Tom
@twilliams81.bsky.social
PhD candidate at UVa doing fun things with novels and computers. Biographer of Raymond Chandler. Occasional critic.
Thank you for coming!
So many people at this in @scholarslab.bsky.social that I'm sitting on the ground 😂 Work-in-progress event for new joint IATH+SLab/DH Center+DAC fellowship, which supports faculty+grad student team working w/us+Data Analytics Ctr. Meant to show humanities research uses for high-performance computing
UVA people, please join us tomorrow at 11am in The Scholar’s Lab where I’ll be talking with Professor Adrienne Ghaly about our use of LLM’s to look for biodiversity in nineteenth century prose fiction. There’s lunch and we’re looking for feedback on our work.
November 18, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Thank you for coming!
UVA people, please join us tomorrow at 11am in The Scholar’s Lab where I’ll be talking with Professor Adrienne Ghaly about our use of LLM’s to look for biodiversity in nineteenth century prose fiction. There’s lunch and we’re looking for feedback on our work.
November 17, 2025 at 5:59 PM
UVA people, please join us tomorrow at 11am in The Scholar’s Lab where I’ll be talking with Professor Adrienne Ghaly about our use of LLM’s to look for biodiversity in nineteenth century prose fiction. There’s lunch and we’re looking for feedback on our work.
Reposted by Tom
she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October
November 13, 2025 at 8:08 AM
she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October
A preview of a slide from Saturday’s #NAVSA2025 talk on Maria Edgeworth. I built a network of adverts featuring Edgeworth and Austen where the edges are other titles and authors. This graph shows the size of the nodes and visualises Edgeworth’s declining prestige in adverts across 19th century
November 12, 2025 at 4:02 PM
A preview of a slide from Saturday’s #NAVSA2025 talk on Maria Edgeworth. I built a network of adverts featuring Edgeworth and Austen where the edges are other titles and authors. This graph shows the size of the nodes and visualises Edgeworth’s declining prestige in adverts across 19th century
Very much looking forward to talking about Maria Edgeworth’s reception in the second half in 19th C in Saturday at #NAVSA2025
Excited to announce "Histories of Reception" with papers by Tom Williams, Tom Gunther, Lucy Whitehead, & Mark Knight at #NAVSA2025
November 12, 2025 at 1:41 AM
Very much looking forward to talking about Maria Edgeworth’s reception in the second half in 19th C in Saturday at #NAVSA2025
Reposted by Tom
@twilliams81.bsky.social reviews Elly McCausland’s “Swifterature”: "McCausland the fan is balanced against McCausland the scholar, though at times the scholar is forced to take charge." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-me-hi-im-the-problem/
November 9, 2025 at 5:01 PM
@twilliams81.bsky.social reviews Elly McCausland’s “Swifterature”: "McCausland the fan is balanced against McCausland the scholar, though at times the scholar is forced to take charge." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-me-hi-im-the-problem/
My review of Swifterature: A Love Story came out today in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social It was fun to work on and I now know all the lyrics to The Life of Ophelia because of it.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...
lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...
It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books
Tom Williams explores the folklore surrounding a pop star’s reputation in Elly McCausland’s “Swifterature: A Love Story.”
lareviewofbooks.org
November 9, 2025 at 2:16 PM
My review of Swifterature: A Love Story came out today in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social It was fun to work on and I now know all the lyrics to The Life of Ophelia because of it.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...
lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...
Looking forward to talking at the DH Center at UVA on 11/18 about a project I’m working on with Prof Adrienne Ghaly. Can AI help us understand how biodiversity is represented in 19th century fiction?If you’re in Charlottesville and would like to know more, please come along.
November 7, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Looking forward to talking at the DH Center at UVA on 11/18 about a project I’m working on with Prof Adrienne Ghaly. Can AI help us understand how biodiversity is represented in 19th century fiction?If you’re in Charlottesville and would like to know more, please come along.
There is nothing more heckle-raising than reading AI assisted essays but, as frustrating as it is, is there not a case for using agentic AI to turn archives like The Publisher’s Circular into a database? It would need supervision of course and compute costs might be high but would it be useful?
October 30, 2025 at 4:09 PM
There is nothing more heckle-raising than reading AI assisted essays but, as frustrating as it is, is there not a case for using agentic AI to turn archives like The Publisher’s Circular into a database? It would need supervision of course and compute costs might be high but would it be useful?
Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.
October 30, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Tom
DEAR GRAD STUDENTS,
This March @post45data.bsky.social will be holding a free, online mini-workshop for grads working in the fields of contemporary literature and culture.
More info / abstract submission here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
1/4
This March @post45data.bsky.social will be holding a free, online mini-workshop for grads working in the fields of contemporary literature and culture.
More info / abstract submission here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
1/4
CFP: The Data of Post45 Literature and Culture (Online Graduate Workshop)
How has encroaching climate disaster impacted how the future is imagined in science fiction novels? What can a century of NYT bestsellers lists tell us about trends in mainstream publishing? And how c...
docs.google.com
October 27, 2025 at 3:57 PM
DEAR GRAD STUDENTS,
This March @post45data.bsky.social will be holding a free, online mini-workshop for grads working in the fields of contemporary literature and culture.
More info / abstract submission here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
1/4
This March @post45data.bsky.social will be holding a free, online mini-workshop for grads working in the fields of contemporary literature and culture.
More info / abstract submission here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
1/4
Deliver Me on Netflix is extraordinary tv. It’s a Swedish version of s04 of The Wire and is 💔
October 23, 2025 at 1:49 AM
Deliver Me on Netflix is extraordinary tv. It’s a Swedish version of s04 of The Wire and is 💔
If you ever wondered what the NG are doing in DC…
October 22, 2025 at 12:16 PM
If you ever wondered what the NG are doing in DC…
Looks like UVa has rejected the compact
October 17, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Looks like UVa has rejected the compact
Nervously running a script written with codex on ~17k 19th century adverts. Missing the comfort of Jupyter notebooks and tqdm.
October 17, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Nervously running a script written with codex on ~17k 19th century adverts. Missing the comfort of Jupyter notebooks and tqdm.
Some fun with Sora. It’s all a bit BBC drama but kind of amazing all the same
October 16, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Some fun with Sora. It’s all a bit BBC drama but kind of amazing all the same