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Jean Barré

@jbarre.bsky.social
535 followers 544 following 104 posts

PhDone ! in Computational Literary Studies at LaTTiCe lab & École normale supérieure in Paris. I study French genre fiction (1860–1945) using quantitative and network-based approaches. jeanbarre.eu

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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Want to play with corpora of the French 3rd Republic ? Want to join a nice team ? Want to do something else than LLM and have fun with smaller models as well ? Want to work with people in the humanities and the digital humanities ? Well, this might be for you 😄: jobs.inria.fr/public/class...
jobs.inria.fr
NLP Post-doc / Engineer for Information Mining in Historical Data (French 3rd Republic)
Offre d'emploi Inria
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JCLS @jcls-io.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🗓️ We are thrilled to announce the Call for Papers for the conference+journal track of the 6th annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies, July 8-9, 2027, in #Groningen, #TheNetherlands! #CCLS2027 #CfP Submit your article by February 1, 2027! 🥳🥳🥳 jcls.io/site/cfp/
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/09/2026
Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.
Free-text evaluation of answers to character modeling and constrained generation questions. This is just one of several scores Chronologic-EN can produce; we focus on it here because it's both the hardest test and the one most relevant to simulation of the past. Frontier models reach 72%; Talkie-1930 is stronger than several larger competitors, but not at the frontier by this measure. Note that this score has improved ~45% in the last two years, but still falls perceptibly short of ground truth.
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Thierry Poibeau @tpoibeau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
"Les Mots sans les choses. Philosophie, éthique et impact des grands modèles de langue" vient de paraître aux Editions Rue d'Ulm. Que changent ces modèles à nos façons de penser et d’écrire, et quelles conséquences pour la société et notre autonomie ? presses.ens.psl.eu/les-mots-san...
presses.ens.psl.eu
Les Mots sans les choses
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Philosophie, &eacute;thique et impact des grands mod&egrave;les de langue</p>
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Merten Kröncke @mertenkroencke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Canonicity is central to literary studies, and most researchers have some intuition about which authors or texts are canonical. But how can we measure canonicity in a truly systematic manner? A new article by @agneshilger.bsky.social, @janaeckardt.bsky.social and me tries to theorize this question.
doi.org
Taking a Step Back: Theoretical Fundamentals of Canonicity and Its Empirical Reconstruction
Abstract. Canonicity is central to literary studies. Even if scholars are not explicitly concerned with it, canonicity shapes their selection of texts and authors—and that, in turn, may reinforce the ...
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Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Fiction has undergone a huge demographic transformation over the last 50 years. Men lost ground, which women gained. But the way some have written about it, you’d think men are, as a NYT headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up. sinykin.substack.com/p/where-have...
sinykin.substack.com
Where Have All the Literary Men Gone?
Not too far....
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Interested by a corpus of 19th/early 20th c. French for your research? Here's the French corpus of 11K! novels I tried to curate during my PhD 😅, now live at JOHD, and downloadable on Zenodo! 📄 doi.org/10.5334/johd.597 📦 zenodo.org/records/20233178
doi.org
Hors d’usage: Curated French Fiction from Gallica, 1800–1950 | Journal of Open Humanities Data
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Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Freshly out in @pnasnexus.org: "On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems" The first major publication of project @lostma.bsky.social , where we lay down our methodology for studying the transmission, evolution or disparition of texts. /1 #science 🧪
academic.oup.com
On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems
Abstract. Knowledge of past cultures relies heavily on surviving written material. Over the centuries, texts were copied, altered, and often lost, leaving
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Small new paper ! 🎉 Genre is a problematic notion in CLS: bibliographically unstable, heterogeneously annotated, yet central to many experiments Our new #NLP4DH paper (ACL 2026) proposes a method to retrieve genre tags automatically in a huge novel archive, from a small seed list only.
Network visualization of a k-nearest-neighbors graph over 10,998 French novels from Gallica. Each node is a novel, connected to its most similar neighbors by cosine similarity of text embeddings. Orange nodes are predicted adventure novels, green nodes are randomly sampled non-adventure novels.
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Sil Hamilton @srhm.ca · 03/07/2026
Attending #ACL? Come join us at NLP4DH 2026 on Saturday from 10am to 5pm! Great selection of papers from across the DH & NLP spectrum this year. Schedule: www.nlp4dh.com/nlp4dh-2026/...
nlp4dh.com
NLP4DH - Schedule
NLP4DH 2026 Schedule
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Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦 @sobchuk.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!
Job announcement of two positions at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt: postdoc (Macroevolution of European Literature) and PhD student (Computational Literary Studies). Successful candidates will be affiliated with the research group Cultural Evolution of the Arts.
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Antonina Martynenko @tonyamart.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Our paper with Damien Tricoire & Julian Csapó discussing if Diderot was the author of anticolonial passages in 'Histoire des deux Indes' is out in DES! doi.org/10.61147/des... (1/6)
doi.org
Ghostwriting and collective authorship in the Enlightenment: Diderot, d’Holbach’s coterie and the problem of authorship in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes
In recent decades, researchers have developed enormous interest in the role of Denis Diderot in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's major historiographical work, the <i>Histoire des deux Indes</i> (HDI). Schola...
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Julia Neugarten @julianeugarten.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Happy to announce that our article 'The style of scorn: computationally operationalizing the relationship between anger and complexity in 'Ik Ga Leven' by Lale Gül' (together with @jorisvanzundert.bsky.social) is out now with Digital Scholarship in the Humanities! OA link: doi.org/10.1093/llc/...
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Judith Brottrager @jbrottrager.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Kicking off the second day of #MappingtheCanon, @jbarre.bsky.social tells us more about the link between genre traditions and the canon.
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Judith Brottrager @jbrottrager.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Let the mapping begin! #MappingtheCanon
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
PhDone ! 🎓 Immense gratitude to my jury (including @evelyngius.bsky.social @matthieuletourneux.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com ), my co-directors @tpoibeau.bsky.social & Thomas Conrad, and everyone who supported me along the way ❤️
Six people (Thzierry Poibeau, Thomas Conrad, Marie-Ève Thérenty, Me, Claire Barel-Moisan &Matthieu Letourneux) stand in a row smiling in front of a projection screen for a group photo after a PhD defense. In the centre, a young man with curly dark hair in a dark blazer holds a large bouquet wrapped in kraft paper. The screen behind them reads "Soutenance de thèse" with ENS-PSL and Lattice logos, and the thesis title about computational methods for modelling genre fiction in French-language literature.A man with curly dark hair, wearing a dark blazer over a white shirt and beige trousers, sits at a desk working on a laptop during his PhD defense. Behind him, a large projection screen shows a video-call interface with two remote participants (Evelyn Gius & Ted Underwood) in separate windows. A small conference-room camera device stands on a table to the right.
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Judith Brottrager @jbrottrager.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Very excited about a very special event: in two weeks, some of the most interesting quantitative work on the literary canon and canon formation comes together in Darmstadt 🧵
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Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
🚨New paper alert!🚨 In our new paper with @oliviermorin.bsky.social, Rowan Hall, and Marie Halo published in the Journal of Language Evolution, we explored the relationship between word length and ambiguity on a large-cross linguistic dataset. 1/6
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Je soutiens mon Doctorat le 5 juin à l'ENS à 14h, salle des Résistants (45 rue d'Ulm) : « Modéliser la littérature de genre. Méthodes computationnelles et évolution des genres dans la fiction de langue française » une aventure qui se termine ! 🎉
Page de couverture de la thèse de doctorat de Jean Barré (PSL / ENS, laboratoire Lattice), intitulée « Modéliser la littérature de genre : Méthodes computationnelles et évolution des genres dans la fiction de langue française ». Soutenance prévue le 5 juin 2026. Jury : Marie-Ève Thérenty (Présidente, Montpellier III), Evelyn Gius (Rapporteure, TU Darmstadt), Matthieu Letourneux (Rapporteur, Paris-Nanterre), Claire Barel-Moisan (Examinatrice, ENS Lyon / CNRS), Ted Underwood (Examinateur, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Thomas Conrad (Co-encadrant, ENS-PSL), Thierry Poibeau (Directeur, ENS-PSL / CNRS).
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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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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Google dropped 4 different Gemma open-weight models! I'm most excited that they're finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. huggingface.co/collections/...
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Katarzyna Anna Kapitan @kakapitan.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
#jobklaxon PhD Fellowships available at @psl-univ.bsky.social! Come & work w/us in CultureLab (w/ @jbcamps.bsky.social @oliviermorin.bsky.social et al not bsky). Deadline 31/05 Starting 01/10 Duration 3 yrs (fixed-term employment with benefits) Salary: sad. www.culturelab.psl.eu/en/news-cult...
culturelab.psl.eu
2026 CultureLab PhD Grant Call - Grands Programmes de Recherche-Culture Lab
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Katarzyna Anna Kapitan @kakapitan.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
#jobklaxon 10 postdocs available at @psl-univ.bsky.social in #AI. Working language: English. Btw. #digitalhumanities also happen under the AI hype these days, so get in touch and walk by this very building on your way to work. Join me in being #touristatwork #juniorProfInParis
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Folgert Karsdorp @folgertk.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Out in Evolutionary Human Sciences! With @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @jbcamps.bsky.social, @remcosleiderink.bsky.social & Anne Chao New work on unseen species models for cult heritage to the question: how many stories were _shared_ between medieval French and Dutch literature? lnkd.in/exyAWtir
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Ryan Heuser @ryanheuser.com · 26/02/2026
I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines". www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...
frontiersin.org
Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology
Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 25/02/2026
From time to time I mutter about a secret project that involves benchmarks and historical language models. Here's a formal announcement of the Schmidt Sciences grant. Other PIs include @dmimno.bsky.social , @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, and @mattwilkens.bsky.social. And +
ischool.illinois.edu
New multi-institutional project to use AI to represent past historical periods
A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural...
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Andrew Lampinen @lampinen.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.
infinitefaculty.substack.com
Memorization vs. generalization in deep learning: implicit biases, benign overfitting, and more
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the memorization
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
New article! "Toward an Ontological Representation of Fictional Characters" by @antoine-bourgois.bsky.social, me, @oseminck.bsky.social & @tpoibeau.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/chr.... Nothing fancy here — only sweat & tears. 🧵
doi.org
Toward an Ontological Representation of Fictional Characters | Computational Humanities Research | Cambridge Core
Toward an Ontological Representation of Fictional Characters
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École des chartes | PSL @ecoledeschartes.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
📢 Postulez aux masters en #humanitésnumériques de l'École des chartes - @psl-univ.bsky.social . L’École propose deux masters qui forment au traitement des sources (objets, textes, images) par les technologies numériques. Candidatures : 17 fév.-16 mars. ▶️ En savoir plus : urls.fr/tr9XN4
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Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
This call is currently open for a Humanistica-satellite event, that might interest people in computational humanities (and not only). It is supported by CultureLab and welcomes long papers as well as lightning talks and posters.
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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
You like Automatic Text Recognition (ATR/OCR/HTR) ? You like challenges ? Well, we open a competition for ATR/OCR of medieval manuscripts, in cross-lingual & diachronic settings for the Latin script. 📆 20/01 Registration 📆 21/03 Test set released 📆 3/04 Deadline for results Link cmmhwr26.inria.fr
cmmhwr26.inria.fr
ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multilingual Medieval Handwriting Recognition
ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multilingual Medieval Handwriting Recognition The ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multilingual Medieval Handwriting Recognition (CMMHWR26) seeks to evaluate the state of the art in...
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Thierry Poibeau @tpoibeau.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
New Publication: "Understanding Conversational AI: Philosophy, Ethics, and Social Impact of Large Language Models" (270 pages, Ubiquity Press, open access). Feel free to read it and share it widely! www.ubiquitypress.com/books/m/10.5...
ubiquitypress.com
Understanding Conversational AI | Ubiquity Press
<p><i><b>What do large language models really know—and what does it mean to live alongside them?</b></i></p><p>This book offers a critical and interdisciplinary exploration of large language models (L...
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Ryan Heuser @ryanheuser.com · 12/12/2025
Amazing papers at #CHR2025; particularly enjoying the computational literary studies. An observation: questions about genre as a confounding factor seem to keep coming up. I do wonder if (and I'm also guilty of this) CLS can fixate on the x-axis of history and we ought to give genre more attention.
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Wouter Haverals @wouterhaverals.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
@jbarre.bsky.social, @oseminck.bsky.social, Antoine Bourgois, and @tpoibeau.bsky.social built a detective detector, tracing the different archetypes in French detective fiction #CHR2025
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Luxembourg is a good place to talk about Canonicity with Yuri #chr2025
Yuri and I standing by a literal cannon while we talk about canonicity in the Luxembourg city casemates
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Alix Chagué 🌈 @alix-tz.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
I added a new post on my research blog last week. I wanted to react to a post from Dan Cohen that I've seen circulating on BlueSky last week about Gemini 3, and figured I would add my critical 2 cents to the mix! alix-tz.github.io/phd/posts/025/
alix-tz.github.io
025 - A Perfect Job is the New Very Good Job
A little disclaimer for once, because I usually prefer to praise if I name people. I do not know Dan Cohen nor his work, my criticism of his article is not directed against him personally, but rather
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JCLS @jcls-io.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
New article in #JCLS 4(1)! 🎉 Visser Solissa, van Cranenburgh & @fpianz.bsky.social present a model for detecting syuzhet—the ordering and disclosure of events that shape a narrative—and formalize event annotation in fiction across multiple languages. #CCLS25 #ComputationalNarratology
doi.org
Event Detection between Literary Studies and NLP. A Survey, a Narratological Reflection, and a Case Study
Narrative structure in fiction relies on the strategic presentation of events, where the ordering and disclosure of information (syuzhet) shape reader engagement and tension. This study outlines a com...
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
🚨 huge dataset for CLS -> 650K "contemporary" & multilingual books tagging @tpoibeau.bsky.social + we need to bring Antoine Mazière around here
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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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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
🗓️ The #CHR2025 programme is online! Browse what’s on the menu here: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/programme/ Proceedings are coming soon as well. Don’t forget: registration closes on 20 November! #computationalhumanitiesresearch
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 04/11/2025
Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +
chronicle.com
Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.
If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
What happens when we model the detective archetype at scale? 🕵️‍♂️📚 Our new paper, accepted for #CHR2025 combines literary history and computational modeling to trace how the figure of the detective evolves across 150 years of French fiction. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00627
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Christof S. 🇪🇺 @christof.fedihum.org.ap.brid.gy · 04/11/2025
Awesome! Our new paper in #DHQ has just been published! It discusses three measures of #keyness (or #distinctiveness) when applied to #subgenres of the #French #novel. The twist is that we perform a #qualitative #evaluation of the measures by relating each list […] [Original post on fedihum.org]
A 3-by-4 heatmap in tones of yellow, green and blue, showing matches for three measures (zeta, welch, LLR) and four subgenres (blanche, policier, scifi, sentimental). Best score in yellow is for zeta and sentimental (a perfect 50 out of 50), whereas the worst score is for LLR and policier (with just 21 matches).
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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
It's been brewing for months: @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social releases CoMMA (Corpus of Multilingual Medieval Archives) ! 📚 2.5bn tokens of mostly Latin and French texts 🕰️ 800→1600 CE 📜 23k manuscripts 🖥️ 18k on the reading interface: comma.inria.fr 🔍 Paper: inria.hal.science/hal-05299220v1 (1/🧵)
comma.inria.fr
CoMMA
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Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 27/09/2025
And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...
psl.eu
Colloque inaugural du Grand programme de recherche CultureLab | PSL
Recherche, CultureLab inaugure ses travaux le 22 septembre 2025 au Campus Condorcet avec une journée consacrée aux sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles et à l’évolution culturelle. , Le Gra...
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Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
✍️ Our paper is finally out! All poetic forms come from somewhere, but figuring out their relationships is hard. We use sequence alignment on scansion (010.10) to measure metrical similarity between poems. This allows us to detect related forms across languages and times 1/ tinyurl.com/metronome25
cambridge.org
Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment | Computational Humanities Research | Cambridge Core
Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment - Volume 1
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 25/06/2025
New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky rdcu.be/etk07 The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +
rdcu.be
The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa
Nature Computational Science - Many humanists are skeptical of language models and concerned about their effects on universities. However, researchers with a background in the humanities are also...
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Jean Barré @jbarre.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
I had fun presenting some of my PhD obsessions about the french detective novel in Würzburg. Thank you @fotisjannidis.bsky.social for the invitation ! The whole team is impressive, brand new building and talented people, the future of DH is actually here 🤩
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