It's a little late, but I just posted a blog recounting my teaching gig over the summer and how I thought through LLM policy for an intro to Python for DH class: matthewkollmer.com/thinking-thr... The blog also links to a ton of Berkeley DH teaching materials which, I must say, are top-notch!

There has been little scholarly work on the media history of the GPU. This freshly published OA article is my attempt to show the lines of influence from learning machines in the 1950s through 1980s HPC and MPP systems to the TPUs and GPUs of the present. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I hope that student will be in the audience for my MLA talk in Jan!

Alice Valiant@alice.strange.domains · last mo.

within 5 years someone's gonna do a humanities PhD dissertation about the "assistant persona", seen from both the LLM instantiation of it and also the fact that it's a cultural object interwoven with conceptions of servitude and obedience

I would just add that, from where I sit, this doesn't look like turf that can be defended or a tide that can be held back. There's already interdisciplinary collaboration on this topic and we can all work together to ensure the work is done well.

Federico Pianzola@fpianz.eurosky.social · last mo.

some of us saw this coming: computer scientists are doing a lot of research on fiction and narrative. 💥 63 papers + 2 SemEval tasks out of 6,422 publications in the latest @aclanthology.org Full list: federicopianzola.me/blog/index.h... #ComputationalHumanities @tedunderwood.com

Before migrating here, Twitter’s final gift was to Yglesias-pill me 😂 Most things are fine, and some can even be good

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social · 2mo ago

not wrong! bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/

Seeing Dr. Fabros hooded was extraordinary. A very special event in an already special day.

Alex Fabros, 80, makes history at UCSB

From farmworker fields in California to war in Vietnam to a doctoral degree in history, Alex Fabros, 80, is UCSB's oldest PhD recipient.

news.ucsb.edu

Looking for something to do this summer? We have a new batch of documents up at our Zooniverse site, Corresponding with Quakers. We've added materials from the Huntington's Shackleton Correspondence to UCSB's Ballitore Collection and we need help transcribing! www.zooniverse.org/projects/rac...

Corresponding with Quakers | Zooniverse - People-powered research

Investigating race, gender, class, and religion in 18th- and 19th-Century Irish Quaker Documents

zooniverse.org

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

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.

Conservatives too dislike UaaS and no one knows what to do "[To] enact the ideals of the civic-education movement, you wld need more than a new college: you wld need to reimagine the entirety of our education system and the society into which students graduate [...] a whole new ideal of the person"

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2mo ago

Everyone needs to read this before handwringing about ‘declining humanities major’ or getting fascism-curious about a GOP or Koch-brothers funded effort to install a civic center on your campus: harpers.org/archive/2026... 🗃️

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Teagan Johnson@teagrjohnson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

1/ LLMs learn narrative from their pretraining data but what narrative content is actually in there? It turns out narrative is wildly unevenly distributed across sources and topics. New preprint with @andrewpiper.bsky.social @elliottash.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social:

Oberlin students affirm we did not believe it would take forms this comical

Hulk Hogan Hulks Out in Iconic Wrestling Moment

Alt: Hulk Hogan Tears Shirt in Iconic Wrestling Moment

static.klipy.com

Jacob T. Levy@jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Oberlin students didn't in their scariest nightmares imagine the extent to which EVERY DAMN THING could become about the performance of whiteness and masculinity.

So, naive question about these campuses that pay OpenAI $13mil/yr. Why don’t they pour that money into a cluster running the strongest available open-weight model, with API and interactive options. And if the answer is “overhead,” why aren’t we collaborating?

Felt medieval. Might delete later

New piece from @markmarino.bsky.social and Jeremy Douglass bringing AI into the fold of Critical Code Studies, as a new method for reading!

@dhnow.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Editors’ Choice: Critical Code Studies with AI: conversing with LLMs about code

This is a way bigger indictment of US infrastructure.

W.E.D.em Boyz@leftistwonk.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure

I can confirm that using claude to write rust works pretty well. RustMallet is a whisker faster than Java Mallet at training topic models, and adds some tweaks that I have avoided in Mallet for stability reasons (multiple saved states by default). github.com/mimno/RustMa...

GitHub - mimno/RustMallet: Rust implementation of sparse Gibbs sampling LDA, following the SparseLDA scheme from MALLET

Rust implementation of sparse Gibbs sampling LDA, following the SparseLDA scheme from MALLET - mimno/RustMallet

github.com

Even constraining the AI impact to the individual layer however, will change the nature of work. More experimentation and more exploitation of novel solutions for instance will change the complexity of code committed if not the quantity. Some evidence for this coming out of public repo analysis too

@princeton.edu is seeking to hire AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows affiliated with the AI Lab (@princetonainews.bsky.social) and the Center for Digital Humanities to conduct research focused on societal AI. Applications open through Jul 1! cdh.princeton.edu/news/2026/05...

Applications open for AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Applications open for AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows

cdh.princeton.edu

The AI encyclical is bringing something to a head for me, as someone who came up through the Catholic school system. In a nutshell, I think that a lot of cultural critics -- in AI and other fields -- rely on mystification to make their arguments just as much as any religious dogma does.

Wow!! An undergrad I mentored this spring had a paper accepted at ASIS&T. Really really impressed by their curiosity with the project and motivation to turn it into a formal paper. These kids!

For those who like to do the optional readings, I’ll just leave this here www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

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 · 3mo ago

the 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...

Already making plans for this resource!

Post45 Data Collective@post45data.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The P45 Data Collective Tabular Data Style Guide is now live! If you are a researcher, student, librarian, or instructor working with cultural data, this style guide is for you. data.post45.org/style-guide....

The annual Academic Jobs Report by the AHA is here. For me, the two big takeaways are (i) a roughly 15% drop in the total number of History faculty since 2010, and (ii) a 20% drop from the previous year in tenure/tenure-track job ads in last year's hiring cycle. Not irreversible, but pretty grim.

The 2025 Academic Jobs Report – AHA

The latest available data on higher education hiring proves that history departments are shrinking.

historians.org

It's publication day! Available in print and Open Access mitpress.mit.edu/978026255091... A book about how digital social reading apps are changing and nurturing the way we read. I talk about Wattpad, Goodreads, AO3 and more. @mitpress.bsky.social @unigroningen.bsky.social @gronlp.bsky.social

Digital Social Reading

How digital social reading apps are powerfully changing—and nurturing—the way we read.Conventional wisdom would have us believe that digital technology i...

mitpress.mit.edu

3x the writing in the week after classes than during the whole previous semester? The project I thought was behind schedule just hit warp speed!

Don’t forget to vote! Deadline this Friday, May 15

Teddy Roland@teddyroland.bsky.social · 5mo ago

MLA Members: You just received an email regarding a ratification vote for measures that passed the Delegate Assembly. I participated in discussions about them during the conference, so I want to share a few notes about the Constitutional Amendments, which are a little opaque.

I'm starting a newsletter! I'll be sharing "dispatches" or "field notes" about AI, language, and culture, drawn from my research, reading, and traveling. Short, frequent, informal!

Welcome to Field Notes

A little bit about me and why I'm writing here

field-notes.leaflet.pub

Good news: the formula this story reports is about state funding only. Long term structural change is possible! Bad news: Federal funding got bumped too during COVID and it goes away next fall. OUSD is scrambling to cover enrichment programs and teacher aids, which impact current students.

The Oaklandside@oaklandside.org · 4mo ago

California’s spending is also now ranked as one of the most equitable in the nation. The data, from the 2022-2023 school year, reflect Covid spending boosts.