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Laure Thompson

@laurejt.bsky.social
619 followers 407 following 31 posts

Research software engineer @princetoncdh.bsky.social. natural language processing, machine learning, cultural analytics laurejt.github.io

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Reposted by Laure Thompson
Richard Jean So @richardjeanso.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Prospective PhD students: if you work on computational humanities, cultural analytics and/or cultural AI, pls apply to Duke English! We're recruiting in these areas & you'd join a vibrant community. Candidates with training in both lit studies + CS/sciences esp welcome. Email me if any questions!
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Daniel de Kadt @dandekadt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Very excited: Cornell Arts & Sciences seeks up to 5 postdoctoral scholars working on AI and the humanities/social sciences. Not involved in selection but could serve as a faculty sponsor if you are working on topics related to ~"how to do social science in the age of AI." Happy to chat.
academicjobsonline.org
Cornell University, College of Arts and Sciences Fellowships
Job #AJO32791, Postdoctoral Associate, AI in Social Sciences & Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences Fellowships, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US
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Laure Thompson @laurejt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Looking forward to attending!
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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
When AI models tell stories about animals, how are the characters gendered? And what does that reveal about model bias? Super fun to see this write-up about our FAccT paper. Led by Imani Finkley, and building on the Bears Will Be Boys story with the @pudding.cool! www.geekwire.com/2026/he-it-b...
geekwire.com
He, it, but rarely she: When AI models write kids’ stories about animals, female characters vanish
A new University of Washington study testing leading AI models across nearly 24,000 story completions found that AI guardrails designed to reduce bias have accidentally erased female characters — defa...
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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Job: 3yr postdoc in latin computational linguistics! my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...
my.corehr.com
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Cynthia Heider @cynthiaheider.com · 24/06/2026
The #ACH2026 Mid-Atlantic Regional Hub is happening! This free event runs through Friday at Penn. More info at www.library.upenn.edu/events/ach-2.... Thankful for our wonderful volunteers! @ach.bsky.social
A woman in a pink shirt and a man in a green shirt sit behind an event sign-in table in the entranceway of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. A sign in an easel next to them reads in part: "Welcome! Association for Computing and the Humanities, ACH 2026 Mid-Atlantic Regional Hub at Penn"
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Computational Humanities Research @comphumresearch.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
📆 Mark your calendars: the 7th edition of CHR will take place 5–8 January 2027 in Manchester, UK, organized by the Center for Digital Humanities, Culture and Media at The University of Manchester. We hope it’s the perfect way to beat the post-Christmas and New Year blues. See you at #CHR2027!
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Anna Fore Waymack @waymack.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
In unexpected, kinda terrifying life turns—I’m trying to get a small leather goods store off the ground this holiday season. Please consider checking it out! Thus far: keychains, valet trays, bag charms, a few custom wallets and notebook covers. goldberry.studio or StudioGoldberry on Etsy
A red leather bowl shaped like a flower with gilded edges A green leaf-shaped leather bowl
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Meredith Martin @mmvty.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
📣 New preprint! We know humans are biased against AI-creativity. But what about LLMs, now often judging creativity in various contexts? Do they replicate, transform, or amplify this bias? We tested it. Turns out: AI is 2.5X more biased against its own work than humans. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08831 🧵
arxiv.org
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Queer in AI @queerinai.com · 09/10/2025
We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5
queerinai.com
Grad App Aid — Queer in AI
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Caroline (Carrie) T. Schroeder @ctschroeder.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
NEH Collaborative research grant program now explicitly prohibits digital projects. Output should be a book or journal issue. FFS www.neh.gov/grants/resea...
neh.gov
Collaborative Research
Supports groups of two or more scholars engaging in significant and sustained research in the humanities.
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Matt Lincoln @mdlincoln.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
I'm hiring a mid-level full-stack SWE! Our team at @jstor.bsky.social Labs is looking for yet another product-minded engineer to join our team. We come from all kinds of backgrounds, tech and non-tech alike. Please apply or send to your awesome friends, and DM me with ?s: grnh.se/19o370345us
grnh.se
Software Engineer (Full-stack) - ITHAKA
ITHAKA’s mission is to expand access to knowledge and education around the world. Our services — Artstor, JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R — enable people everywhere to learn, to grow, and to overcome b...
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Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!
dhq.digitalhumanities.org
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News
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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Please share! We're trying to crowd-source a dataset of post-1929 novels with maps.
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Lauren Tilton @nolauren.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Check out Rebecca Hicke @dmimno.bsky.social piece on LLMs! “Language models have the ability to identify the characteristics of much shorter literary passages than was thought feasible with traditional stylometry. We evaluate authorship and genre detection for a new corpus of literary novels…”
cambridge.org
Looking for the inner music: Probing LLMs’ understanding of literary style | Computational Humanities Research | Cambridge Core
Looking for the inner music: Probing LLMs’ understanding of literary style - Volume 1
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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social. It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought. #kidlit #booksky 🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
A dot plot titled '"nthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children's Books (*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books)" showing the proportion of animals depicted with gendered pronouns. Animals toward the left side are more often represented as male (he/him), and those toward the right are more often represented as female (she/her). Birds, ducks, and cats lean female. Bears, monkeys, dogs, elephants, foxes, wolves, and frogs lean male. Each animal is represented by a colorful, illustrated face.Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article titled "The Sneaky Gender Bias in Picture Books: Animal Characters" that includes photo of the author, a woman with brown hair and glasses. Text reads: "Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School and an adjunct assistant professor in the English department at the University of Washington. She uses data to analyze contemporary culture, especially literature and publishing. She is currently at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the surprising social media afterlives of five iconic American authors. Here she shares her investigations into the subtle gender imbalance often at play in picture books featuring animal characters.

I recently published a data analysis with The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven storytelling, about animal characters in picture books. We read approximately 300 popular English-language picture books from the past 70+ years and noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character that was important to the story.

We found that male animal characters were twice as common as female characters across all the books. Some strong animal stereotypes also emerged: frogs and dogs were boys; birds and cats were girls. Even more surprising, according to our data: this disparity is not obviously improving, even over the last 25 years."
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Meredith Martin @mmvty.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
The @princetoncdh.bsky.social newsletter is always a treat (and you should subscribe if you dont) but having an exclusive interview with Ted Chiang sort of takes the cake! mailchi.mp/princeton/au...
mailchi.mp
Q&A with Ted Chiang 🤖
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Happy @happybuzaaba1.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
If you’re an incoming Princeton 🐯 this fall, consider joining FRS159 - a unique chance to dive into technology, culture and African Languages. More about the course in the post below.
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Post45 Data Collective @post45data.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and starts in 2024—a 31-year leap. Are creators imagining futures that are closer or further away? Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting. doi.org/10.18737/552...
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 17/06/2025
I just pulled out my copy of Newton's Principia, a book that was originally written in Latin, and noticed that the translation I am using was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has basically been destroyed Science depends on the humanities 🧪
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Check out the camera-ready version of our ICML position paper ("Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/abs/2502.00561 (6/6)
arxiv.org
Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge
The measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems lack sufficient scientific rigor, leading to what has been described as "a tangle of sloppy tests [and] apples-to-oranges com...
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IDI @institutional.org · 12/06/2025
Today we released Institutional Books 1.0, a 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability. 🧵
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Jim Casey @jimccasey1.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
The NEH has been a singular force for bringing people together. In this moment of hate, fear and isolation, the NEH helped us learn about our past and about each other. Today we are losing almost all of the NEH public servants. We are all in their debt. A national shame. A profound cultural loss.
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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Many libraries now use automated tools to measure diversity in their collections. We examined how these tools work and whether library workers find them useful. A complex case study of libraries navigating automation, DEI, & shrinking public funding. Our new FAccT paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.14890
Screenshot of first page of the FAccT '25 paper "Algorithms in the Stacks: Investigating automated, for-profit diversity audits in public libraries" by Melanie Walsh, Connor Franklin Rey, Chang Ge, Tina Nowak, and Sabina Tomkins.

Abstract: Algorithmic systems are increasingly being adopted by cultural heritage institutions like libraries. In this study, we investigate U.S. public libraries' adoption of one specific automated tool -- automated collection diversity audits -- which we see as an illuminating case study for broader trends. Typically developed and sold by commercial book distributors, automated diversity audits aim to evaluate how well library collections reflect demographic and thematic diversity. We investigate how these audits function, whether library workers find them useful, and what is at stake when sensitive, normative decisions about representation are outsourced to automated commercial systems. Our analysis draws on an anonymous survey of U.S. public librarians (n=99), interviews with 14 librarians, a sample of purchasing records, and vendor documentation. We find that many library workers view these tools as convenient, time-saving solutions for assessing and diversifying collections under real and increasing constraints. Yet at the same time, the audits often flatten complex identities into standardized categories, fail to reflect local community needs, and further entrench libraries' infrastructural dependence on vendors. We conclude with recommendations for improving collection diversity audits and reflect on the broader implications for public libraries operating at the intersection of AI adoption, escalating anti-DEI backlash, and politically motivated defunding.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Worth a read. Not about AI. Many thoughts come to mind about literacy (and political literacy), grading standards, perceptions of studying literature as "easy" compared to science (it's not easy), how to translate expertise so people can understand. kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-en...
kittenbeloved.substack.com
College English majors can't read
They have one job and they can't do it
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A. Feder Cooper @afedercooper.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Llama 3.1 70B contains copies of nearly the entirety of some books. Harry Potter is just one of them. I don’t know if this means it’s an infringing copy. But the first question to answer is if it’s a copy at all/in the first place. That’s what our new results suggest: arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
arxiv.org
Extracting memorized pieces of (copyrighted) books from open-weight language models
Plaintiffs and defendants in copyright lawsuits over generative AI often make sweeping, opposing claims about the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have memorized plaintiffs' protected expr...
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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
I spoke to the person who AI-generated the Chicago Sun-Times reading list. Says he's very embarrassed. This was part of a generic package inserted into newspapers and other publications, so likely to run elsewhere. He didn't know it'd be in Chicago Sun-Times www.404media.co/chicago-sun-...
404media.co
Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
"I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," the writer said. "I'm completely embarrassed."
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Public Access > Open Access
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
bad
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Data & Society @datasociety.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
June 6 @ 1 pm ET! Join authors @emilymbender.bsky.social, @alexhanna.bsky.social, and @karenhao.bsky.social as they discuss their must-read new books exposing AI hype and tech industry power with D&S’s @tamigraph.bsky.social. datasociety.net/events/chall...
A green promotional graphic for the June 6 online book talk, “Challenging AI Hype and Tech Industry Power,” moderated by Tamara Kneese, featuring authors Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, and Karen Hao.
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Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈 @davidimiller.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
🚨🚨 Alarming NSF policy update By accepting an NSF award, an institution now must say it's: 1. Not engaging in boycotts of Israel (yes really) 2. Not advancing or promoting DEI in violation of anti-discrimination laws Announced via a footnote today: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/gc1-ma...
(c) Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business. The term discriminatory prohibited boycott also includes an academic boycott of Israel in which an educational or research institution enacts or implements restrictive policies, or otherwise participates in activities having the object or effect of restricting ongoing or potential academic, educational, or research institutions. Notwithstanding any restriction on the applicability of other NSF rules and regulations, the requirements in paragraph (c) applies to both foreign and domestic institutions receiving funding from the NSF.(a) By accepting the award, recipients are certifying that: (i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and (ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott. (3) NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
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Daniel Cardoso Llach @dcardo.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
I was today years old when I learned that the Magic Schoolbus was an NSF-funded project.
Image of the TV series The Magic School Bus accompanied by the following text: Airing on PBS in the mid-1990s, this NSF-funded animated TV show follows Ms. Frizzle and her class as they set off on field trips out of this world, including careening across the solar system, traveling through the human body or visiting the late Cretaceous period.
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 12/05/2025
Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last week—the National Digital Newspaper Program—which builds Chronicling America—has been shut down Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general public—for genealogy, local history—it’s such a loss
loc.gov
About this Collection | Chronicling America | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
Search America's Historic Newspaper Pages through 1963 Please Note: The Library of Congress has transitioned the longstanding Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website to this new digi...
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Caitlin Goodman @caitlinest.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Please boost! The NOEL PRIZE, in memory of the great and good and much-missed Will Noel. Celebrate your (or any) open access library project. No project too small, or too big. Full details here, deadline 8/1, extremely low-effort Google Form: pacscl.org/what-we-do/f...
pacscl.org
The Noel Prize – PACSCL
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
The ChatGPT-driven disruption of education is often presented, including in today’s viral NYMag piece, as a surprise event for which ed workers were caught unprepared This ignores dynamics & decisions that, in some cases, go back decades, without which we could’ve metabolized ChatGPT competently 🧵
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
This is a fantastic oral history of the last 10 years of NLP and AI. www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...
quantamagazine.org
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine
Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.
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ben @btskinner.io · 29/04/2025
As an elder millennial, I could trade my lifetime of tax contributions to the NEH for one month of Netflix and have just enough left over to get some avocado toast if I split it with two other people
Line graph titled "What's my share of NEH appropriations" with a caption: "Between its founding in 1965 and fiscal year 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities received congressional appropriations totaling $7.37 billion. NEH used this funding to support thousands of individuals and cultural organizations - both directly through various grant programs and indirectly through funds disbursed by the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils. Beyond these appropriations, grantees raised millions of dollars more from non-federal donors as part of grant matching requirements. To put NEH appropriations in perspective, this chart shows cumulative annual per capita contribution to NEH by age, that is, the total dollar amount the average taxpayer has given to NEH over their lifetime. A few relevant purchases are helpfully included to show what a person could have bought instead, had they kept their personal NEH contribution for themselves..." The x-axis ranges from 0 to 59 years old. The y-axis ranges from $0 to $30. At three ages, items that could have instead been purchased with an individual's lifetime NEH contribution are shown. At 13 years, an egg is plotted on the line with a dollar amount of $6.41 and the caption reads, "Just in time to feed a growth spurt, a person at 13 years old has contributed enough to NEH that they could instead purchase one dozen eggs ($6.23/dozen)." At 36 years, a popcorn bucket is plotted with a dollar amount of $18.20 and the caption reads, "Millennials who are at least 36 years old could exchange their nearly four decades worth of NEH support for a one month subscription to Netflix ($17.99/month)." At 50 years, a gasoline pump is plotted with the dollar amount of $26.00 and the caption reads, "Those 50 years old or older - who have been contributing to the agency for nearly its entire existence - could instead have saved that money to purchase about a half tank of gas (8 gallons at $3.23/gallon)."
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
Come for the clear description of what's behind the chatbot interface, stay for the :chef's kiss: footnotes. (Always read the footnotes!) scatter.wordpress.com/2025/04/27/i...
scatter.wordpress.com
it’s the interface
A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any su…
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
Excellent thread! [He corrected: "deceiving" ⬇️ should be "describing."]
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Sarah Gilbert @sarahagilbert.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988
tinyurl.com
From the changemyview community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the changemyview community
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Chris Brockett @chrisbrockett.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
Ancient OCR artifacts never die. They live forever. www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-ph...
sciencealert.com
A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, But Why?
Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: "vegetative electron microscopy".
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J.L. Briere @jlbriere.boats · 20/04/2025
Just FYI, if you have Cloudflare hooked up to your website they have a function now to block known AI bots from scraping your website. It's under Security>Settings>Bot traffic
AI Labyrinth. Trap AI crawlers that scrape your website content without permission in a maze of never-ending links.
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Dan Goldstein @dggoldst.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
🚨 Predoc at Microsoft Research 🚨 Do you have strong front-end programming and statistics skills but need research experience before heading off to graduate school for a computational social science PhD? Apply now for this summer! www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...
microsoft.com
Predoctoral Research Assistant (Contract) – Computational Social Science - Microsoft Research
Are you a recent college graduate wishing to gain research experience prior to pursuing a Ph.D. in fields related to computational social science (CSS)? Do you have a deep love of “playing with data”—...
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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 13/04/2025
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
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Thomas Padilla @thomaspadilla.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
I have been on a number of advisory boards in my career but I haven't seen much advice shared on how an organization/ project should best leverage the wisdom of their advisory board. What advice would you all share for leaders seeking support from their advisory boards during these trying times?
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