iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Very excited to share that my @longreads.com essay, "Uncanny Testimony," received the 2026 American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Award in the Technology category! Enormously grateful to the judges for selecting my essay! longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

longreads.com

Uncanny Testimony - Longreads

As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

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University of Washington Information School @ischool.uw.edu · 23/04/2026

Our faculty are leading in the classroom, the lab and beyond – and we want to bolster support for this vital work. Make your gift today for #HuskyGivingDay to support faculty teaching, research and student mentorship: bit.ly/ischoolHGD26

Husky Giving Day: Faculty excellence, powered by you.
Purple gradient graphic quote image. “Teaching and research work together to help students understand AI and shape it in meaningful ways.” - Ben Lee, Information School Assistant Professor. University of Washington Information School.

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I’m thrilled to have an essay in the latest print issue of the Bennington Review! It’s about my year working at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the convergence of collective and inherited memory. Enormously grateful that the editors selected it! bcgl.substack.com/p/new-essay-...

bcgl.substack.com

New essay in the Bennington Review

Greetings in 2026!

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Last May, @toddpresner.bsky.social, Robert Ehrenreich, and I convened a symposium at @ischool.uw.edu to explore "AI and the Future of Holocaust Research & Memory." Our resulting white paper is now officially online and contains provocations, reflections, and refusals: doi.org/10.6069/cx72...

doi.org

AI and The Future of Holocaust Research & Memory

How will the advent of AI impact the future of Holocaust studies? Will it provide new methods for analyzing data and displaying information for research and education that will benefit the field, or w...

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

@rjainrjain.bsky.social's Gates Cambridge Scholarship is such exciting news and so well-deserved! Can't wait to hear what the year at Cambridge brings! grad.uw.edu/rijul-jain/

grad.uw.edu

Rijul Jain

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University of Washington Information School @ischool.uw.edu · 06/03/2026

Our new class aims to help students across the University of Washington gain a broader, better understanding of AI. Assistant Professor Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social has been teaching Informatics 110 as part of an effort to build robust AI literacy for all students. ischool.uw.edu/news/2026/02...

ischool.uw.edu

Informatics class helps UW students get a handle on AI

Students today are being asked to engage with artificial intelligence in all aspects of their lives — in their personal lives, education and careers. But...

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Calling all technologists, artists and other creative visionaries: The Library of Congress has opened the call for the next Innovator in Residence! Apply by 2pm ET April 10 newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...

Library of Congress Innovator in Residence graphic

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Coalition for Networked Information @cni-org.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The plenary videos from the CNI meeting are now available: 🤝Shaping CNI’s Future Together 📚A Landscape of AI in Libraries @bcgl.bsky.social 🏆AUPresses Stand UP Award @brettbobley.bsky.social @aupresses.bsky.social 💰The State of Funding for US Higher Ed, Science, and Technology in a Time of Change

youtube.com

CNI Fall 2025 Membership Meeting - YouTube

CNI Fall 2025 Membership Meeting videos at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill Washington, DC. Learn more at: https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2025

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Molly Hardy @mollyhardy.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Publication day! My article on how to read an 18C newspapers, on digital remediation, and on the unfree press out in the world. Thanks @andy-schocket.bsky.social @historymatterssyd.bsky.social & M. Karrs for making it all possible. @universitypress.cambridge.org lnkd.in/eEwbdbSw

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THiCC PI @profdancy.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Figured I’d wait to post anything for this, but I can’t tell you how excited I am for us to have the opportunity to be funded to do this work. We really do believe that our project connecting communities, digital archives of the early Black press, and human-AI systems will have a large impact

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Brett Bobley @brettbobley.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

For "Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives," congrats to: Jim Casey, Christopher Dancy, @snblickhan.bsky.social, Tiffany Smith, Benjamin Lee. (And I must also include @profgabrielle.bsky.social !)

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Seconding all of this — so much fun not work with so many people I deeply admire, and we can’t wait to share out as our project progresses!

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sam blickhan @snblickhan.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

I can confirm, thinking with this crew is honestly wonderful, 10/10, Dream Team experience. I have more to say but a meeting to facilitate! More soon.

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Honored to be giving an opening plenary talk on AI & libraries later today at CNI 2025! I’m excited for the conversation with Kate Zwaard and for the full program by @cni-org.bsky.social! www.cni.org/events/membe...

cni.org

Schedule

CNI Fall 2025 Membership Meeting December 11-12, 2025 Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill Hotel, Washington, DC PDF Schedule View the CNI Fall 2025 Membership Meeting schedule & directory.…

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Jim Casey @jimccasey1.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

I am beyond thrilled to share some good news: 1. I've moved to a new job at UC Santa Barbara. 2. We have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Both, we hope, will allow us to continue building the work! + hfa.ucsb.edu/news/schmidt...

hfa.ucsb.edu

Schmidt Sciences awards $750,000 to UCSB-led team to transform Black press archives with AI | Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

English professor Jim Casey leads a national coalition to recover 19th-century African American newspapers using machine learning and public crowdsourcing.

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Thank you to @datarescueproject.org for publishing this blog post by @kdeeds.bsky.social and myself on GovScape! Extremely grateful to @datarescueproject.org for all their incredible work!

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Very excited to have a software paper with @yh-huang.bsky.social in the CHR journal on the Digital Collections Explorer, our open-source multimodal viewer for digital collections!

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infoDOCKET @infodocket.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

New Research Tool: GovScape (US Gov PDFs) govscape.net ||| Research Paper (preprint) About #GovScape arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010 #govdocs @eotarchive.org

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Tyler McBrien @tylermcbrien.com · 19/11/2025

Anyone interested in govt transparency and public access should check out GovScape from @bcgl.bsky.social and his team👇 It's an incredibly powerful tool that allows visual, semantic text, and keywords search of 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages!) and counting: www.govscape.net

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govscape.net @govscape.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

We’re live! Search 10 million+ U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages)! GovScape offers visual search, semantic text search, and keyword search. Explore below: Website: govscape.net ArXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010

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Trevor Owens @tjowens.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Huge step forward in enabling access and use of content archived from government websites!

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

1/ Announcing GovScape – a public search system for 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages)! GovScape offers visual search, semantic text search, and keyword search. Explore below: Website: www.govscape.net ArXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010

govscape.net

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University of Washington Information School @ischool.uw.edu · 16/10/2025

Assistant Professor Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social's essay on the topic of AI and Holocaust Memory, “Uncanny Testimony,” was published by @longreads.com: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

longreads.com

Uncanny Testimony - Longreads

As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

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Longreads @longreads.com · 26/09/2025

“For all its futuristic appeal, I felt myself turning to the past. I yearned to speak with my grandmother about her life.” A scholar at the intersection of AI and Holocaust memory wrestles with technology that speaks with the dead. By @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

longreads.com

Uncanny Testimony - Longreads

As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

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Jennifer Serventi @jenserventi.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Appreciated this thoughtful piece from @bcgl.bsky.social. Eloquently puts into words some of concerns about a particular use of AI that I've been grappling with.

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Longreads @longreads.com · 25/09/2025

“But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?” The grandson of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor grapples with the use of AI to reanimate the dead. A new essay on @longreads.com, by @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

forms.gle

Survey on Serendipity and Information Seeking in Digital Collections

Purpose of the Study We are seeking to understand the different methods of information seeking in digital collections. In addition, we would like to understand what the participants' perceptions of se...

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

forms.gle

Survey on Serendipity and Information Seeking in Digital Collections

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Lucy Lu Wang @lucylw.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Pls help spread the word: We are hiring! 🌲☕✨ @ischool.uw.edu is recruiting two tenure-track assistant profs in AI. Areas include human-AI collaboration, AI & society, comp social science, NLP, and AI applications. Apply by Nov 15, 2025: apply.interfolio.com/171020 Happy to answer questions!

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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DHQuarterly @dhquarterly.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

CFP - AI for DH: Research Problems and Critical Approaches. DHQ seeks 500-word abstracts for a special issue on AI (research problems, critical approaches, responsible applications, case studies, etc.). Deadline: Sept 15, 2025. More details: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

dhq.digitalhumanities.org

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

dhq.digitalhumanities.org

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961 Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

arxiv.org

Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections

We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital col...

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Very excited to have this article in Internet Histories with @tjowens.bsky.social and Jonah Estess! In the article, we study Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN Security Council and trace the PowerPoint through web archives

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Today, I’ll be sharing about the public symposium, “AI and the Future of Holocaust Research and Memory,” hosted at @ischool.uw.edu on Udub’s campus in Seattle. Wonderful to be here with such incredible colleagues across the world and across disciplines.

Title slide for the public symposium “AI and the future of Holocaust research and memory,” hosted by the University of Washington.

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James Keating @jameskeating.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

On Thursday @ 12.30pm I'm joining the Australian Society of Archivists online to discuss 'Authors and Archives'. Sign up if you'd like to hear me on Miles Franklin's interwar archival activism, and Ben Lee and Andrew Dean on JM Coetzee's 1960s foray into AI www.archivists.org.au/events/event...

archivists.org.au

Authors and Archives: Miles Franklin's Activism and J. M. Coetzee's AI

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

I wrote a little bit about the Library of Congress - a place I care about deeply - given today's news: bcgl.substack.com/p/the-disman...

bcgl.substack.com

The Dismantling of the Library of Congress is an Assault on Knowledge Itself

Some thoughts on the day...

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

I wrote a little bit about the Library of Congress - a place I care about deeply - given today's news: bcgl.substack.com/p/the-disman...

bcgl.substack.com

The Dismantling of the Library of Congress is an Assault on Knowledge Itself

Some thoughts on the day...

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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Finally documented the Beyond Words dataset from the @librarycongress.bsky.social labs / @bcgl.bsky.social for the BigLAM @hf.co org! - 3.5K annotated historical newspaper pages - Bounding boxes + category labels - Photos, ads, headlines, cartoons & more

Image of a historic newspaper with bounding box predictions for "photographs" "headline" "illustration" etc.

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Very excited to be organizing this public symposium at Udub with Robert Ehrenreich at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and @toddpresner.bsky.social at UCLA, and we'd love to have you join in-person in Seattle on 5/20!

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Thomas Padilla @thomaspadilla.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

AI preservation is an unaddressed challenge. New work from me on "Preserving AI" at Inside Higher Ed. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

insidehighered.com

AI Preservation Is an Unaddressed Challenge (opinion)

Future scholars will need an enduring digital record of AI technology, Thomas Padilla writes.

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

After five years, Newspaper Navigator is undergoing some changes - the dataset will continue on, but it's time to say good bye to the search application. LC Labs and I would love to hear from past users about their experiences with Newspaper Navigator in the comments: blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/20...

blogs.loc.gov

Help Us Say Farewell to Newspaper Navigator! | The Signal

The Library will retire the Newspaper Navigator application on April 21st, 2025. Created by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee while he was in service as a Library of Congress Innovator in Residence, the ap...

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Excited to share our preprint "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research” We're open to feedback—read & share thoughts! @laurenfklein.bsky.social @mmvty.bsky.social @docdre.distributedblackness.net @mariaa.bsky.social @jmjafrx.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social

Screenshot of the first page of preprint, "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research," by Lauren Klein, Meredith Martin, Andre Brock, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh, Jessica Marie Johnson, Lauren Tilton, and David Mimno

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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

For the latest print issue of @currentaffairs.bsky.social, I wrote about gambling in America, and how it relates to the present political moment. Many thanks to @the-syllabus.bsky.social for naming it a "Best of Journalism" curators' pick this past week! www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-wor...

currentaffairs.org

How Gambling Took Over America

An unhealthy fixation with financial speculation pervades American culture generally and sports particularly.

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Brian Hutler @brianhutler.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Interactive AI Fair happening today and tomorrow at Temple!! We kick off today with a talk by Prof Ben Lee from U of Washington on AI and Libraries @bcgl.bsky.social More info here sites.temple.edu/fair/

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