iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 10h

My students, I think, are extremely tired of me inserting the 1893 Columbia Exposition (which you know as the Chicago World’s Fair) into every analysis of U.S. politics and culture. Do them a favor and if you see me in the streets ask me about it so I can spare them more often.

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ASA Collective Behavior & Social Movements @asa-cbsm.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

📢 New Member Publication Alert! Check out Dr. Aliza Luft's new book by Harvard University Press: Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust

urldefense.com

Sacred Betrayal — Harvard University Press

A searing account of the French Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust, revealing how the nation’s most influential bishops shaped the course of Nazi persecution through closed-door negotiation...

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

University of Mannheim is hiring a W3 Professor in Social Data Science and Social Science Methodology. Start: 1 February 2027. Application deadline: 22 October 2026. www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/en/about/job...

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Their main point is that universities should support open-source, open weight models that are also more efficient. Rather than spend money on commercial frontier models, we should put our money towards open source and open weight models that are better for science, and more efficient.

The infrastructural needs of science are fundamentally different from those of consumer AI platforms built to serve millions of users. Researchers with the necessary technical know-how should champion an alternative vision: one centred on open-weight AI models — those with publicly available parameters — that can be deployed locally while prioritizing the efficient use of computing resources. Such an approach would make the use of AI tools more sustainable and better aligned with public interest.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

What a "compressed complex concept" is to one discipline is "stifling jargon" to another? I think that is also definitely true, and is a tricky balance for sure.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Using jargon to compress concepts also allows us to advance our fields. If we always have to rehash or re-explain complex concepts and why they're important, it makes it more difficult to then expand our playlist.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

That's right. I have read papers that are packed with jargon that make absolutely no sense, even to a trained reader. Not good. But I've also read papers where every word is deliberately placed and loads of complex information is contained in each sentence. And those are beautiful.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Controversial hypothesis: The push to remove all "jargon" from academic writing had contributed to the overall decline in reading skills. No one wants to grapple with text anymore! Just spoon feeding ideas. If we're talking about gyms for the brain, that's my contribution. Bring back the jargon.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

They really do have the best chalk. I'm teaching in the math building for the first time and I now know the inferiority of the chalk I've been using all these years. I had no idea chalk quality diverged that much.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think this is right. With @tomeinhorn.bsky.social, we wrote a single Python script that works on any of the Hugging Face models. Just switch out the model name, and you can run the same script on any and compare output.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Right now I would vote Olmo as that one we all get behind. But I also support the flourishing of multiple flowers. Hugging Face is great because it's a platform that anyone can put models on.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I just requested API access to our new campus cluster running AI models. One of their questions on the form was "what app are you building"? Whyyy are we building apps? No more chatbots, no apps. What students need is direct access to the models themselves, so they can poke and prod and change them.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Yes completely agree. No contracts with OpenAI/Antrhopic etc. Don't give them money. And ideally the most open models! Olmo is a fantastic option. I would love if my university installed Olmo on a local cluster that my students could have access to.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

SFO is so damn civilized. Touchless water bottle filling station with three temperature options: chilled, ambient, and hot.

Picture of a table with three touchless water fountains for filling water bottles. One for hot water, one for ambient, one for chilled. Airport scene in the background.

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Second paper with @lauraknelson.bsky.social and Yash Mali about what LLMs know about the past. Poster also available here: tomeinhorn.github.io/files/TADA-L...

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Just got around to reading this. This is a fascinating paper. Thanks for sharing

Screen shot of the end of the abstract:
CCES data demonstrate LLP vividly: on average, the larger the state’s voter
populations, the further away the actual Trump vote shares from the usual
95% confidence intervals based on the sample proportions. This should re-
mind us that, without taking data quality into account, population inferences
with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox: the more the data, the surer
we fool ourselves.

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This year UMass Amherst CICS will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Job ad to be posted soon. For anyone at #TADA2026 or #COLM2026 this week, I or my colleague Hamed Zamani would love to chat or answer questions about it - just say hi or send me an email to meet!

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

His response to the theory question is we should do theory without evidence. No evidence theory ("pure theory") is better than bad evidence theory. He's brutal about this stuff! (Obviously he didn't win this battle)

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Sam Lucas would say the counterfactual is worse than vibes. It would be actively building policy or theory on wrong evidence, sending scholarship on the wrong path, which is worse than vibes for him 🤷‍♀️

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Absolutely brutal journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Under such conditions, only a collective response may
succeed in breaking inertia’s hold. Hence, it may fall to
gatekeepers—editors, reviewers, and personnel commit-
tees—to require all analysts to prove that the threats social
world lumpiness poses are addressed. (See note 31 for
accompanying job market adjustments and implications.)31
If the social world is lumpy and challenges all methods,
then it is appropriate to place the burden of proof on all
social scientists seeking access to scarce resources—includ-
ing grant funding, journal pages, publisher prestige, and
lifetime employment—to prove that they have taken appro-
priate steps to address those challenges such that when
questions do not involve intrinsic interest in the studied
cases, their findings apply beyond those selected for study.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Re-reading Sam Lucas who has for his entire career insisted that non-probability samples are useless at best for understanding the social world. The vast majority of studies I read do not use probability samples. With big data etc., where are we with sampling theory? Do folks still teach it or nah?

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Thank you to @schmidtsciences.bsky.social for naming me an AI2050 Senior Fellow. The program asks: "AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened?" Answering it requires beginning to understand the cumulative effects of AI use; that is my project. www.ias.edu/news/alondra...

ias.edu

Alondra Nelson Receives AI2050 Senior Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, has been named by Schmidt Sciences as a 2026 AI2050 Senior Fellow. Nelson is one of six senior researchers to receive this $...

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We have an opening for a tenured Professor / Associate Professor of Interactive Media "with an emphasis on interactive storytelling, worldbuilding, and/or playful design in the public interest". I'm on the hiring committee and happy to answer questions.

american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Associate or Full Professor of Interactive Media Film and Media Arts School of Communication

American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Just gonna drop this Wikipedia article here as, canonically, pornography may have tipped the balance toward VHS in ye olde videotape format war. Where porn goes, so goes (consumer) technology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videota...

en.wikipedia.org

Videotape format war - Wikipedia

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(I agree with both OP threads, just building on them) This is an interesting because 1) Folks were against teaching AI because "it's supposed to be easy," but agents have shown what many of us have long been saying: we need to teach bc it's *not* easy 2) Porn has always led technology development

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Shelly Lundberg @shellyjlundberg.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Shameless self-promotion and a request. My publisher is asking me to encourage Amazon reviews, so.... If you bought How Economics Discovered Women on Amazon and like it, it would help me out if you post a short review. news.ucsb.edu/2026/022818/...

news.ucsb.edu

Economist Shelly Lundberg wins prestigious Mincer Award, releases book on gender economics

Lundberg's Mincer Award for lifetime achievement in economics scholarship comes as her newest book, “How Economics Discovered Women” hits the shelves.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'm going into deeper despair about what universities think is a good use of AI in academia (subpar admin chatbots) and what would actually be a good use of AI in academia (developing hyper specialized OCR engines for some obscure subject or language, as just one example).

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is really helpful. I completely agree that histories are a better approach than STS/philosophy of science in this particular case. Show cases where it's clear scientists reasoned differently.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is interesting because the student brought up phrenology themselves and that it has since been proven wrong. But they did not think that meant that 19th century scholars *reasoned* differently than we do today. Just that facts and theories are discovered, and sometimes proven wrong, over time.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'm afraid I will lose this student at the word "hermenuticize" :-)

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

You are talking to a bright, eager undergraduate student in CS. They are convinced that scientific reasoning is not socially/culturally conditioned. That is, the scientific method is the scientific method, whether it's 2026 Canada or 1850 China. What would you recommend they read? (Note the CS & UG)

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Ungated preprint here: osf.io/preprints/so...

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Great thread, great blog and report. And since we're plugging past work that is newly relevant, my heart has always been with this 2023 one: muse.jhu.edu/article/898331

Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspectives:
A Framework for Radical Objectivity in
Computational Social Science and
Computational Humanities
Laura K. Nelson
Just as the invention of the telescope revolu-
tionized the study of the heavens, so too by
rendering the unmeasurable measurable, the
technological revolution in mobile, Web, and
Internet communications has the potential to
revolutionize our understanding of ourselves
and how we interact. . . . Three hundred years
after Alexander Pope argued that the proper
study of mankind should lie not in the heavens
but in ourselves, we have finally found our tele-
scope. Let the revolution begin.
—Duncan Watts
We have entered a new era of scholarship in the social sci-
ences and humanities: the computational era. Rooted in the
analysis of unprecedented amounts of social data and cultural
material, computational social science and computational humanities
blend traditions from the social sciences and the humanities with tools
and approaches from computer science, engineering, and linguistics.
This disciplinary cross-pollination has unearthed old disciplinary debates,
including those around epistemology: what constitutes knowledge and
the goals of knowledge building and, particularly in the interpretive
social sciences and the humanities, the role of objectivity in knowledge
creation.
Objectivity in science and scholarship has always been a contested
terrain; it is no different in the computational era. While there are
complexities and nuances to debates about objectivity, broadly speak-
ing since the nineteenth century,1 epistemological debates in science
have revolved around the appropriate role of the subject in generat-
ing objective knowledge.2 On one side of this discourse is the ideal
of science and scholarship as the pursuit of disembodied objectivity.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Imagine ASA doing anything at all re: better publishing practices and/or AI 🦗🦗🦗

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

YY Ahn @yyahn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

As people have predicted, there are quite a few open-source alternatives to Jev, including: - Laya, this was the original according to him: github.com/NandhaKishor... - on Apple Core ML / neural engine: github.com/mizorewww/la... - with Qwen: github.com/jaredpalmer/...

github.com

GitHub - NandhaKishorM/laya

Contribute to NandhaKishorM/laya development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's possible for Jev/Laya/Decision Models to be not that big a deal as tech and massive as a new paradigm. Here's why I'm really excited from an NLP history perspective (thread)

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Reposted by Laura K. Nelson

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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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 22/09/2026

9 years ago I wrote about parallels between the idea of “mechanical objectivity” outlined in Daston & Galison’s book Objectivity & the rhetoric of “distant reading” in DH Prepping for today’s class discussing Objectivity, it strikes me that LLMs are forcing culture writ large to confront this myth

ryancordell.org

Objectivity and Distant Reading | Ryan C. Cordell

Book history, digital humanities, old newspapers, and information sciences

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Not too young! I have already had the "thank labor unions for the weekend" talk. He, um, tolerates my responses.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I saw Ezra Zuckerman give a talk on his book project on the sociology of time. It was absolutely fascinating.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My 5 y/o is devastated that the weekend is 2 days while the school/work week is 5 days and that this will be the case for the rest of his life. Insisting that society got it backwards. The weekend should be 5 days. And kiddo, I got nothing in response. We'll contemplate that on the walk to school.

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