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Teddy Roland

@teddyroland.bsky.social
421 followers 168 following 602 posts

Postdoc @ School of Information Sciences, UIUC American Literature, Media Theory, Data Science I publish under "Edwin Roland" but don't tell anyone.

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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 19h
Topic Model to Transformer: I’m in your base killing your dudes proceedings.mlr.press/v202/li23p.h...
proceedings.mlr.press
How Do Transformers Learn Topic Structure: Towards a Mechanistic Understanding
While the successes of transformers across many domains are indisputable, accurate understanding of the learning mechanics is still largely lacking. Their capabilities have been probed on benchmark...
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Morgan Johnson @poormojo.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
No joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads
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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Really inspirational project here. The entire pipeline of model training — from bespoke pretraining data through fine tuning — has been effectively democratized. Not to mention that the results are freaking SOTA for a cluster of tasks humanists care about!
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Kirill Maslinsky @maslinych.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
new dataset: more than 104 thousand titles of works of fiction originally written in Russian or translated into Russian 1801–1975 in a dataset prepared by myself and Yauheniya Lekarevich dataverse.pushdom.ru/dataset.xhtm...
dataverse.pushdom.ru
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 13/10/2026
Me, walking into @illinoisrbml.bsky.social to inspect the spread @caitcoker.bsky.social has out for my class’ visit Me: Wow a 1st American edition of *Moby Dick* in which someone pasted newspaper articles about whaling & reviews of the book Me: do we know who pasted these? CC: um, Herman Me: 🤯
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
"Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs. 90% of executives say AI efforts have yet to translate to productivity gains." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
It is SO exciting to see how the work begun more than a decade ago, even before "The Program Era and the Mainly White Room" in LARB, work that's led to endlessly useful essays, like "Who Gets to Be a Writer" in Public Books, is now out as the book Crowd Control cup.columbia.edu/book/crowd-c...
cup.columbia.edu
Crowd Control | Columbia University Press
From the race riots of 1919 to the Black Lives Matter movement, anxieties about Black uprising have influenced literary funding and prestige in the United St... | CUP
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Simon Davies @simonfd.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
AI genuinely feels to me like a virus, infecting the minds of management and administrators, who are forcing it on their staff despite no valid use cases or ROI. It’s a plague of short-sighted idiocy www.wired.com/story/book-p...
wired.com
Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting
Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.
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James Neal @james3neal.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
"HathiTrust wins $5m Mellon grant for AI-powered book discovery project" www.researchinformation.info/news/hathitr...
researchinformation.info
HathiTrust wins $5m Mellon grant for AI-powered book discovery project - Research Information
Project will explore responsible, equitable and transparent uses of artificial intelligence in large-scale digital collections
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Kathy Harris @triproftri.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
JOB POSTING: SJSU Dept of Humanities is hiring Asst Prof of #DH . H&A has grt grp of #digitalhumanists thinking broadly & creatively about our world + new DH Center + incredible student groups + funding for convos re ethical tech, speaker series, etc. Due: 12/1/26 jobs.sjsu.edu/sj/en-us/job...
jobs.sjsu.edu
San José State University - Details - Assistant Professor in Dept Humanities - Digital Humanities
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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Alas, analytic philosophy. Always going to be wasn’t it?
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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
Possibly better outcomes on avg thanks to mechanization. Yet present inequalities will end up being reproduced based on access to, say, bespoke legal representation
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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Each cup of coffee costs a little more as human hands spend more time with it. So like that but for legal briefs and medical diagnoses
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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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The Oaklandside @oaklandside.org · 17/09/2026
A period of unprecedented price volatility is reshaping the economics of restaurants and farms. We traced the fallout through a single dish.
oaklandside.org
How tariffs, war, and supply chains collide in Cafe Colucci's vegan combo
A period of unprecedented price volatility is reshaping the economics of restaurants and farms. We traced the fallout through a single dish.
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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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Jessica Chapel @jnchapel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
It's been gratifying to see the response to this project since we officially put it out into the world last week: www.bpl.org/news/boston-... #AI4LAM
bpl.org
Boston Public Library and Harvard IDI Release Open Dataset from 135 Years of Historic Newspapers
Newspapers represent one of the richest available primary sources for historical research — capturing not just major events, but births…
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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
Homemade bagels in a wide serving bowl.
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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Offers must include statement of internal research grants, contact information of three (3) deans, and a unicorn.
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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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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Seeing Dr. Fabros hooded was extraordinary. A very special event in an already special day.
news.ucsb.edu
Alex Fabros, 80, makes history at UCSB
From farmworker fields in California to war in Vietnam to a doctoral degree in history, Alex Fabros, 80, is UCSB's oldest PhD recipient.
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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 1: A web passage scored across our 12 narrative dimensions. Agency and setting dimensions are rated on a 1–5 Likert scale, temporal sequencing and causal density are passage-level proportions (0–1), and event density is the rate of event triggers per token. This passage scores high on agency and event features but low on setting, a “narrative profile” commonly seen across first-person web narratives.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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Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Oberlin students affirm we did not believe it would take forms this comical
static.klipy.com
Hulk Hogan Hulks Out in Iconic Wrestling Moment
Alt: Hulk Hogan Tears Shirt in Iconic Wrestling Moment
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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
Applications open for AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows
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