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Becca Cohen

@beccacohen.bsky.social
424 followers 488 following 15 posts

IS PhD Student at UIUC studying digital humanities, language, cultural analytics and ethical AI

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Becca Cohen @beccacohen.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
If only the PocketOS founder had seen the sitcom Silicon Valley 🤦‍♀️
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 01/03/2026
OpenAI posted the terms of the deal. Reveals that it absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance. EO 12333 is how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines *outside the US* even if it contains info from/on US persons. openai.com/index/our-ag...
2. Our contract. Here is the relevant language:

The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.

For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.
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Post45 Data Collective @post45data.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Come “poke around” our data “to find new books and authors [you’ve] never heard of!” @jamesfolta.com makes great use of the Int'l Bestsellers dataset built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on @literaryhub.bsky.social. lithub.com/find-your-ne...
lithub.com
Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers.
In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.” But recently, I came across a Substack post analyz…
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Lit Hub @literaryhub.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Compiled Sean DiLeonardi, Becca Cohen, and Dan Sinykin, the International Bestsellers Dataset gathers data about international bestselling books from 2013 to 2022.
buff.ly
Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers.
In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.” But recently, I came across a Substack post analyz…
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Stoked to see @jamesfolta.com in @literaryhub.bsky.social talking up a dataset on int'l bestsellers built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social + @beccacohen.bsky.social (I helped). See who the world reads! One nit: Folta sez "Sinykin is a great follow on Bluesky"—LIES lithub.com/find-your-ne...
lithub.com
Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers.
In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.” But recently, I came across a Substack post analyz…
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Sean DiLeonardi @sdileonardi.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
When we published international bestseller data with @post45data.bsky.social all I wanted was to make a Sankey diagram but never managed, now someone has. And it looks beautiful. Check it out! Source: substack.com/home/post/p-... public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...
public.flourish.studio
Publishing flows (no domestic)
A Flourish data visualization by cody
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Becca Cohen @beccacohen.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Excited to see the dataset being used!!
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critical slop studies @struthious.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
"I want statisticians and data scientists to be more honest and explicit about the rhetorical role of statistical inference. No one in introductory statistics tells you that they are teaching a language of persuasion with numbers."
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dominique routhier @routhier.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Ok this sounds cool books will be written by robots evaluated by robots and sold by robots to robots!
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Aaron Clauset @aaronclauset.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Out now in @natphys.nature.com "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", with @weihuali.bsky.social and H Zheng, we show how election into prestigious academic societies has markedly different effects on the research prominence of women and men physicists /1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Screenshot of the top of the paper "The undervaluing of elite women in physics",
Abstract: "Elite women in physics wait longer than
men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along."
Body: "Physics has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, both in the range of phenomena it studies and its demographic composition. For example, the share of publishing women physicists worldwide has more than doubled — from 4.5% in 1970 to 9.2% in 2020 — and continues to increase. Yet parity remains distant, raising the question: to what degree has the physics community progressed toward the meritocratic ideal of recognizing scientists purely on the basis of their contributions?

We address this question in two ways. First, we compare broad trends in the productivity and prominence of men and women physi- cists worldwide over the past 50 years. Second, we examine the careers of elite physicists, asking whether the high honour of being elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) impacts the careers of men and women in physics differently. Our analysis leverages a recently developed Bayesian network model1 to estimate individual measures of scientific productivity and prominence from large-scale bibliographic data. We apply this model to a global physics collaboration network constructed from first- and last-author pairs in 9.1 million physics journal articles (omitting single-author papers) published between 1950 and 2023 and recorded in the OpenAlex bibliographic database. Within this global network, we focus on 93,456 established physicists with at least 30 years between their first and most recent publication and with at least 10 first- or last-author publications..."
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Making a CLEAN, SHAREABLE dataset is fucking hard! I'm super proud, then, to publish this one, on a team led by @sdileonardi.bsky.social and @beccacohen.bsky.social, with @post45data.bsky.social. It has more than a decade of 21C int'l bestseller data, revealing how popular world lit circulates....
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Sean DiLeonardi @sdileonardi.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Hoo boy! I can’t believe it’s happening. We’ve been working on this for years. Thanks to @post45data.bsky.social you can now search our IB database, with a very cool interface! Please share with anyone who might be interested Special thanks to @ninasabak.bsky.social for aiding with the data source
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Post45 Data Collective @post45data.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
New dataset on bestsellers from 40+ countries, with consistent coverage for France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the U.S. Congrats to the authors @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, and @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on this major contribution! 🎉 🔗: doi.org/10.18737/386...
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Juan Diego Rodriguez @juand-r.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
🎉 New Benchmark Alert: KRISTEVA – Close‑Reading for LLMs📚 I’m excited to announce a new paper accepted to ACL 2025, in collaboration with Patrick Sui, Philippe Laban, and others!
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Marie Pruitt @mariepruitt.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
I’m going to need Mother Nature to knock it off with all these tornadoes. How am I supposed to write my dissertation while I’m stressing out about corralling my cats into the basement?
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Becca Cohen @beccacohen.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
Thanks Apple AI, was looking for somewhere I could get germs on sale (second image is the actual promotion notification it was summarizing)
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The Transfeminine Review @thetransfemininereview.com · 07/02/2025
I need to hear this right now, which means that others probably do too: However you're getting through this, you're doing a good job. This month's been fucked up and intense and I know I'm not the only one who's overwhelmed. It's exhausting and cruel, and the important part is getting through 🩵
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Megan Ward @megaplex.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
10 Days to MLA! 12 Truisms About the Novel Debunked. Day 3: The author is a solitary creator. To find out what's NOT true, read @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social , @sdileonardi.bsky.social + @beccacohen.bsky.social in a special issue of Studies in the Novel: muse-jhu-edu.oregonstate.idm.oclc.org/issue/54034
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Sarah Allison @sarahdallison.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
& a link to the issue muse.jhu.edu/issue/54034 some contributors on bluesky who put the 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 in "firewall" include @krbarrett.bsky.social @3volumenovel.bsky.social @sdileonardi.bsky.social @beccacohen.bsky.social @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social @kavithaganesan76.bsky.social @dallasliddle.bsky.social
muse.jhu.edu
Project MUSE - Studies in the Novel-Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 2024
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Sean DiLeonardi @sdileonardi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
If Stephen King is a brand name, what’s the diff bw him and more recent authors who embrace self-branding? It was more difficult to answer this than I first thought It was a pleasure getting here with my coauthors (& the ed.s & Post45 2023 crew). Please read and let us know what you think
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
With @sdileonardi.bsky.social and @beccacohen.bsky.social, I wrote a shortish essay on The Girl on the Train and how self-branding is changing authorship. For a fascinating special issue of Studies in the Novel ed by @megaplex.bsky.social and @sarahdallison.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
muse.jhu.edu
Project MUSE - Brand Management: International Bestsellers and the Death of the Author, Again
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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 06/12/2024
Maybe one of the reasons there are so many unhinged academics is that in order to keep your job, you’re constantly required to tout yourself as a Scholar of World-Historical Significance, even as your office’s ceiling tiles slowly dislodge themselves to fall on your head.
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Sean DiLeonardi @sdileonardi.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Post the last sentence of your last article OUT THIS MONTH! w @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social @beccacohen.bsky.social The convergence of these two developments-Web 2.0 and globalized conglomerate publishing-with all their extra-literary ramifications, has transformed the author [into a brand manager].
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Sarah Griebel @sgriebel.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
There are many ways to identify texts that seem ahead of their time. Our CHR 2024 paper asks which measures of textual precocity align best with social evidence about influence and change.
Abstract: Measures of textual similarity and divergence are increasingly used to study cultural change. But which measures align, in practice, with social evidence about change? We apply three different representations of text (topic models, document embeddings, and word-level perplexity) to three different corpora (literary studies, economics, and fiction). In every case, works by highly-cited authors and younger authors are textually ahead of the curve. We don't find clear evidence that one representation of text is to be preferred over the others. But alignment with social evidence is strongest when texts are represented through the top quartile of passages, suggesting that a text's impact may depend more on its most forward-looking moments than on sustaining a high level of innovation throughout.
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arxiv cs.CL @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Sarah Griebel, Becca Cohen, Lucian Li, Jaihyun Park, Jiayu Liu, Jana Perkins, Ted Underwood Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change arxiv.org/abs/2411.15068
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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Our proceedings are out! 🚨 They include no less than 78 papers that reflect the diverse and innovative research happening within the Computational Humanities. Take a dive here: ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/
ceur-ws.org
CEUR-WS.org/Vol-3834 - Computational Humanities Research 2024
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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
🔍 The full program for #CHR2024 is now available! Join us for cutting-edge computational humanities research and discussions. See the complete schedule at: 2024.computational-humanities-research.org/programme/
2024.computational-humanities-research.org
Computational Humanities Research 2024
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arxiv cs.CL @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social · 28/02/2024
Kaige Xie, Mark Riedl Creating Suspenseful Stories: Iterative Planning with Large Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2402.17119
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Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 25/02/2024
The Gemini debacle showed how AI ethics *wasn't* being applied with the nuanced expertise necessary. It demonstrates the need for people who are great at creating roadmaps given foreseeable use. I wasn't there to help, nor were many of the ethics-minded ppl I know.
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Becca Cohen @beccacohen.bsky.social · 06/10/2023
Being gaslight by ChatGPT again (It in fact did not even add the punctuation it claims to on Grand Central)
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