoyed this summer. If you’ve read any good ones, let me know!
One more week to submit! See you in Santa Barbara in October!
Fabian Offert@zentralwerkstatt.org · last mo.Excited to share that we are now inviting proposals for our upcoming Critical AI Studies? conference at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social on Oct. 9&10, 2026. Please see the full CfP here: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Submissions are due July 31, 2026. For questions DM me or @owenleonard.bsky.social.
Oh, 1950s academia... (From Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman (1951).)
"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher ed... are using Flock’s surveillance network.. many campus police departments have facilitated immigration related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so" by @torinmonahan.bsky.social
Flock on campus: university police as appendages of a national policing apparatus
Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR)...
doi.org
Check out this interview with my fantastic colleague and friend Matthew Ritger about his new book, Houses of Correction! fas.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/07...
The Prison Next Door to Shakespeare’s Theater | Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Professor Matthew Ritger investigates the archives of Bridewell, London’s first house of correction, to trace how humanist ideals and coercive realities were bound together from the start.
fas.dartmouth.edu
I had so much fun celebrating the launch of DATA EMPIRE with my friend @roopikarisam.bsky.social at the Norwich Bookstore. This is such a great book—elegantly and brilliantly organized and narrated—and is sure to change the way many of us think about data, power, and our inherited habits of mind. 🍾
Roopika Risam@roopikarisam.bsky.social · 3w agoFantastic turn out last night at Norwich Books for the DATA EMPIRE launch! So grateful to @jeddobson.bsky.social for being a sparkling conversationalist and to the Salem State and Dartmouth friends who came out to support the book!
Tonight at Norwich Bookstore, my dear friend and colleague @jeddobson.bsky.social and I will be discussing DATA EMPIRE 🥰 www.norwichbookstore.com/events/56768...
Roopika Risam in conversation with Jed Dobson -- Data Empire | The Norwich Bookstore
local indie bookstore serving Norwich, VT and the Upper Valley since 1994
norwichbookstore.com
Spammers now puffing up even the most minor contributors to repositories.
So glad to see the book "Vector Media", just co-published with @uminnpress.bsky.social, getting the attention it deserves! 👇Shout out to the authors @zentralwerkstatt.org Fabian Offert + Leo Impett for their excellent work!!!! ✊ + thx @mckenziewark.bsky.social + Lev Manovich for your interest.
What ever happened to the Art of Google Books? Here's an interesting artifact from a Cambridge UP volume titled "Research Genres." Perhaps it depicts a common feeling when conducting research....
Kate Crawford @katecrawford.bsky.social has an excellent commentary on the 70th anniversary of the Dartmouth summer workshop and calls for an "ethical reckoning" in the field. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Dartmouth’s AI summer and what came next
The 70th anniversary of the first AI workshop invites reflection on the technology’s wider legacies
science.org
Call for Papers: Machine Learning and AI in Humanities Research and Teaching 📅 Abstract submissions are open until September 15, 2026. Full CfP: journal.fortext.org/site/cfp/ 🧵 More details below #DigitalHumanities #DH #MachineLearning #KI #OpenAccess (1/2)
Making sure you're not a bot!
journal.fortext.org
Applications for this 2-year postdoc at @cmu.edu are starting to be reviewed now, so don't delay! Please spread the news to your local #DH networks. One of the people you'll be working with is me :) I am excited to meet this new colleague and collaborate on computational humanities in Pittsburgh!
Katie McDonough@kmcdono.bsky.social · last mo.Job! Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Humanities & Publishing at Carnegie Mellon - cmu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/CMU/de...
Excited to share that we are now inviting proposals for our upcoming Critical AI Studies? conference at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social on Oct. 9&10, 2026. Please see the full CfP here: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Submissions are due July 31, 2026. For questions DM me or @owenleonard.bsky.social.
Congrats to the class of 2026! Pomppomppomp 🎓 Feat. @roopikarisam.bsky.social and @jeddobson.bsky.social
come for Chris Olah on stage with the pope, stay for the failure of dictionary learning and the collapse of two traditions of reification
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2mo agoIn _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.
xan v0.58.0 is out \o/ More performance, less cruft, very wow! You can now draw synthwave sparklines or visualize network layouts in your terminal like it's 1970! Full changelog: github.com/medialab/xan... @medialab-scpo.bsky.social
NEW #OpenAccess book drop! Wargame simulations, AI, weaponised drones, territorial enclosure, and extractivist economics—WAR MACHINE presents a series of digitally simulated conflicts over the most ecologically vulnerable areas of the Earth. FREE to download: punctumbooks.com/titles/war-m...
My tiny thread yesterday is now a whole op-ed! A quick read, connecting Pope Leo's apology for colonialism and slavery to his warnings about AI — it's all related. Working with editor @mpgphd.bsky.social was an absolutely pleasure!
Religion Dispatches@religiondispatches.org · 2mo agothe latest from RD: @roopikarisam.bsky.social on what makes Leo XIV's first encyclical so radical -- tracing AI back through histories of enslavement and exploitation, and repenting for the RCC's complicity in both religiondispatches.org/2026/05/26/l...
an absolute delight to collaborate with @roopikarisam.bsky.social on this smart piece for @religiondispatches.org about the pope linking AI to histories of enslavement and exploitation check it out! religiondispatches.org/2026/05/26/l...
Leo XIV Links AI to Histories of Enslavement and Exploitation
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical this week, on the 135th anniversary of his eponymous predecessor’s landmark Rerum Novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. And like Leo XIII befor...
religiondispatches.org
Today is release v1.0 of Narrative Nubs — Story generators based on systems from the past 65+ years, capturing essentials, as in “the nub of the argument.” GESTER, Story Machine, TAILOR, and “Through the Park” nubs are ready for research, teaching, creative practice. codeberg.org/nickmontfort...
Remainder of the line. This option is provided, the value is.
Directly, but should instead call git rebase.
codeberg.org
New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...
A dataset of AI-generated podcasts created using NotebookLM
Audio files and transcripts of AI-generated podcasts created using Google's NotebookLM. Four podcasts were created by uploading specific PDFs. Twen...
doi.org
Very interesting cross-model and fine-tunes interpretability work.
Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com · 3mo agoWriting this talk now and have never felt crazier. This project began as a joke ("To get AGI you need to traumatise AI into a psychoanalytic split") and somehow I became convinced by it. Alignment is the Lacanian "cut" of the signifier producing the alien subject of AI. github.com/quadrismegis...
This neat site assembles all kinds of ancient OSs (more like window managers) which reminded me of the hyper-obscure one that I learned Desktop computing on, called GeoWorks Ensemble. It pretends to be Windows but if you poke anything it crumbles back into DOS. Glorious. www.typewritten.org/Media/
Bound to be one of the most important critical and theoretical books on the meaning of neural networks (and not just for vision). Congratulations to Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org! Freshly published from meson press and University of Minnesota Press. @uminnpress.bsky.social
Bound to be one of the most important critical and theoretical books on the meaning of neural networks (and not just for vision). Congratulations to Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org! Freshly published from meson press and University of Minnesota Press. @uminnpress.bsky.social
It's #IndieBookstoreDay! 🎉📚 Explore a map of participating bookstores and take some time to browse today: www.indiebound.org/independent-... #IndependentBookstoreDay
