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J.D. Porter

@jdporter.bsky.social
518 followers 537 following 198 posts

www.jdporter.org Literature/DH scholar, Price Lab at UPenn | I work on text mining, canons, literature and philosophy, and so on | Writing in PMLA, Synthese, The Atlantic, Cultural Analytics, the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlet series, etc

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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
View of the park where the Phillies play. The scoreboard says CLINCHED because they clinched a playoff spot, which is kind of a funny thing to say for the last game of the season, but I’ll take it.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I saw this painting today (“Seine”, by Ellsworth Kelly), and I’m increasingly convinced that modernism holds an answer for us about how AI art will be received if it ever becomes pretty indistinguishable from human art.
The painting “Seine” by Ellsworth Kelly. Small black and white rectangles are scattered across a long horizontal wooden canvas, like a pixelated distillation of light reflecting off a river.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Edmundo Sosa’s heroics saving me from having a really dumb take about how the Angels’ right field wall is weirdly short
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Even in Michigan Philly calls to me
Photo of the Fleetwood Diner in Ann Arbor, MI. The diner’s name is a neon sign, but several letters have burned out, so the lit-up part just says WOOD ER, which is kind of like the stereotypical way people write the Philadelphia pronunciation of “water”.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
This is a great dataset! Among many other things it contains info about many of the poets I would once have considered (and probably on some level still consider) the *cool* poets. Your Fred Moten, your Lyn Hejinian, your Craig Dworkin, your Elizabeth Willis, etc. Find your own cool poets now!
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Can’t wait to read this!!
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
An AI “actor” or “performer” is really just a cartoon. They don’t have any more agency or interiority or personhood than Elmer Fudd.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Felt like what we really needed was a pop song with no clear connection to the team, to sing at random intervals. But then I randomly sorted 60 yrs of Billboard to pick one and got this—an incredible song, but it goes way too hard for an activity called "footie" www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9v...
youtube.com
Sly & The Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
YouTube video by SlyATFamilyStoneVEVO
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
A year since the Clippers scandal broke and the main fallout so far is that Kawhi has managed to flee US jurisdiction
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Trump has tried to replicate each other President’s signature failures, from the hits (internment camps, corruption, losing a war in Asia) to the deep cuts (tariffs, destroying the WH, picking a contemptible racist VP), but I’m still kind of surprised to see him going for the William Henry Harrison.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I put the Lynx on as background last night and wound up intently watching the whole thing. Miles uses time and space like no other player I’ve seen. So much fun to watch defector.com/olivia-miles...
defector.com
Olivia Miles Is The Throwback Point Guard Of The Future | Defector
Vertical video makes Olivia Miles look good. Horizontal video makes her look better. Her gift shines in context, on the unadorned and unsoundtracked platform that is the next day’s full-game replay. W...
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
It's really funny to me how often Zohran gets helpful advice about how to do something he just did without the advice
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Even if this wasn’t an affront to humanity, and even if it was possible to train an LLM on a one-person corpus (no), using solely one person’s words *obviously* doesn’t guarantee you get their views. Example: you can make the phrase “this wasn’t an affront” from this post.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Brunson is pretty clearly the biggest ball hog of any NBA Finals MVP. No one who shot as much as him missed as often. The size of the dot shows assists/game. He was below the median on that front, so not moving the ball around, either. Singular player—not sure we'll see a winner like this again.
Scatterplot showing every NBA Finals MVP. The x axis shows how many shots each player took per game. The y axis shows the player's field goal percentage. The point of the graph is that Brunson took a lot of shots but didn't make very many—in fact, everyone who shot at least as often as him made more, and everyone who missed as many as him shot less. Players are sized by assists per game, and Brunson was a little below the median on that front, so it's not like he was making up for it with playmaking. Also the two players closest to him were great defenders, whereas he is one of the worst defenders ever to get the award. Players are colored more or less by their team when they won, although I was lazy about matching the colors exactly.
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Reposted by J.D. Porter
Hannah Walser @hkpmw.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Idk what’s going to happen tonight, but I was rooting for the Phillies in the 2022 World Series when Sam Alito decided to attend a game, so I know that karma is real
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
When a team invites a dictator to the game it’s good if they lose, is my view
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
I think if every well-informed person in the country can understand jokes about your last four mayors, you have to accept that pretty much anyone who moves to your city can quickly become a "true" citizen of it. Hegemony facilitates assimilation.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
The scale and dispersion of Knicks fans emerging like cicadas for their team’s once-per quarter-century title run shows us just how much pain James Dolan causes almost every year
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
This is obvious horseshit, but I think it's useful to put numbers to this stuff sometimes. The Warren wealth tax would raise $16.5b from Bezos alone in the first year, which amounts to $4k for every teacher in the US, roughly a 6% pay raise on average. Bet that *would* help that teacher in Queens!
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Much more difficult to list the 100 worst novels of all time
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
How bad a foul baiter is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? See if you can guess which two dots are his on this graph of MVP seasons. Dots are further right if players shot the ball a lot. Higher dots mean players shot more free throws. Answer lower in the thread.
Graph showing seasons for NBA MVPs since 1974, which is the first year the relevant data exists on Basketball Reference, where I got it. The x axis shows field goal attempts (FGA), reflecting how often a player shot in general. The y axis shows free throw attempts (FTA), reflecting how often a player shot free throws. Both are scaled per 75 possessions, to mitigate differences in pace from one season to the next. You'd expect a clean correlation between FGA and FTA, since shooting is generally necessary for drawing shooting fouls, but these dots are pretty widely distributed.  (R squared in a linear regression is .27, so FGA explains less than a third of FTA). This graph erases some nuance, e.g. you get fewer FTA if you tend to score when fouled (i.e., getting and-1s), but it's still a decent rough picture.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Enkidu was a great Philly dog. He was confident and self-possessed, loved food dropped on the sidewalk, and looked vaguely like Gritty. What he loved to do, he did, and I was lucky that so often he included Hannah and me. He was my buddy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9II...
youtube.com
Enkidu Blue
YouTube video by Nothing
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
This is one of the best 21st century jazz albums
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Once again pondering the fact that Penn's motto, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, is usually translated as "Laws without morals are useless".
thedp.com
Judge orders Penn to comply with federal subpoena seeking list of Jewish faculty, students
Penn has until May 1 to respond to the subpoena's requests, but will not be required to “reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific Jewish-related organization.”
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
Bam Adebayo now holds the title belt for highest scoring game among active players. He's just the 34th player with this achievement, and the 21st since Elgin Baylor (the first good offensive player).
Graph showing the history of active NBA players with the highest scoring game. The x axis is time, and the y axis shows how much they scored in that game. The graph begins in November, 1959 with Elgin Baylor's 64-point game, and goes to just after Bam Adebayo scored 83 in March of 2026.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
In that NYTimes "spot the AI writing" quiz, three of the five examples use the "It's not X; it's Y" tactic. I feel like you see that a lot in all sorts of generated text. What's the deal? Is this really common in the data, or is it somehow emerging from the training or generation process?
Three passages from a NY Times piece that was effectively an ad for Claude, the tool used to generate them. Each has a highlighted excerpt with a characteristically AI-ish "not" clause: 

1. "Not from cruelty, but from understanding..."
2. "The universe is not indifferent to us; we are made of it..."
3. "Ambiguity was not weakness. It was survival."
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!
pricelab.sas.upenn.edu
Critical Approaches to AI Working Group | Price Lab for Digital Humanities
The Price Lab is the University of Pennsylvania's center for innovative uses of technology in the study and teaching of history, art, and culture.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Jazz did a lot of heavy lifting for my sanity in 2025, and for whatever reason (coincidence? not?) it was a really good year for new jazz releases. I wanted to do a little thread about my favorite albums, and give a top five.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
The extent to which everyone refuses to learn whether it's "Sliwa" or "Silwa" is very funny to me
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
The occupied city winning because its diverse prosperous team came through thanks to guys who don’t usually get the glory is what we’re going for here, I think.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Love this piece by Laura McGrath, who finds an important question for the book industry—“What if we’ve been over-estimating the role that genre plays in the life of a reader?"—in a recent paper I wrote with James English.
laurabmcgrath.substack.com
The Omnivore Dilemma
Digging into the Data of Contemporary Readers
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
As a metaphor maybe
Snippet of one of the President's idiotic posts, asserting that "This Ballroom will be happily used for Generations to come!"
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
I think a lot of people feel an almost familial pride in and love for their cities, and among other things these marches highlight each city, its particular faces, slang, colors, streets, communities. It's ineffable but I think it’s profound.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Hell yeah www.thedp.com/article/2025...
thedp.com
Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment
With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Roughly 40% of political journalism is “Right Wing Guy Dislikes Left Wing Thing”
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
It’s so clear he didn’t write this: the fanfic cadence, coherent narrative, diverse (for him) vocab, topical focus, quotations, a sense of other people’s experience, the notion that he spoke to Melania. These Potemkin ramblings show that even his old delights (griping online) are beyond him now.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
If eating road kill were just a little more dangerous, I wouldn't have COVID right now.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Really excited to see this piece come out! Studying eclectic readers has been a fascinating and extremely rewarding challenge. We wound up operationalizing both genre and eclecticism in ways that (classic DH stuff here) point to the limits of both concepts. culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...
culturalanalytics.org
The Eclectic Reader | Published in Journal of Cultural Analytics
By James English, J. D. Porter. Using Goodreads data, this study explores the overlooked eclecticism of readers, revealing both patterns of cultural hierarchy and the conceptual limits of eclecticism ...
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
These were the best donuts in the world, and really good kolaches, too. Now we're a year from them being as bad as Krispy Kreme, <5 years until they're gone entirely.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
Out of the cradle, endlessly boppin
Dave Parker in a shirt he designed. It says “If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys boppin”. He’s also wearing what sort of looks like a cool version of a gardening hat. A youngish Walt Whitman, as depicted in Leaves of Grass.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
I will pretty much always participate in a ranking exercise—a habit that has been weirdly vital to my career. The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.
The NY Times movie ballot image that everyone was sharing several days ago, showing that my ten favorite movies of this century so far are Certain Women, In the Mood for Love, Beau Travail, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ocean's 11, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Wall-E, Moonlight, Nomadland, and Inglourious Basterds.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
This is an incredible dataset, and it's a lot of fun to play around with it on the Post45 site!
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
Here's a graph of the Sufficient Bucket in every NBA playoff game so far this season. The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).
Graph showing all of the 2025 NBA playoff games. The Y axis shows the total score of the game. The X axis shows when the Sufficient Bucket happened. The colors reflect the winning team. The label shows that team, plus the round and game. Example: Dončić made a technical FT to get the Lakers a Sufficient Bucket with 9:01 left in round one game 2, and the total score of the game was 179. So that's the purple dot labeled LAL 1-2 located just outside the third quarter line at the bottom of the graph.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
This is a great dataset, very excited to see it go live! Already looking forward to sharing this with my students next time I teach.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
One of my favorite papers to work on! Writing with Nat and Jumbly had a huge impact on my thinking about meaning, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of LLMs.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Erik and I have been blown away by the excellent work these students have done. It was really thrilling to see them featured at this showcase!
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Inspired by a few people over the holidays mentioning Trump's "blowout win", here are a few tables (via Wikipedia) showing how narrow it was. - Worse than every Dem win of this century - 5th worst in the last 100 years - All time, 49th place (out of 59) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Table showing that Trump's popular vote margin in 2024, about 1.47%, is in 5th place out of the seven 21st century elections, beating only those cases where the electoral college winner lost the popular vote.Table showing that Trump's 2024 popular vote margin is one of the closest of the past 100 years, beating only popular vote losers and various elections involving Richard Nixon.This table is difficult to read but makes the point visually that Trump's 2024 popular vote margin is pretty low; about eight out of ten elections feature a winner with a better margin.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
“Difficult” is the top word missing from Moby Dick. Feels like Melville doing a little malicious compliance with his editor’s demands
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Reposted by J.D. Porter
The Price Lab @pricelab.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
What's in an anthology? @jdporter.bsky.social, Price Lab DH Specialist, & @fredner.org (with assistance from David McClure & the @stanfordlitlab.bsky.social) built a relational database of all 464 authors & 3,374 works published across the ten editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
I went to a very interesting AI/pedagogy summit yesterday, and one of my big takeaways is that we really need an institution-level push to normalize this kind of thing. It's a really straightforward way to make sure we preserve the essay form and writing skills (in code or prose).
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