Sign in

John Ladd

@jrladd.com
120 followers 126 following 19 posts

Assistant Prof @ Washington & Jefferson CIS Data science, cultural analytics, network analysis, early modern lit, birds jrladd.com

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by John Ladd
Erin A. McCarthy @erinannmcc.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Excited and only slightly terrified to have this accepted manuscript available. The Heresy of Vector Embeddings: Early Modern Manuscript Verse and LLMs between Meaning, Form, and History | Computational Humanities Research | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
The Heresy of Vector Embeddings: Early Modern Manuscript Verse and LLMs between Meaning, Form, and History | Computational Humanities Research | Cambridge Core
The Heresy of Vector Embeddings: Early Modern Manuscript Verse and LLMs between Meaning, Form, and History
03813
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 08/07/2026
I made some exciting updates to the EarlyPrint Lab's tools over the past few weeks. You can search and explore printed books from 1500–1700 in new and more flexible ways! The Ngram Browser, Bibliographia, and Phrase Search tools have all been updated on earlyprint.org. Thread 👇
A screenshot of the EarlyPrint Ngram browser, a line plot with two lines represent the words "love" and "loue" showing that v replaces u around 1630. Also includes a bar plot showing the overall frequence of "love" is much higher than "loue".A screenshot of the EarlyPrint Bibliographia, an interactive scatter plot of more than 50,000 texts, with texts labeled as "Sermons, English", "Ballads", and "Controversial Literature" highlighted in blue, yellow, and purple respectively. On the left is a panel that allows the user to adjust the date range and selected subject headings. The 1667 edition of Paradise Lost is selected on the plot, and its metadata is shown in the box on the right.A screenshot of part of EarlyPrint's Phrase Search interface, showing results for the phrase "for whom the bell tolls." The image shows the content results, which search for keywords in the phrase in any order, and the form results, which look for similar part-of-speech sequences. Each set of results has buttons to run the same searches in Corpus Search and the Ngram Browser.
112
Reposted by John Ladd
Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
Postdoc in Digital Humanities at WashU in St. Louis. Deadline is May 1. Also, St. Louis is wonderful. apply.interfolio.com/185361
Screenshot of Interfolio position that reads: "Postdoctoral Fellowship, Digital Humanities - Department of Comparative Literature & Thought, Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis - Danforth Campus: School of Arts & Sciences: Comparative Literature
Location
St. Louis, MO
Open Date
Apr 24, 2026

Deadline
May 01, 2026 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time
Description
The Department of Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral teaching fellowship in digital humanities. The fellowship period will run from July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2028, with the possibility of a one-year extension.

In addition to pursuing their own research agenda, the postdoctoral fellow will teach the equivalent of four courses per year and is expected to participate fully in the thriving DH community on campus. Teaching responsibilities will include at least one regular course each Fall and Spring semester. Additional teaching responsibilities may include additional semester-long lab courses or a series of several short-term workshops. Fellows are expected to be in residence during the entire fellowship period, apart from research-related travel. Fellows will receive a salary of $64,380 per year, plus Washington University postdoctoral benefits and a $2,500 annual research/travel stipend."
13935
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 30/03/2026
My new article, "Milton's Precarious Data," is out now in Milton Studies! It explores how Paradise Lost addresses problems of uncertainty in observed data, a brand new term at the time. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/milton-...
scholarlypublishingcollective.org
Milton’s Precarious Data
ABSTRACT. Milton’s writing understands and disassembles data as a source of certainty. His use of data (yes, he used data frequently in his work) and his understanding of the data-obsessed movements o...
120
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 26/03/2026
Very happy and excited to be returning to Dream Lab again this May to explore early modern book history with text analysis, social networks, and machine learning. Consider joining me in Philly!
A line chart from the N-Gram Browser on earlyprint.org. It shows the frequency of the words "happy" and "excited" from 1550 to 1700. Both words are increasing in frequency, but happy is increasing the most dramatically.
023
Reposted by John Ladd
Center for Digital Humanities @princetoncdh.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Our December feature is now online! 📰 After his talk for our Modeling Culture series, @jrladd.com discusses how AI fits into a long history of text technologies—from the printing press to large language models, as well as his hopes/concerns for AI in humanities scholarship. Read the Q&A below!
cdh.princeton.edu
Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print: Q&A with John Ladd
Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print: Q&A with John Ladd
083
Reposted by John Ladd
Center for Digital Humanities @princetoncdh.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
Sep 29: "Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print" with John Ladd (@jrladd.com), Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Studies at Washington & Jefferson College. Info/RSVP:
cdh.princeton.edu
Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print
Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print
111
Reposted by John Ladd
Center for Digital Humanities @princetoncdh.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
Modeling Culture explores AI not only as a technology to critique, but as a new mode of inquiry for research and interpretation. Three interconnected components will unfold in 2025-26: a faculty and grad seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum. Public talk details in thread👇
cdh.princeton.edu
CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI
CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI
2139
Reposted by John Ladd
Chris Warren @chriswarren.info · 15/08/2025
After nearly two years running our homespun ESTC 📚📜, we’ll soon retire it at the request of the ESTC. Proud to have been part of the @print-and-prob.bsky.social team 💪, led by Nikolai Vogler, that helped our scholarly community in a time of need 💜
1267
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 31/07/2025
Had a good time collaborating with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and the AI for Humanists team on this! It also features some data we've been cooking up for @print-and-prob.bsky.social. Worth thinking about whether you have a research task that a local LLM could help with...
062
Reposted by John Ladd
David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
New NEH-supported tutorial on running LLMs locally with ollama! Your laptop is more powerful than you think. Save money, privacy, and energy. aiforhumanists.com/tutorials/
aiforhumanists.com
Code Tutorials
The AI for Humanists project is developing resources to enable DH scholars to explore how large language models and AI technologies can be used in their research and teaching. Find an annotated biblio...
36224
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 29/05/2025
Had a blast with so many new friends at the @pricelab.bsky.social’s Dream Lab workshop last week! For anyone interested in applying DH methods to book history questions, here’s a mini-site with a guide and all the materials from “Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books”: jrladd.com/digitalbooks/
jrladd.com
Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books
032
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 28/03/2025
For anyone interested in #DH and #CulturalAnalytics for early modern studies and book history: I'm very excited about the new Dream Lab course I'm teaching in May! Registration is open now: www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-ap...
eventbrite.com
Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books
Dream Lab 2025
020
Reposted by John Ladd
The Price Lab @pricelab.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Dream Lab presents: “Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books," a #DH workshop hosted at the University of Pennsylvania this May.
111
John Ladd @jrladd.com · 21/01/2025
I'm so pumped to be teaching this course, and I'm really grateful to @pricelab.bsky.social and @folgerlibrary.bsky.social for making these scholarships available. Let's hang out in May and talk about all the amazing ways you can combine book history and DH!
021
Reposted by John Ladd
Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
Elon Musk killed our WCW "plums in the icebox" Twitter bot, so I just resurrected it in this custom feed: bsky.app/profile/did:... If you are amused by wild poetic text reuse, you might enjoy. Shout out to my so sweet collaborator @jrladd.com, and take that, Elon!
141
Reposted by John Ladd
Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 09/08/2024
Everyone is laughing at me and @jrladd.com for wearing identical shades of millennial mustard. This is the inevitable outcome of grad school buddies #dh2024
Two grad school buddies in identical shades of millennial mustard
3361
Reposted by John Ladd
Journal of Digital History @jdighist.bsky.social · 18/07/2024
If you’ve seen our network analysis tool, Network Navigator, check out this article! It situates our work (@jrladd.com, @zoeleblanc.bsky.social) in the larger DH tools ecosystem and explores the role of network analysis in scholarly infrastructure. rb.gy/ppspn6
rb.gy
Journal of Digital History
The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is an international, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal. JDH will set new standards in history publishing based on the principle of multi-layered articles.
144
Reposted by John Ladd
ArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 07/04/2024
Study for ‘The Spanish Dance,’ by John Singer Sargent, 1879-80, 📸 via @cjzero.bsky.social
122831
Reposted by John Ladd
Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 14/02/2024
🚨New AI for Humanists tutorials just dropped!🚨 We have new code notebooks for using LLMs to: - measure document similarity - classify texts with zero-shot prompting We explore narrative vs non-narrative texts, historical poetry, ChatGPT poetry, & book reviews. Tutorial effort led by Greg Yauney!
AI for Humanists project logo
28445