iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by James E. Dobson

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal @ranjodhdhaliwal.com · 29/09/2026

Starting 'The State of Digital Studies' here in Basel today with @berrydm.bsky.social talking about the Vector Paradigm. Register via contralab.online/state-of-dig...

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Christian Wolf @chriswolfvision.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

2020: cold emails with applications mentioning unrelated areas like Biology. Candidate didn't even check my/our webpage. 2026: cold emails which relate the candidate's CV with our work and latest papers. 100% LLM written, generic LLM language. Same effect, same probability of getting a reply.

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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Rice University's history department hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence!

apply.interfolio.com

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

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I get this instinct, but in the world of AI, philosophy has been privileged for a long time. These aren’t questions with final answers, and we’ve had rigorous conversations about them for thousands of years. I find going to other parts of the humanities and social sciences more practical.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is sure to be another landmark event in the development of Critical AI Studies.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I did not have the courage to ask if Nick, like David and myself, also has a problematic doppelgänger.

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Tyler Shoemaker @t-shoemaker.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Next month marks the 60th anniversary of the JHU conference where Derrida delivered “Sign, Structure, and Play.” We’re taking the opportunity to revisit (and reopen?) the structuralism question with regard to AI. If you’re in the Triangle, come by!

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This event was fantastic. Greatly enjoyed chatting with Nick, David Brooks, and the audience!

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Camp extra too, although very much tempted to step up my game and try these others.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

What on earth happened to Ideologiekritik? I'm struck that - even among leftist cultural commentators - there is so little recourse to the language of ideology. Is it just that 'we tried talking like that, and the world didn't change in ways we hoped?'

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The best place to write about our machines!

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

These titles always make me think about the English prof. book project from the film Smart People: "You Can't Read!"

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Although a subtitle of “A Report on Knowledge” is pretty baller. Too bad it’s taken. Thanks for that discussion!

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Going into my present project with this kind of energy.

Book covers: How to Read a Page, How to Read a Book, How to Read a Model

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

while Dobson was a special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence at Dartmouth, which has plunged more deeply into A.I. than any other Ivy League school.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Yes, that’s right — they’re both in humanities departments! Yet as part of his work in the Future Leaders Institute at UNH, Smith held a summer camp for high schoolers called Governing Artificial Intelligence

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Nicholas Smith is a professor of philosophy at UNH, and James Dobson is a professor of English at Dartmouth College and director of the school’s writing program.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Granite Staters: I'm speaking on a panel tomorrow evening at Lithermans Limited in Concord, NH at 6pm on AI impacts. Joined by Nicholas Smith, a UNH philosopher. Come for the Beer & Pizza and chat. www.concordmonitor.com/2026/09/10/s...

concordmonitor.com

Science Cafe returns Sept. 15 to discuss AI impacts - Concord Monitor

Science Cafe returns Sept. 15 at Litherman’s Brewery to discuss AI impacts with experts Nicholas Smith and James Dobson. Join the talk.

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Paula Krebs @paulakrebs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Undergrad English majors, language majors, theater, folklore, creative writing majors: for conversation with writers of romance novels, advice on job seeking, opportunities to apply for grants up to $5000, and lots more, join the MLA's new undergrad member program! www.mla.org/Membership/A...

mla.org

Undergraduate Affiliate Membership

Whether you’re a Spanish literature major, a creative writer, a health humanities student, or an undergraduate with a deep commitment to the Oxford comma, the MLA invites you to join our new community...

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Greatly enjoyed this essay on a foggy morning spent moving back and forth between nature and the couch. It’s a sharp review, autobiographical fragment, and much more.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Congratulations to Roopsi, Dartmouth’s new Provost Leadership Fellow for AI Strategy! Looking forward to what comes next.

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David Gunkel @davidgunkel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is why reading Derrida is so interesting and complicated. His writings--in both content and form--deliberately disrupt the common expectation that what has been written can be read as the expression of what the author of the text actually thinks. This is precisely what his texts deconstruct.

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maybe: leif weatherby @leifw.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

New German Critique has the Digital Theory Lab's Semiotic Machines special issue forthcoming, featuring a collection of essays by people at the cutting edge of AI and interpretation, politics, and culture ngc.arts.cornell.edu/forthcoming....

ngc.arts.cornell.edu

New German Critique: Forthcoming Issues

Widely considered the top journal in its field, New German Critique is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German studies.

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Dartmouth Arts and Sciences @dartmouthartsci.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

#Dartmouth professors Sarah Preum and Tim Burdick co-author a study that finds AI-generated patient messages can help with routine tasks, but models also tended to overdiagnose, overtreat, and miss key follow-up questions.

nhpr.org

Dartmouth study finds AI can help doctors sound more empathetic, but overdiagnoses and overtreats

A study from Dartmouth found that AI can help physicians manage patient messaging, but it comes with some caveats.

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markcmarino.bsky.social @markcmarino.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Wow. Blown away by this glowing review of Inventing ELIZA in the Wall Street Journal! My favorite line is that we were "talmudically annotating the code." archive.ph/fCcIy @sarahciston.com, @mitpress.bsky.social @wsj.com #critcode #ArtificialIntelligence #computerhistory #SoftwareHistory

Screen shots of the review in the Wall Street Journal: 'Inventing ELIZA' Review: The Mother of all Chatbots

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

There has been little scholarly work on the media history of the GPU. This freshly published OA article is my attempt to show the lines of influence from learning machines in the 1950s through 1980s HPC and MPP systems to the TPUs and GPUs of the present. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

marketing image from Nvidia of the DGX Spark paired with a MacBook.

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Mark (reluctant scrivener) @markmadsen.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I mean, machine god fantasy is the driving force of much of the industry so the abstract seems to hold promise

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Earlier ms version had a reading of this bonkers ode to excess/the phallus but my readers were not having it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf8E...

youtube.com

Inside the World's Largest AI Supercluster xAI Colossus

YouTube video by ServeTheHome

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This is a nice @seattletimes.com piece about our research paper, led by Imani Finkley! With some origin story lore about the @pudding.cool analysis that inspired it. Plus a goofy picture of me reading a Jimothy-coded kids' book about anthropomorphic raccoons. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

seattletimes.com

UW researchers say AI-generated kids' books can twist biases in strange ways

AI-generated content has become more common in children's books. What happens to gender diversity when AI writes about animal characters?

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I'm basically this person. The CM (also appearing in this film) was paired with a host computer and discussed in ways that echoed Rosenblatt's fantasy of "coupling of a perceptron with a conventional digital computer [that] might carry us over the remaining obstacles of grammar and syntax.”

screengrab from Jurassic Park ("It's a UNIX system! I know this")

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I was particularly interested in tracking the language of the "emergent" through John Hopfield and Richard Feyman and into Danny Hillis's Thinking Machines company. This is surprising, given that pre-established research linked the massively parallel CM machines to symbolic not connectionist work.

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Greg Britton @gmbritton.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Now available: John Thelin's magisterial History of American Higher Education, fully updated in its fourth edition. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/... @hopkinspress.bsky.social @universityofky.bsky.social #HigherEd

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This was initially delivered as a talk as part of the Klopsteg Lecture Series, sponsored by the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University, in May 2025.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I argue that "AI" is powered by the libidinal economy (shocking, I know) and that "these co-processing devices function in excess of their use in the acceleration of matrix multiplication...as material placeholders for fantasies of computational autonomy and an emergent intelligence to come."

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This photo nicely illustrates what has been a constant in the history of connectionist ML: the pairing of a general-purpose computer with an accelerator to offload the calculations needed to power neural networks.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

What I mean by naive is the widespread assumption that the generation of text and language modeling are the same. I've had mildly heated arguments with folks who do not understand this. Generation is another kind of modeling. Watermarking is a good way to talk about this kind of modeling activity.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Here's Kirchenbauer et al. "A Watermark for Large Language Models"

arxiv.org

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I'm interested in the discourse as folks are discovering watermarking and how this might change the naive ways that people talk about generation. Watermarking strategies have now been around for a few years.

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The single most important thing I have done in my writing classes since 2023 is teach students how LLMs work--and to create curriculum for this that was adopted across first-year writing at Harvard. Right now we cannot assume students understand this-and it matters. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/u...

When Cassady Tondorf, 17, learned how chatbots produced writing, she realized their utter lack of originality. “The entire internet is open to it,” she said. “It’s just regenerating the same things, over and over.”

If she wanted to be valuable on the job market, she felt, she would need to have ideas and skills that were uniquely her own.

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I feel this when I see folks circulating lists of work produced by journalists instead of humanists: "The extent to which humanists themselves distrust and despise humanities scholarship is depressing, and it’s paved the way for increasingly hostile calls from both inside and outside the house."

defector.com

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

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Noa Garcia @noagarciad.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

AI for Peace 2nd edition is back at @neuripsconf.bsky.social, Paris, December. The call for in person presentations is open. Submit, come, and be part of a community that is building up. AI for Peace @ NeurIPS 2026, Paris - One-page, non-archival, talk or poster. - Deadline 14 September 2026

Banner with a description of AI for Peace workshop. "A one-day workshop on how AI research enters military use-and researchers' responsabilities when it does". Link to submit a presentation.

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Jason Weidemann @fiveoclockbot.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

It's the Steam-ification of academic texts. And I don't want to poke, I mean this as a naive question that I am sure there's a complicated answer to, but it was these same libraries that aggressively moved from buying and shelving print books to digital collections, no?

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