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Kent K. Chang

@kentkchang.bsky.social

140 followers 64 following 35 posts

PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley. Natural language processing & cultural analytics.

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Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 30

To ensure wider reach: our Cultural Analytics class will meet in a larger classroom, 210 South Hall, on 9/2. (And no, pun not intended.)

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 28

It just hit me. I gave the first lecture of the class I designed from scratch today. And there were not enough seats in the classroom!

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

The most visceral moment for me this time was in “Looking for a Plot,” when Doris sees Malik in the hospital and, at last, allows herself to wallow and wail. Often we’ve found the answer before we even know it.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

“It works if it works, it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work”—so, probably not, as long as we think we’re still looking and feel like we’re getting closer with each step.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

"Looking" never answers any question, which is the beauty of the show. It makes you ask whether it’s even necessary to find an answer. Why do we need answers to, What’s loyalty? What’s love? or even What do I want? Is it really about the answer?

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

Which makes Lynn an interesting character: he’s found Brian, love of his life, and he’ll never have that again. Dom, younger than Lynn but older than the main trio, thinks he deserves more, even if it’s not him. To keep looking, or not? Is Lynn too cynical? Is Dom naive?

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

It’s so real because it can be summarized as a bunch of people trying to figure out what they want: sexually, professionally, emotionally, and so on. I suspect this is at the core of the titular pun.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

Desire, intimacy, identity—you can perform them (on and off screen), and they might ring true, but I'm increasingly inclined to accept the idea that they are impossible to represent. They’re ethico-epistemological: always discursive, contingent, and emergent.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

It’s so real because it’s not really about representation; if anything, it complicates it. Agustín says, “I’m gay, not queer,” and in the same scene applies for a job caring for homeless trans kids. Brady seems to support sexual freedom but upholds rigid “community values.”

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

It’s so real that I feel obligated to suspend the critic’s vocabulary, except when warranted: my favorite episode is still “Looking for a Plot” (season 2, episode 7), proof that if you have strong, fleshed-out characters, you don’t need a plot.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

The wine tasting, the many permits, the Central Valley, the Bay Bridge—though perhaps not the drug ones—and I recognized many places featured in the show. While it’s obviously fictional and dramatized, it felt even more real than a documentary.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

I probably started the series just to see if Tony Kushner was right (“Heaven Is a City Much Like San Francisco”). This time around it hit so differently. Now also a Bear (as in Golden Bear, if clarification is needed) living in the Bay, I immediately got most of the references.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Aug 17

Watched Michael Lannan and Andrew Haigh’s Looking again over a couple of weekends. The first time I watched it I was contemplating whether to go to Berkeley for grad school, and indeed I took that t-shirt Jonathan Groff wore in episode 2 (with the Cal logo on it) as a sign.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Jun 26

Great read! "The limits of Interdisciplinarity" resonated with me the most. AI has the potential to make the articulation of critical sensibility more concrete and robust, but there are troubling trends, both in academia and politics, that do make me wonder if this conversation can be sustained.

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Jun 25

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky

rdcu.be/etk07

The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa

Nature Computational Science - Many humanists are skeptical of language models and concerned about their effects on universities. However, researchers with a background in the humanities are also...

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Jun 26

And of course, I can’t get enough of PB&J. I smile when Pam smiles. That “most expensive scene” defines tears of joy for me. I envy those who have yet to experience it for the first time. I can't imagine I almost missed this gem (didn't like the first few episodes several years ago, like with BBT)!

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Jun 26

Oscar is provocatively normal and quietly subversive, except in memorable moments like, “Besides having sex with men, I would say the Finer Things Club is the gayest thing about me,” which echoes with a precision both comedic and, indeed, queerly profound.

Kent K. Chang @kentkchang.bsky.social · Jun 26

Recently, though rather belatedly, I decided to give The Office another go, after seeing the great John Krasinski in Angry Alan off-Broadway. Five seasons in I know that I shall remain, in spirit at least, a lifelong resident of Scranton, PA (Stars Hollow, CT is probably just a short drive away).

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

That, to me, is the ultimate question cultural analytics must confront, interrogate, and answer for itself. The course site is now live: ca.kentkc.org. Note to prospective students: the syllabus may adapt to meet your needs—feel free to reach out! (9/9)

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

We wrestle with various epistemological tensions: between judgment and generalization, interpretation and representation, and so forth. What forms of validity remain and emerge when modernity is shaped by and shaping the positive force of empiricism and the negative movement of theory? (8/9)

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

We take up an old question with new tools—and, we hope, new connections: what does it mean to mean and represent? Cultural artifacts offer approximations of human experience and possibility; machine learning gives us ways to characterize such phenomena—at scale, or on a different plane. (7/9)

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

In Act III, we ask what scale affords: we move from individual texts to institutional structures and discuss how interpretation and knowledge is not simply accumulated but shaped, by labor, ideology—power, against the backdrop of the scaling laws that launched the LLM era. 6/9)

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

In Act II, we trace how meaning emerges not from marks on a page, but from entangled pathways through learned, latent spaces—across modalities, over time, as logic and sense scatter and settle across layers of neural networks, tokens, and video frames. (5/9)

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

We begin, paradoxically, with ends—a series of “deaths”—not as closure, but openings. We explore how interpretation becomes a problem of representation learning: how to operationalize what matters, estimate a construct from data, and treat sense as that which is mediated through modeling. (4/9)

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

The course is structured in three acts, each organized around a conceptual tension (a dramatic conflict, if you will) that implicates both theory and modeling. (3/9)

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

The course expands the argument I make toward the end of my "Queer Gap" in CA essay: that students working in cultural analytics must know not just how to apply tools, but how to modify, invert, or reinvent them in pursuit of questions that matter—matters of concern, in every sense. (2/9)