iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

We've been super busy the past few months getting out some research on the computational analysis of film, so I've put together a page with the highlights. people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dbamman/fil... Some things to call out: 1/7

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

Computational Analysis of Film

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

cls-lab.com

CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder

The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.

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Sayash Kapoor @sayash.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Thrilled to share that I am joining UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in the School of Information! I start in Fall 2027, and I am recruiting PhD students this cycle. List me in your application if you want to work with me! More on what I'm looking for (and a form to indicate interest) 🧵

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Allison Cooper @kinolab.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

What’s in, or what isn’t in, a close-up? Kinolab is working with computer scientist @dbamman.bsky.social (UC Berkeley, School of Information) and other collaborators this year to optimize analytical AI for film and media research, bridging the gap between distant and close viewing practices. 📉🎥👀

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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

📢 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!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

This has been a desideratum since the day we first published this model -- I'm so happy Patrick figured this out!

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Models are now expert math solvers, and so AI for math education is receiving increasing attention. Our new preprint evaluates 11 VLMs on our QA benchmark, DrawEduMath. We highlight a startling gap: models perform less well on inputs from K-12 students who need more help. 🧵

Title, author list, and two figures from the paper.
Title: The Aftermath of DrawEduMath: Vision Language Models
Underperform with Struggling Students and Misdiagnose Errors
Authors: Li Lucy, Albert Zhang, Nathan Anderson, Ryan Knight, Kyle Lo
Figure 1: On the left is a math problem, where students are asked to draw x < 5/2 on a number line. The right side shows two example student responses that differ in correctness. DrawEduMath pairs each math problem with one student response, and prompts VLMs to answer questions about the student response.
Figure 2: VLMs consistently perform worse on answering DrawEduMath benchmark questions pertaining to erroneous student responses. Performance on non-erroneous student responses is labeled with specific VLMs’ names; that same model’s performance on erroneous student responses is directly below.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Just a testimonial: potato 1.0 is amazing and I use it all the time for annotation. Excited to see what’s in 2.0!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

That DHS/ICE and anyone up or down the chain could describe this murder victim as a “domestic terrorist” is utter depravity.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

I used to be astonished that John Keats wrote everything by 26yo (and still am) but now newly in awe to learn that late Beatles (“let it be” etc) were 29?!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

This program brought together such a wonderful group of ~30 PhD students for two weeks at Berkeley last year with backgrounds in sociology, information, law, computer science and more — same idea but in Oxford next summer; apply by Feb 2 if you’re looking to make connections across fields

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Berkeley wrote up our work on measuring the stories in contemporary songs and had me reflect on the origin of that work in Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Excited to get this work out in the world at #chr2025 (with Sabrina Baur, Mackenzie Cramer, Anna Ho and Tom McEnaney) -- asking: how much do contemporary songs tell stories, and how has that changed over the past half century? anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

anthology.ach.org

Measuring the Stories in Contemporary Songs

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

New grant program announcement: You've heard me talk this morning about those 23 new DH awards from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program? Well, we just announced our new RFP for 2026! Teams can be global too! Please consider applying. RFP here: www.schmidtsciences.org/opportunity/...

schmidtsciences.org

2026 Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI) RFP - Schmidt Sciences

Overview [Read the full RFP] Schmidt Sciences is requesting proposals to the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), aimed at fostering research in the digital humanities with a particular focus ...

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

En route to #CHR2025 in Luxembourg — looking forward to seeing people there!

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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

📢 The #CHR2025 proceedings are out! 97 papers, ~1600 pages of computational humanities 🔥 Now published via the new Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, with DOIs for every paper. 🔗 anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... And don’t forget: registration closes tomorrow (20 Nov)!

anthology.ach.org

Edited by Taylor Arnold, Margherita Fantoli, and Ruben Ros

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

It's the season for PhD apps!! 🥧 🦃 ☃️ ❄️ Apply to Wisconsin CS to research - Societal impact of AI - NLP ←→ CSS and cultural analytics - Computational sociolinguistics - Human-AI interaction - Culturally competent and inclusive NLP with me! lucy3.github.io/prospective-...

A staircase in the new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences building at Wisconsin Madison. Tan wood structures surround tapestry art and a small indoor garden.

A view from above of the staircases in the Wisconsin CDIS building

An shot from below of winding wooden staircases and a glass atrium rooftop. The new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences building at Wisconsin Madison.

A bicolor white cat with seal-colored markings, looking upwards with big wide dark eyes.

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Kyle Lo @ ICML2026 🇰🇷 @kylelo.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

why intern at Ai2? 🐟interns own major parts of our model development, sometimes even leading whole projects 🐡we're committed to open science & actively help our interns publish their work reach out if u wanna build open language models together 🤝 links 👇

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

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Chris Warren @chriswarren.info · 18/09/2025

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

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Meredith Rose @mrose.ink · 05/09/2025

Unfortunately, I expect that the fact they won a pretty resounding fair use victory is going to be lost in much of the coverage. They lost on downloading & storing the LibGen dataset (straight infringement!), but the act of training on copyrighted material (+ making their own ebooks) was a win.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

This is such a pity -- "Push It" has, hands down, the greatest hook of all time (and the original version is now only available on youtube?) www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCad...

youtube.com

Salt-N-Pepa - Push It (Official Music Video)

YouTube video by SaltNPepaVEVO

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

I realized recently that in 10 years of teaching I don't think I've ever asked students to pay for a textbook for a class -- largely due to these excellent draft chapters of Jurafsky & Martin.

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David J. Harding @djhardingsoc.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Berkeley Sociology is hiring faculty! Sept 1 application deadline. Two positions: (1) open area junior search. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05013, (2) associate or full professor in Anti-Black Racism and Social Inclusion aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05012 Please help spread the word!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

Assistant Professor - Open Field - Sociology

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

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naitian @naitian.org · 23/07/2025

I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards! (thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!) aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

A poster for "Culture is not Trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" which takes the form of a flow-chart. The central question, and the starting point of the flow chart, is "What is culture in cultural NLP?"

An arrow is labeled "wait, so what's cultural NLP?" This leads to a block explaining that the goals of cultural NLP are described in section 2 of the paper. They include inclusivity, depth, discerning, and adaptiveness.

That leads to an arrow that says "that sounds great!". But there are recurring challenges in this kind of work! Section 3 surveys some of these: a discomfort around the proxies being chosen, a lack of coverage, and a lack of dynamicity.

That in turn leads to an arrow labeled "Hm, sounds like we need to figure out..." and it leads back to the main question: "What is culture in cultural NLP?"

A final arrow extends below this block: "Well, who's to say, really?"

This points to sociocultural linguistics. Section 4 explores how other disciplines, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis have faced similar challenges in the past. Section 4.2 gives an overview of sociocultural linguistics, which is a set of principles tying together some convergent themes: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness.

One arrow extends from this asking, "what's that have to do with cultural NLP?" Section 5 gives a case study of how indexicality clarifies how to think about stereotypies in the context of mining cultual knowledge from the web.

Another arrow says "How can I build safe NLP systems?" Section 6.2 explores how localization can serve as a useful model from building culturally aware technologies because it forces developers to define culture explicitly and tractably.

Finally, an arrow asks "how can I study culture with NLP methods?" Section 6.1 lays out theoretically motivated directions for future empirical and theoretical work in computationally modeling culture.

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Meredith Rose @mrose.ink · 21/07/2025

One of the fun parts of policy work is that you have a handful of extremely important, esoteric, but load-bearing legal concepts (like fair use) that only ever make it into public consciousness when they're being targeted for destruction, and public opinion about them is entirely outcome-dependent.

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Brandon Butler @bb.usefairuse.com · 22/07/2025

Creative people and people of good will who are allies and advocates for creativity need to come to grips with the fact that AI training is generally fair use for the same deep reasons that critique, parody, teaching, scholarship, and other daily creative practices are fair use.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Go to WI and work with Lucy! And stay for the farmer's market, memorial union, orpheum, willy st coop, chocolate shoppe, american players theater, and the million other things that make Madison an amazing place to live. PhD app deadline in December.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

I’m a week late with my #thanksbrett but just want to add my appreciation too — in thinking of all the careers that ODH has given space to and supported (including my own), words can’t suffice. @brettbobley.bsky.social maybe at least it’s now permitted to let us buy you a beer.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Flying back today from a circuit of some (not all!) of the great DH centers in Germany (Darmstadt, Bielefeld, Leipzig and Würzburg). Such great energy and amazing people moving the field forward at each one. I'm bringing back lots of ideas.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I'm joining Wisconsin CS as an assistant professor in fall 2026!! There, I'll continue working on language models, computational social science, & responsible AI. 🌲🧀🚣🏻‍♀️ Apply to be my PhD student! Before then, I'll postdoc for a year in the NLP group at another UW 🏔️ in the Pacific Northwest

Wisconsin-Madison's tree-filled campus, next to a big shiny lake

A computer render of the interior of the new computer science, information science, and statistics building. A staircase crosses an open atrium with visibility across multiple floors

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

At Perseus, the vast majority of hits have always been from non .edu addresses. NEH means the Greek and Roman world is available to everyone, not just academics.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Among these is one working with me -- if you have a background in literary/cultural theory and are interested in the ways in which computational methods, including LLMs, are able to provide support for empirical sensemaking about literature, media and culture, please get in touch!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

We just launched an open search for postdocs at the @berkeleyischool.bsky.social in a bunch of areas (social informatics, climate informatics, communications, econ, behavioral science, literary theory, algorithmic justice), all mentored by different faculty: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04845

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar - School of Information

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

The people at the NEH are among the most knowledgeable and professional public servants I know. They operate with a shoestring budget already. Just let them be.

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

If you're an international student at UC (or beyond), know your rights: www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sites/defaul...

universityofcalifornia.edu

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 08/03/2025

It's been delayed a little, but here — at last — is the CFP for Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, to support research "at the intersection of AI and the humanities." Expressions of interest are due April 4th. Pls RT! www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

schmidtsciences.org

Humanities and AI Virtual Institute - Schmidt Sciences

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Not sure if I can imagine a bigger driver for protest turnout out than being commanded not to protest — happening in dozens of cities nationwide this friday! standupforscience2025.org

standupforscience2025.org

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

March 7, 2025. Washington DC and nationwide. Because science is for everyone.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 21/02/2025

Postdoc opportunity at the School of Information Sciences, Urbana-Champaign. Teaching one course a semester. Application deadline April 1, but they recommend conversation with potential faculty mentors in advance of that date. Renewable for a second year. Pls RT! ischool.illinois.edu/research/pos...

ischool.illinois.edu

Postdoctoral Research Associate Program

Description of the postdoctoral research associate program including requirements and application process.

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naitian @naitian.org · 18/02/2025

There's been a lot of work on "culture" in NLP, but not much agreement on what it is. A position paper by me, @dbamman.bsky.social, and @ibleaman.bsky.social on cultural NLP: what we want, what we have, and how sociocultural linguistics can clarify things. Website: naitian.org/culture-not-... 1/n

Culture is not trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP. By Naitian Zhou and David Bamman from the Berkeley School of Information and Isaac L. Bleaman from Berkeley Linguistics.

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UC Berkeley School of Information @berkeleyischool.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

A new study by Ph.D. student @dan-hickey.bsky.social found that weekly rates of hate speech on X rose about 50% in the months after its purchase. 🔍 “We need to know when we’re getting content moderation right and when we’re getting it wrong," he said. More: www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2025/st...

ischool.berkeley.edu

Study Finds Persistent Spike in Hate Speech on X

A new analysis by UC Berkeley School of Information Ph.D. student Dan Hickey has found that weekly rates of hate speech on the social media platform X rose about 50% in the months after its purchase i...

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

I need an explainer for the Ross/Westlaw case that tells me what Ross was “training” — a generative QA system? A search engine? Is it just retrieving the bulk memos (that infringe on the headnotes?). Not clear to me how AI is implicated @bbutler.bsky.social @matthewsag.bsky.social

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

New @ai2.bsky.social paper accepted to #NAACL2025! We worked with Teaching Lab and ASSISTments to create a new dataset for evaluating VLMs. DrawEduMath includes 2,030 teacher-annotated images of students’ handwritten responses to math problems. Website: drawedumath.org

a screenshot of the drawedumath website, showing paper title Evaluating Vision Language Models with Expert-Annotated Students’ Hand-Drawn Math Images and author list Sami Baral, Li Lucy, Ryan Knight, Alice Ng, Luca Soldaini, Neil Heffernan, Kyle Lo with affiliations at WPI, Berkeley, Insource Services, Teaching Lab, and Ai2. Below that is an image showing an example image with question-answer pairs from the dataset.

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