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Matteo Di Cristofaro

@matteodic.bsky.social
825 followers 1.3K following 52 posts

Researcher in Corpus Linguistics and Digital Humanities @ UniMoRe. Corpus and Cognitive Linguist, Python & R user. Overall nerd (posts not representative of employers). Website: infogrep.it Online materials: catlism.github.io

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Reposted by Matteo Di Cristofaro
Philip Di Salvo @philipdisalvo.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/t...
nytimes.com
How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web
As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
forgot to add this to the linguistics feed 🐦🐦 #linguistics
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Emojis and homoglyphs may look like marginal details, but they can have very real consequences for tokenisation, frequency counts, and corpus-based interpretation. This paper is my attempt to show why data fidelity matters before analysis even begins. #corpuslinguistics #digitalhumanities #data
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Glad to share that “Digital Communication and Media Linguistics,” the contribution by M. Bondi and me to the "Research Handbook on Public Communication", is finally out! #linguistics #digitalcommunication #medialinguistics #digitalaffordances www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/b...
elgaronline.com
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Harald Klinke @harald-klinke.de · 10/06/2026
Digital Humanities often focus on data and tools. Critical Infrastructure Studies asks a deeper question: who builds, controls, and maintains the systems that shape what becomes visible, searchable, and knowable? An important perspective for the age of AI. #DigitalHumanities #AI #VisualCulture
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
This volume reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies as it explores how DH builds on and extends the field’s theories and technologies. Inc...
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/05/2026
RE: scholar.social/@olivia/115157822712… Published with some minor changes! Please share widely. 😊 Guest, O., Suarez, M., ... & van Rooij, I. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education, 16(2), 85–118 […]
scholar.social
Original post on scholar.social
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Facta @facta.news · 05/05/2026
Ad esempio il presentare come umano e cosciente un modello linguistico artificiale. Le conseguenze di antropomorfizzare i chatbot IA presentano infatti diversi rischi | @cianellaaa.bsky.social
facta.news
Cosa non va nell’intervista di Veltroni a Claude | Facta
Presentare come umano e cosciente un modello linguistico artificiale pone dei seri rischi per gli utenti
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Internet Archive @archive.org · 23/04/2026
🧵 We tend to think the internet is permanent, but VANISHING CULTURE—the new 📚 from Internet Archive—starts with a simple reality: our digital record is far more fragile than we think 🕳️ 📖 Read for free: archive.org/details/vani... 🛒 Purchase in print: www.betterworldbooks.com/product/deta... ⬇️
Book cover titled “Vanishing Culture” on a teal background. Pixel-art style graphics show a VHS tape, open book, film reel, chain link, and vinyl record dissolving into digital fragments. At the bottom, a cursor icon points to the word “SAVE,” alongside an archive-style building icon, evoking digital preservation.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 20/03/2026
For nearly 30 years, journalists have relied on the Internet Archive to see how stories were originally published, before edits, removals, or changes. We need to safeguard that. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
eff.org
Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Big congratulations to Francesca Nannetti @francescanannetti.bsky.social for successfully defending her PhD today! A great piece of work ("Exploring Graduate Recruitment Practices through Job Advertisements and Curricula Vitae: a Corpus Approach to HRM Research") and a well-deserved milestone. 🎓
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Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 17/01/2026
Yay! The hard copies of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities arrived today. It was a pleasure to write a chapter in this about pirate infrastructures and shadow libraries.
The cover of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities with the top words in yellow and the bottom in red
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Brenna Hassett @brennawalks.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
the way you collect data determines what kinda data you collect. Who knew? (Many people). So a survey of our archive is a survey of the data we can reach — it’s most often the history of people who were wealthy and connected enough to be remembered, and it’s pretty white and anglophone
Network diagram with princess emojis all
Over it
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
"crashing is not failure; crashing means we were exploring territories that were unexpected by the program." I love this perspective. Thanks @switchangel.bsky.social www.youtube.com/live/mLozqDn...
youtube.com
Coding Rave Music Part ????
YouTube video by Switch Angel
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Dr Nechama Brodie @brodiegal.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’
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DAIHUM: Digital & AI Humanities @daihum.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
📖 ToolFindr - Lightweight Explorer for Discovering Research Tools in Digital Humanities
ai-humanities.com
ToolFindr - Lightweight Explorer for Discovering Research Tools in Digital Humanities
[AI Summary]: ToolFindr is an open, community-curated platform for discovering Digital Humanities research tools, built on the Tool Registry Framework and integrating data from Wikidata and the...
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
I have recently found "What are embeddings" by @vickiboykis.com, and I think it should become a #corpuslinguistics and #digitalhumanities must-read starting book. Plus it's free under CC by-nc-sa! vickiboykis.com/what_are_emb...
vickiboykis.com
What are embeddings?
A deep-dive into machine learning embeddings.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Extreme speech thrives in encrypted spaces, but killing encryption won’t stop it, says a group of researchers who have studied the problem from multiple angles. We need context-driven governance, not backdoors, they say.
buff.ly
Policy Directions on Encrypted Messaging and Extreme Speech | TechPolicy.Press
Encryption, disinformation, and democracy: rethinking policy for messaging apps with rights-based safeguards.
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Craig Silverman @craigsilverman.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
“Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and phony citations. Already, the community of Wikipedia volunteers has mobilized to fight back against AI slop” www.theverge.com/report/75681...
theverge.com
How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content
Wikipedians are wading through the muck.
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
I love this!
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
Many VLM-based OCR models have been released recently. Are they useful for libraries and archives? I made a quick Space to compare VLM OCR with "traditional" OCR using 11k Scottish exam papers from @natlibscot.bsky.social huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/ocr-time-capsule
Screenshot of the app showing a page from a book + different views of existing and new ocr.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 22/07/2025
Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/
4-panel comic. (1) [Person 1 with ponytail flanked by person with short hair and another person speaking into microphone at podium] PERSON 1: In the early 2010s, researchers found that many major scientific results couldn’t be reproduced. (2) PERSON 1: Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today’s studies have become more robust. (3) PERSON 1: Unfortunately, our replication analysis has found exactly the same problems that those 2010s researchers did. (4) [newspaper with image of speakers from previous panels] Headline: Replication Crisis Solved
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Philipp Markolin @philippmarkolin.eurosky.social · 11/07/2025
I believe it is worth interrogating the fundamental forces re-shaping our information spheres away from liberal democracy towards myth, manipulation and magical thinking empowering autocracy and nihilism. Here’s how it all falls apart—a 🧵 in 6 figures ⬇️ www.protagonist-science.com/p/how-social...
protagonist-science.com
How social media destroys democratic discourse, explained in 6 easy figures
Where we all went wrong
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 06/07/2025
Stuffing ai into everything “isn’t just a forecast, it’s a libidinal fantasy — a capitalist dream of replacing relationships with code and scalable software, while public institutions are gutted in the name of ‘innovation.’”
truthout.org
Regulating AI Isn’t Enough. Let’s Dismantle the Logic That Put It in Schools.
AI in schools isn’t progress — it’s a sign of how far we’ve strayed from the purpose of education.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 06/07/2025
🤷🏿‍♂️
futurism.com
Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology's screwups.
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Ken Burnside @kenburnside.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'." MBA-brain is real.
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Is 😵‍💫 one token or two? To a human, it's one. To a corpus tool, it’s often split (😵 + 💫). And 𝙊𝙉𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙀 ≠ online. This preprint shows how emojis & homoglyphs challenge tokenisation and distort linguistic evidence. 🔍 arxiv.org/abs/2507.01764 #Emoji #Homoglyphs #CorpusLinguistics #AcademicSky #LangSky
arxiv.org
Data interference: emojis, homoglyphs, and issues of data fidelity in corpora and their results
Tokenisation - "the process of splitting text into atomic parts" (Brezina & Timperley, 2017: 1) - is a crucial step for corpus linguistics, as it provides the basis for any applicable quantitative met...
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Fellow academics, can anyone help with obtaining an #endorsement on arXiv? I have a preprint I'd like to upload to Computer Science > Computation and Language (cs.CL), but need someone to endorse my account. Here's the endorsement link: arxiv.org/auth/endorse... #corpuslinguistics #linguistics
arxiv.org
arXiv user login
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PsyPost @psypost.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Memes can serve as strong indicators of coming mass violence
psypost.org
Memes can serve as strong indicators of coming mass violence
A new study finds that surges in visual propaganda—like memes and doctored images—often precede political violence. By combining AI with expert analysis, researchers tracked manipulated content leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, revealing early warning signs of instability.
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Chris Cooper @coopersensei.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
Finally, a Replacement for BERT (Blog about ModernBert) huggingface.co/blog/modernb...
huggingface.co
Finally, a Replacement for BERT: Introducing ModernBERT
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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UniMoRe - Digital Humanities Summer School @unimoredh.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
📒The scientific program is out! Click on the link below to have a look at the speakers and the workshops of our Summer School! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ www.summerschooldigitalhumanities.unimore.it/2025-edition...
summerschooldigitalhumanities.unimore.it
Scientific Programme – Summer school digital humanities
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UniMoRe - Digital Humanities Summer School @unimoredh.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Our Summer School is beginning now with the institutional greetings.
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Charles Driver @charlesdriver.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
Postdoc position open in Zurich -- Prof. Martin Tomasik and I have a joint SNF project on interpretable neural network approaches for large scale, complex item / temporal structure, online learning / cognitive development data. Please retweet. tinyurl.com/PostdocGNNSNF
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Paperpile @paperpile.com · 09/05/2025
⏹️ Ending the experiment too early 🎯 Running experiments until you get a hit 🍒 Cherry-picking your results 🔧 Tweaking your data ➗ Not adjusting for multiple comparisons www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
P hacking — Five ways it could happen to you
Some data practices can lead to statistically dubious findings. Here’s how to avoid them.
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Tony Thorne @tonythorne007.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Academics and Universities have got to formulate a coherent approach to AI and guide their students. Cries of despair and digitally illiterate pronouncements will not reverse the effects of technical innovations.
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ReproducibiliTea @reproducibilitea.org · 29/04/2025
Designing a Good Research Practice Roadmap - a presentation by Fiona Ramage @fionar.bsky.social youtu.be/dnzRQPOxz1o?... The event was organised by Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea
youtu.be
Reproducibilitea – Designing a Good Research Practice Roadmap
YouTube video by Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea
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Social Media Lab @socialmedialab.ca · 26/04/2025
With Canada’s election just days away, the continued appearance of deepfake ads reveals a serious flaw in Meta’s ad-review system. If fraudsters can repeatedly bypass detection, it suggests the platform’s current safeguards are not equipped to catch even basic forms of manipulation...
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WIRED @wired.com · 22/04/2025
"Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter," @bencollins.bsky.social told WIRED.
wired.com
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Delighted to share my newly published review of "Data Analytics for Discourse Analysis with Python" (Tay 2024). The work addresses urgent, discipline‑wide concerns in #linguistics, and writing about it was both a privilege and a joy. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kyHu1L-nh...
authors.elsevier.com
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Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
Do you want all your Facebook and Instagram photos, posts and data to be used by Meta to train AI? If not, then *now* is the time to object. This article explains how. datenschutz-hamburg.de/news/meta-st...
datenschutz-hamburg.de
Meta starts AI training with personal data - those who want to object must act quickly (english version)
Meta AI will be trained from May with posts, photos and comments from Facebook and Instagram users
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Michael Morisy @morisy.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it and learn how you can help. www.muckrock.com/news/archive...
muckrock.com
Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it and learn how you can help.
Since the start of the new Trump administration, hundreds of federal data sets and government websites have gone offline without warning, sometimes returning with major changes and sometimes not retur...
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Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.
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Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Meanwhile, in 🇪🇺 @ec.europa.eu expands scrutiny of X. The earlier investigation is expanded to changes to algorithms/ recommendations, X's handling of the AfD/Musk live stream, and clarify vitality dynamics. And to keep data for probing, akin to the request to TikTok www.politico.eu/article/euro...
politico.eu
EU steps up scrutiny of X as anger grows over Musk’s political meddling
Musk has made major interventions to back far-right figures in Germany and Britain.
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
Amazing book by @joanwestenberg.com I just discovered, and one I'll be adding to the #digitalhumanities module next semester. www.permissionlessbook.com
permissionlessbook.com
Permissionless.
A manifesto for the future of everything. By JA Westenberg.
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Jeff Greene @jeffgreene.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
If you're interested in how large language models work and what those workings mean for how we should talk about LLMs, I strongly recommend reading the first seven (very readable!) pages (through section 6) of this paper by @mpshanahan.bsky.social: buff.ly/3ZEY5Vo #AcademicSky #EduSky
buff.ly
Talking About Large Language Models
Thanks to rapid progress in artificial intelligence, we have entered an era when technology and philosophy intersect in interesting ways. Sitting squarely at the centre of this intersection are large…
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MIT Technology Review @technologyreview.com · 13/12/2024
Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.
technologyreview.com
How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy
Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.
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Harald Klinke @harald-klinke.de · 14/12/2024
Study (2017): Social networks collapse in two stages – first, loosely connected users leave; then social contagion triggers rapid disintegration. X (formerly Twitter) may face this: losing key influencers (‘Super-Connectors’) could push it past a tipping point. #SocialMedia @netzpolitik.org
nature.com
Cascading collapse of online social networks - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Cascading collapse of online social networks
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Asad Sayeed (also @asayeed[@zirk.us]) @asayeed.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
this is exactly right, NLP was one of the routes by which people from humanities disciples particularly linguistics (disproportionately female) "smuggled" themselves into computer science at later career stages, so of course it was not considered "serious"
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Matteo Di Cristofaro @matteodic.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
fascinating, and I'd say I agree with this. Can someone suggest references on this topic? I'd like to know more about it
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