Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · 1d

DH as critical praxis and worldbuilding with @laurenfklein.bsky.social and @roopikarisam.bsky.social. An intellectual-pedagogical-feminist dream symposia come true through, hosted through my Critical Data Lab at UCLA Data X. datax.ucla.edu/news-events/...

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 21d

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

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Javier Cha @javiercha.bsky.social · Jul 17

CFP: #HKADH2026 will be hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (23-25 January 2026).

Keynote speakers: Lauren Tilton @nolauren.bsky.social and Andrew Piper ‪‪@andrewpiper.bsky.social‬.

Submission deadline: 31 August.

2026.hkadh.org/callforpapers/

#HKADH

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Aug 14

“'I see the page, the spread, or the book as another medium where I could transpose what I have learned and known about film—sequence, rhythm, and pacing,' he says. In publishing projects like Tenderness Montage he has attempted to translate the filmic montage into a sequence of printed pages."

For Alec Figuracion the sequence, rhythm, and pacing of a film is akin to that of a book

Treading the line between publication design and moving image, the designer has found more to the two mediums than that which keeps them apart.

www.itsnicethat.com

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Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Aug 14

Join me for the bibliotactics book talk today zoom and in person in Singapore 16:00 – 17:30 (SGT) ari.nus.edu.sg/events/20250...

ari.nus.edu.sg

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Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · Aug 4

A post describing some common ways to structure DH-y syllabi for those about to rough one out - "Frameworks for DH Course Design"

walshbr.com/blog/framewo...

Frameworks for DH Course Design · walshbr.com

Head of Student Programs at the Scholars' Lab in the UVA Library

walshbr.com

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Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Aug 5

Today! Digital libraries, Cambodia and Vietnam, sustainable development, digital humanities and digital preservation and access. Will be streamed on Facebook live and can join via zoom! khmerstudies.org/2025-cks-lib...

Empowering Cambodian Libraries: Building Sustainable Digital Futures - CKS - Center for Khmer Studies

ដើម្បីអានជាភាសាខ្មែរ សូមចុចទីនេះ

khmerstudies.org

Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Aug 1

Saigon Experimental “Book Talks”: Art, Community, Women’s Reading, August 8-9, 2025

Join us in Saigon for experimental community talks around reading, feminism, and art. It's an honor and dream to "start" my book tour in Saigon (where the intellectual/personal/political journey began) alongside…

Saigon Experimental “Book Talks”: Art, Community, Women’s Reading, August 8-9, 2025

Join us in Saigon for experimental community talks around reading, feminism, and art. It's an honor and dream to "start" my book tour in Saigon (where the intellectual/personal/political journey began) alongside feminist cothinkers Minh and Yen. August 8, 2025: "Library History as Data-Art-Life: Fabulating the Vietnamese Past" August 9, 2025: "Women's Reading: Theory and Practice" Roundtable with Cindy Anh Nguyễn, Yến Vũ và Nguyễn Thị Minh…

cindyanguyen.com

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Alexander Hoyle @alexanderhoyle.bsky.social · Jul 8

Evaluating topic models (and document clustering methods) is hard. In fact, since our paper critiquing standard evaluation practices four years ago, there hasn't been a good replacement metric

That ends today (we hope)! Our new ACL paper introduces an LLM-based evaluation protocol 🧵

Screenshot of first page of paper. It is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00828

Abstract: Topic model and document-clustering evaluations either use automated metrics that align poorly with human preferences or require expert labels that are intractable to scale. We design a scalable human evaluation protocol and a corresponding automated approximation that reflect practitioners' real-world usage of models. Annotators -- or an LLM-based proxy -- review text items assigned to a topic or cluster, infer a category for the group, then apply that category to other documents. Using this protocol, we collect extensive crowdworker annotations of outputs from a diverse set of topic models on two datasets. We then use these annotations to validate automated proxies, finding that the best LLM proxies are statistically indistinguishable from a human annotator and can therefore serve as a reasonable substitute in automated evaluations

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · Jul 10

Friends, please share!

Proofs are ready for @skeuomorphpress.org's edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Rant About Technology." I am so pleased with this book—in many ways our 1st real book project

Details about how to get one through our fundraiser at skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu/le-guin-book...

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Jul 8

In this post I compiled a literature review of research about such gendered service disparities. These dynamics contributed to my resignation from a tenured full professorship last week.

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Jul 8

It’s absolutely not a matter of “just saying no” — not only because the repercussions of refusal are inequitable, but also bc it’s wrong to create individual responsibility for increasing systemic dysfunction: more + more service work spread across fewer folks in a guilt-powered volunteer economy

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Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Jul 8

Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia: An Invitation by Theresa de Langis, Nicole Yow Wei, Tara Tran, Cindy Anh Nguyen [New Publication]

Truly honored to share the excerpts of our publication "Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia: An Invitation". It's been a privilege to work together with fellow…

Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia: An Invitation by Theresa de Langis, Nicole Yow Wei, Tara Tran, Cindy Anh Nguyen [New Publication]

Truly honored to share the excerpts of our publication "Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia: An Invitation". It's been a privilege to work together with fellow troublemakers Tara, Theresa, and Nicole, to redefine academic 'work' through relationships and centered on care. What appears like an academic article is more like an imprint of our collective gatherings, dreaming, and cowriting that spanned summer 2022 (submission to AAS in Asia roundtable- …

cindyanguyen.com

Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Jul 1

lecturer job posting in our Information Studies department at ucla for three courses: Data Management and Practice; Collection Management for Archives, Libraries, and Museums; and Audio Archiving Please share recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10435

Part-Time Lecturers in Information Studies

University of California, Los Angeles is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.apo.ucla.edu

Cindy Anh Nguyen @cindyanguyen.bsky.social · Jun 26

Announcing…BIBLIOTACTICS! Available now for Preorder with UC Press 30% off

My forthcoming book Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial public is now available for preorder from UC Press with the promo code UCPSAVE30. Be the first to pick up your print copy to be published and shipped by January…

Announcing…BIBLIOTACTICS! Available now for Preorder with UC Press 30% off

My forthcoming book Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial public is now available for preorder from UC Press with the promo code UCPSAVE30. Be the first to pick up your print copy to be published and shipped by January 13, 2026. Open access editions through Luminos will also be available that date worldwide. Online ordering of print copies through UC Press is available for US and Canada.

cindyanguyen.com

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Maggie Jack @slouching.bsky.social · Jun 23

Alex Lu, Priyank Chandra, Adrian Petterson and I are hosting a workshop at Aarhus Critical Computing on 18 Aug: Reimagining Social Media and Social Movements in Crisis: A Workshop on Empirics, Theory and Research Guidance. Please join us!

sites.google.com/view/aarhus2...

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · Jun 19

This was inspiring, a talk that drew people from computer science, digital humanities, data studies, and more! @whkchun.bsky.social discussed language models as "deconstruction machines", myths of Echo and Narcissus, mirrors, opacity, "humanities washing", indigenous protocols... such a rich talk!

Pioneer Centre for AI @aicentre.dk · Jun 19

Today, we had the pleasure of hosting a guest talk on LLMs and the Returns of Critical Theory, by Dr. Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute.

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Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>> @caitcoker.bsky.social · Jun 18

Signalboosting this CFP!

Call for Contributors: Routledge Companion to Book Studies

Call for ContributorsThe Routledge Companion to Book StudiesEdited by Michael Durrant and Cynthia Johnston Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

ies.sas.ac.uk

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Micah Bateman @micahbateman.bsky.social · Jun 12

Excited to attempt to fill the big shoes left by @plach.bsky.social and Claudia Berger as co-chair of the DH in Libraries SIG for @ach.bsky.social alongside Jessica Brode Frank. You do not have to be an ACH member to participate in the group; communications signup is here

Stay in touch with DH in Libraries (an ACH SIG)

This special interest group is exploring what people at the intersection of DH and libraries need and want. We envision coordinating with other folks who are asking the same questions in order to cont...

docs.google.com

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · Jun 5

Have you ever done a "hidden curriculum" session with undergrads? (That is, explaining all the things colleges assume you know but are not obvious to many people.) What did they find most helpful?

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Zachary K Stine @zacharykstine.bsky.social · Jun 11

Here's a link to the poster (actually slides). #ach2025

Our argument is that models instantiate interpretive lenses through which we view collections of text. Model evaluation often looks like a way of justifying one interpretive lens as better than others.

github.com/zacharykstin...

...

github.com

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Jun 11

Cool reflection on the interpretive circularity of models & texts.

We tend to imagine that models tell us about the relations between texts, and differ only by accuracy.

But you can also turn this around and use texts to explore the relations between different models / interpretive approaches.

Alt-text:
A slide titled “5 Computational hermeneutics” showing a five-step schematic for comparing how different modeling choices structure meaning. On the right is a numbered list:

Initial representation R

Varying modeling decisions θ₁, θ₂, θ₃

Structuring of signifiers S according to each θ and a difference measure d

Structural difference measure δ

Structuring of modeling decisions relative to S as represented by R

On the left is a drawing of those steps in action:

At step (1), an abstract symbol “R” stands for the starting representation.

At step (2), three funnel-shaped pipelines labeled θᵢ, θⱼ, θₖ branch off from R.

At step (3), each pipeline emits a little triangle of points (s₁, s₂, s₃) arranged differently to show how each θ induces a different structure on signifiers S.

At step (4), arrows from the three point-triangles converge on a central “δ” symbol, indicating computation of pairwise structural differences.

At step (5), the δ measure points back to a small triangle connecting θᵢ, θⱼ, θₖ, showing that difference information is used to re-structure or interpret the modeling decisions themselves.

Below the diagram are two summary sentences:

“The goal of the framework is to enable comparative analyses between the externalized interpretive structures encoded by different models.”
“Need to understand the structural relationships between models by identifying regularities and disparities between how they structure various systems of signifiers.”

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Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Jun 4

My course proposal for Cultural Analytics @berkeleyischool.bsky.social has been approved for Fall 2025! This is the fullest expression of my vision for CA: a radical interdisciplinary experiment for rethinking knowledge production at the intersection of the humanities and machine learning. (1/9)

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pam lach @plach.bsky.social · Jun 6

Join us next week for #ACH2025, a fully virtual conference that centers care for our #DigitalHumanities community. It will be inspiring and energizing 🤩

ACH @ach.bsky.social · Jun 4

Registration is OPEN for ACH 2025! Join us online June 11–13 for keynotes from Rahul Bhargava (Community Data), Lynda Kellam (Data Rescue Project), and Hannah Alpert-Abrams + guests reflecting on NEH + the future of DH.

Full program coming soon. Register: buff.ly/D8LRJ8I
Details: buff.ly/RO9Moem

ACH 2025 – ACH Membership

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) will hold ACH 2025, a virtual conference, from June 11-13, 2025.

buff.ly

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