iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Here are visualizations of multi-agent work from transcript of one job that involved research publishers’ and journal’s AI-use policies for authoers: liu.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/u...

Hub-and-spoke communication diagram shows a coordinating session with Claude Opus 5.5 routing every message among a human user, desktop app, and specialized agents. Blue lines mark instructions, red lines human-agent reports, and black arrows automated notices; labels show 7 prompts, 33 replies, and 0 agent-to-agent messages or follow-ups to agents.

[This alt-text created by gen AI]

A directed-network diagram maps messages, files, and notices exchanged among a human user, desktop app, coordinating session, research sources, and web-fetch summarizer. Color-coded arrows distinguish instructions, reports or result files, shared-brief reads, and pages sent for summarization, with coordinating session linking nine source categories to summarizer.

[This alt-text created by gen AI]

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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I have separated the art from the artist and am now whipping the art to stiff peaks, after which I will gently fold it into the artist before baking at 350 til golden and puffed

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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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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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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Intellectual products will eventually be price-differentiated according to the degree of handcraftedness I think of the way coffee went a few years ago: you can buy Folgers commodity products, or get a routinized Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, or get a single origin drip from the local hipster shop

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Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 17/09/2026

great art articulates eternal truths

script of the end of Waiting for Godot which has been modified to read

ESTRAGON: Well, shall we log off?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let's log off.
[They do not log off]

CURTAIN

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

UCSB grad students have a paid position “Bagel Hour Coordinator” and I now have to pursue another degree so I can apply my most valuable skills

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10/09/2026

Heads-up everyone in digital humanities and/or cultural AI: this is a hugely valuable resource. It does the systematic cleaning and segmentation — of a million books — that we have always wanted to have, for computational research, and have never quite produced in a way that stuck.

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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Siblings are finally united! What is writing and reading in the time of AI? Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Sheila Heti, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, and other amazing writers reflect and offer new possibilities. @uofmpress.bsky.social

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The idea of a machine that mechanistically generates true theorems goes back to Hilbert 100 years ago. People lost interest when Gödel proved it was impossible to generate all of them (true things outnumber proofs) but that never implied the machine wouldn't produce a whole lot of them.

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Chris Forster @cforster.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

What works does the r/classicliterature subreddit consider "classic"? This post gives you an answer (and some media ecological theorizing for good measure): cforster.com/2026/09/redd... With thanks to @mellymeldubs.bsky.social & @mariaa.bsky.social, whose work on Goodreads I borrow from.

cforster.com

The Reddit Classics

Reflections on the most frequently mentioned works in the /r/classicliterature subreddit.

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 27/08/2026

Ok I can share—today MSLIS student Nadja Robot donated a teletype machine to @skeuomorphpress.org’s Undead Media Lab But this is not just any teletype—it’s the one Michael S. Hart used to digitize the Declaration of Independence & Alice in Wonderland—the 1st texts in what became Project Gutenberg

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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 26/08/2026

this is only stuff you can do on open models not just open weights, but fully open models with open datasets this stuff is extremely important, and we know next to nothing about it

Matlin and Chakraborty designed a study » around inf'yence functions, a technique that estimates how much any single training document - an article, post, or page a model trained on - shaped how the model answered a particular benchmark question.
Add those estimates up across the data, and you can see which kinds of writing - literary, technical, and so on - support a given ability in the model. But that holds only if you can confirm the model actually trained on the documents in question.

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This could be at your faculty meeting

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Assistant Professor of English Edwin (Teddy) Roland invites offers of tenure-track employment in English Language and Literature, beginning in Fall 2027. Priority will be given to offers which specialize in American Literature, Literature since 1945, and Digital Humanities.

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Matthew Kollmer @matthewkollmer.com · 21/08/2026

It's a little late, but I just posted a blog recounting my teaching gig over the summer and how I thought through LLM policy for an intro to Python for DH class: matthewkollmer.com/thinking-thr... The blog also links to a ton of Berkeley DH teaching materials which, I must say, are top-notch!

matthewkollmer.com

Thinking Through LLM Policy in Python for DH – Matthew Johannes Kollmer

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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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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

I hope that student will be in the audience for my MLA talk in Jan!

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 15/07/2026

I would just add that, from where I sit, this doesn't look like turf that can be defended or a tide that can be held back. There's already interdisciplinary collaboration on this topic and we can all work together to ensure the work is done well.

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Before migrating here, Twitter’s final gift was to Yglesias-pill me 😂 Most things are fine, and some can even be good

X-Y coordinate axis with highlighted point near center, leaning modestly toward “Good” and “Transformative.” It corresponds to an archetypal character: The B2B SaaS Consultant

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Rachael King @rscar.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Looking for something to do this summer? We have a new batch of documents up at our Zooniverse site, Corresponding with Quakers. We've added materials from the Huntington's Shackleton Correspondence to UCSB's Ballitore Collection and we need help transcribing! www.zooniverse.org/projects/rac...

zooniverse.org

Corresponding with Quakers | Zooniverse - People-powered research

Investigating race, gender, class, and religion in 18th- and 19th-Century Irish Quaker Documents

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Screenshot of paper abstract that reads:

AI FICTION IN THE WILD Neel Gupta Maria Antoniak Melanie Walsh

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (Zhao et al.), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation—including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call infinite story demanders, who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.

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Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 23/06/2026

Excited to share that we are now inviting proposals for our upcoming Critical AI Studies? conference at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social on Oct. 9&10, 2026. Please see the full CfP here: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Submissions are due July 31, 2026. For questions DM me or @owenleonard.bsky.social.

Poster for the conference "Critical Artificial Intelligence Studies?" at the University of California, Santa Barbara, October 9&10, 2026. The subtitle says "An interdisciplinary conference on a field in formation."

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Conservatives too dislike UaaS and no one knows what to do "[To] enact the ideals of the civic-education movement, you wld need more than a new college: you wld need to reimagine the entirety of our education system and the society into which students graduate [...] a whole new ideal of the person"

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Figure 6: UMAP reduction of SBERT embeddings for 20,000 randomly sampled NARRADOLMA documents, colored by PC1 score (interiority). Labels are based on manual examination. Overlays for all three PCs appear in Fig. A5.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 12/06/2026

So, naive question about these campuses that pay OpenAI $13mil/yr. Why don’t they pour that money into a cluster running the strongest available open-weight model, with API and interactive options. And if the answer is “overhead,” why aren’t we collaborating?

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Felt medieval. Might delete later

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

New piece from @markmarino.bsky.social and Jeremy Douglass bringing AI into the fold of Critical Code Studies, as a new method for reading!

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Idothethinking @idothethinking.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

This is a way bigger indictment of US infrastructure.

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I can confirm that using claude to write rust works pretty well. RustMallet is a whisker faster than Java Mallet at training topic models, and adds some tweaks that I have avoided in Mallet for stability reasons (multiple saved states by default). github.com/mimno/RustMa...

github.com

GitHub - mimno/RustMallet: Rust implementation of sparse Gibbs sampling LDA, following the SparseLDA scheme from MALLET

Rust implementation of sparse Gibbs sampling LDA, following the SparseLDA scheme from MALLET - mimno/RustMallet

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Even constraining the AI impact to the individual layer however, will change the nature of work. More experimentation and more exploitation of novel solutions for instance will change the complexity of code committed if not the quantity. Some evidence for this coming out of public repo analysis too

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Center for Digital Humanities @princetoncdh.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

@princeton.edu is seeking to hire AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows affiliated with the AI Lab (@princetonainews.bsky.social) and the Center for Digital Humanities to conduct research focused on societal AI. Applications open through Jul 1! cdh.princeton.edu/news/2026/05...

cdh.princeton.edu

Applications open for AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

The AI encyclical is bringing something to a head for me, as someone who came up through the Catholic school system. In a nutshell, I think that a lot of cultural critics -- in AI and other fields -- rely on mystification to make their arguments just as much as any religious dogma does.

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Wow!! An undergrad I mentored this spring had a paper accepted at ASIS&T. Really really impressed by their curiosity with the project and motivation to turn it into a formal paper. These kids!

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

For those who like to do the optional readings, I’ll just leave this here www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

vatican.va

Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891)

Encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII, 15 May 1891

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Roopika Risam @roopikarisam.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

My tiny thread yesterday is now a whole op-ed! A quick read, connecting Pope Leo's apology for colonialism and slavery to his warnings about AI — it's all related. Working with editor @mpgphd.bsky.social was an absolutely pleasure!

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Already making plans for this resource!

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Federico Pianzola @fpianz.eurosky.social · 22/01/2025

It's publication day! Available in print and Open Access mitpress.mit.edu/978026255091... A book about how digital social reading apps are changing and nurturing the way we read. I talk about Wattpad, Goodreads, AO3 and more. @mitpress.bsky.social @unigroningen.bsky.social @gronlp.bsky.social

mitpress.mit.edu

Digital Social Reading

How digital social reading apps are powerfully changing—and nurturing—the way we read.Conventional wisdom would have us believe that digital technology i...

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

3x the writing in the week after classes than during the whole previous semester? The project I thought was behind schedule just hit warp speed!

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Don’t forget to vote! Deadline this Friday, May 15

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I'm starting a newsletter! I'll be sharing "dispatches" or "field notes" about AI, language, and culture, drawn from my research, reading, and traveling. Short, frequent, informal!

field-notes.leaflet.pub

Welcome to Field Notes

A little bit about me and why I'm writing here

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Good news: the formula this story reports is about state funding only. Long term structural change is possible! Bad news: Federal funding got bumped too during COVID and it goes away next fall. OUSD is scrambling to cover enrichment programs and teacher aids, which impact current students.

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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Benchmarks are both technical and cultural thought experiments, often performing minimal literary forms. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

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