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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Chantal @chantalsh.bsky.social · 14d

"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"?

In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text!

arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163

🧵 (1/7)

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Hoyt Long @hoytlong.bsky.social · 4h

In case you missed it, this "Doing AI Differently" funding call should be of interest to humanities scholars with technical experience, computer scientists with humanities grounding, or anyone whose work spans both domains. Take a look and please consider applying! www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

Expressions of interest: artificial intelligence humanities sandpits: Canada, UK and US

AHRC and SSHRC invite expressions of interest to attend a humanities-led, interdisciplinary research sandpit looking to put humanities insights and methodologies at the heart of artificial intelligenc...

www.ukri.org

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Christian Ilbury @christianilbury.bsky.social · 3h

Theme: Queer (dis)belonging
CfP: 5 January 2026
Website: lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk (to be updated as more info becomes available)

PLEASE SHARE WIDELYYYYY 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🎉

LavLang32 - Lavender Languages 32

2-4 September 2026: Queer (dis)belonging

lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4h

Especially if in keeping the root word, “digital“, -al‘s ending requires an extra clump of vowels to move us to the next hard consonant sound comfortably

Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4h

Yeah! So I’m wondering if in order to make it feel “more right” there’s an extra syllable added in (unlike social > socials, which extends a rule in ways native speakers don’t always do)

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4h

Between you and @triplingual.bsky.social I’m now wondering if it is a syllabification challenge from 1st language to 2nd language

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4h

And I’m noticing that (2) is getting used for (1), an interesting conflation

Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4h

This made me laugh!

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 19h

I very rarely have direct contact on newsroom projects anymore, but this is cool because I did work with folks to help with the original collection protocol to make sure this information was handled and stored privately and wouldn't leave us with a re-identifiable dataset.

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 19h

How does TikTok keep its millions of users scrolling, swiping and staring at their phones?

With readers' help, we collected data from more than 1,000 TikTok users to find out: https://wapo.st/4nC6Nyr

How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day

Washington Post reporters analyzed data from over 800 TikTok users to learn how the app turns people into power users, some of whom spend hours per day scrolling.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 19h

ambient observation: digitization vs digitalization? I have heard more of the second (digitalization) from our younger students, and also from L2 speakers

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 1d

(Should I blog this? Is blogging now massively passe? My excel workshop gets/got so much traction that way...)

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 1d

We talked about how I made this workshop on Thursday; today (Tuesday) at 2pm in the University of Arizona Main Library Data Studio we're doing it live & in person! my slides are here if you want to have a look www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/pwo8s..., huge hat tip to @mellymeldubs.bsky.social

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 1d

love this description, haha. When someone proposed this idea to me in the first place my brain went, oooh what a great idea. still need a person on the other end to assess! super useful, like machine translation.

Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 1d

using genai to produce alt text on images! Doesn’t work for all images ever, of course, but how do you describe a raccoon to someone who has never seen one?

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 1d

I teach about microfiche/film in history classes around primary/secondary source research and in the the history of Early English Books Online and the LOOKS the students give me
It's how we invented scrolling on our phones!

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 1d

I have been trying to explain a microfiche machine to one of my dear, brilliant, talented, but clearly too young to be alive collaborators. And it is taking the last of my soul.

“Micro…fish?? I have never heard that word in my life.” I recorded the timestamp so it can be put on my tombstone.

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Amy Zhang @axz.bsky.social · Dec 3

In collab w/ Semantic Scholar, we conducted a large scale (800+) survey of researcher usage and perceptions of LLMs for science.

Major findings:
+Most are using LLMs already, mostly for writing
+LLMs seem to be a win for research equity
+But some groups, like women, have more ethical concerns too

Simona Liao @simonaliao.bsky.social · Dec 2

Hi everyone, I am excited to share our large-scale survey study with 800+ researchers, which reveals researchers’ usage and perceptions of LLMs as research tools, and how the usage and perceptions differ based on demographics.

See results in comments!

🔗 Arxiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.05025

LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led many researchers to consider their usage for scientific work. Some have found benefits using LLMs to augment or automate aspects of their research pipe...

arxiv.org

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 2d

I really enjoyed this article - I have never felt fully up to par on open access vocab/terminology and I know that if *I* can't quite figure it out then the researchers 100% do not get it

Open Access Tracking Project @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 4d

When Focusing on Terminology Becomes a Hurdle to Open Access Outreach | Katina Magazine https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2025/focusing-on-terminology-hurdle-open-access-outreach

When Focusing on Terminology Becomes a Hurdle to Open Access Outreach

Conversations about open access can be riddled with distracting language. But what if we treated these failures to communicate as opportunities to learn more?

katinamagazine.org

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Bergis Jules 🇱🇨 @bergisjules.bsky.social · 2d

Applications open soon for the second Web Archiving School co-hort. Our fellowship aims to create a new generation of web archiving practitioners dedicated to documenting the Black experience. Sign up today to receive reminders and updates on the application: bit.ly/warc-2026-si...

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 3d

“I wonder if the lack of luxury in their design is almost an effort to excuse the carrier from consumer culture. Tote bags work within the subconscious assumption that they are outside of trends —never bought but rather received“ articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/trader-joe...

Trader Joe's Totes

The It Bag of 2025

articlesofinterest.substack.com

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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 4d

The Lies Characters Tell: Utilizing Large Language Models to Normalize Adversarial Unicode Perturbations
(Unicode characters that are visually homogeneous to Latin letters, are widely used to mask offensive content- uses LLMs to decide what should be in their place) aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

aclanthology.org

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Jeff Lockhart @jwlockhart.bsky.social · 5d

I'm excited to share my new paper with a former student, Tommy Smith. "'This Work Would Not Have Been Possible without...': The Length of Acknowledgments in Sociology Books"

Open Access in @sociusjournal.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1177/2378...

Main figure from the paper. Violin plots showing the length of acknowledgments sections in books by sociologists, broken out by gender, race, sexuality, parents’ education, millennium of author’s PhD, and publisher type.

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 5d

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

“Cartography of Generative AI (2024)” shows a sprawling, diagrammatic ecosystem of how generative AI is produced and maintained. The background is light pink with turquoise and yellow highlights. The left side has a turquoise vertical sidebar with labeled sections such as AI imaginaries, Critical expertise, Data sciences, Silicon Valley, and AI harms.

The main diagram maps the flow of generative AI development from top to bottom:

Top left: A globe icon with arrows represents global energy consumption, linked to servers and calculation power (chips, GPUs, and companies like TSMC).

Top center: Rows of red server racks show data centers, connected to big data platforms and pipelines of training data (shown as orange blocks).

Top right: Yellow stacks and schematic diagrams depict the supply chain of raw materials (e.g., cobalt, lithium) and scenes of mining.

Upper right corner: A vignette labeled digital colonialism shows resource extraction sites and cables crossing oceans.

Middle section:

Blue isometric office-like spaces labeled AI start-ups and Silicon Valley venture capital, with tiny illustrated workers at desks, computers, and whiteboards.

Orange and yellow arrows and blocks represent the movement of datasets, training, and alignment processes.

A section labeled human labour shows rows of workers annotating data.

Lower section:

Gridded platforms in orange and yellow depict data extraction from the internet—social media, images, sound, text—and web scraping from sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube.

Groups of small figures interact with large wireframe cube models labeled generative AI engines.

Other vignettes show AI products (like chatbots), digital gig work, and consumer use.

Far right:

Layers of stacked chips show advanced chip production and global supply chains.

A blue network node diagram illustrates the infrastructure economy behind AI technologies.

Boxes at the bottom describe research and governance structures.

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 5d

My friend @rorshock.bsky.social — CS undergrad, humanities PhD — has built a brilliant prgm @ The New School: “Code as a Liberal Art” nurtures “code + computational thinking as tools for critical + creative inquiry,” and as forces for 👍+👎 social change. His spring Software Engineering class looks 🌟

Software Engineering Applications

Software Engineering Applications Spring 2026 Code as a Liberal Art, Eugene Lang College, The New School This course gives students the opportunity to experience and critically examine the software e...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Zachary Lesser @zacharylesser.bsky.social · 5d

Kofta kebab recipe in England c. 1660. Amazing find!

Danielle Clarke @rhetorician.bsky.social · 5d

Would anyone like to take a guess at the word before “kebob”? Which predates OED - ms is 1660

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Reposted by Heather Froehlich

Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 5d

New @hf.co BigLAM dataset: 9,363 OA books with page images + rich MARC metadata for evaluating (and training) VLMs on metadata extraction.

Libraries are starting to explore AI-assisted cataloguing, but we lack public evaluation data. Hoping this helps fill that gap.

huggingface.co/datasets/big...

Screenshot of the dataset viewer showing a column of marc data + the first few pages of an open access monograph

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