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Ben Lee

@bcgl.bsky.social

Assistant Professor @ the University of Washington iSchool | formerly an Innovator in Residence @ Library of Congress | essays in WIRED, Gawker, The New Republic, Current Affairs, etc. 🌐 www.bcglee.com

1,905 Followers  |  794 Following  |  58 Posts  |  Joined: 01.09.2023  |  2.5219

Latest posts by bcgl.bsky.social on Bluesky

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Uncanny Testimony - Longreads As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

Assistant Professor Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social's essay on the topic of AI and Holocaust Memory, β€œUncanny Testimony,” was published by @longreads.com: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

16.10.2025 22:49 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much, I appreciate it!

11.10.2025 21:37 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much for your kind words - I really appreciate them, and I'm glad that the piece resonated with you! And thank you for your work, too, in having volunteered as a docent and being the family archivist!

11.10.2025 21:37 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much, Scott - very kind of you to say!

01.10.2025 01:49 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Uncanny Testimony - Longreads As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

β€œFor all its futuristic appeal, I felt myself turning to the past. I yearned to speak with my grandmother about her life.”

A scholar at the intersection of AI and Holocaust memory wrestles with technology that speaks with the dead.

By @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

26.09.2025 19:16 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1
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Uncanny Testimony - Longreads As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

For @longreads.com, I wrote a personal essay about AI Holocaust testimony, my grandmother, memory, and memory loss

longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

25.09.2025 17:11 β€” πŸ‘ 14    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

I really appreciate your kind words, @dhutchinson.bsky.social!

29.09.2025 05:51 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Appreciated this thoughtful piece from @bcgl.bsky.social. Eloquently puts into words some of concerns about a particular use of AI that I've been grappling with.

27.09.2025 01:38 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much, @jenserventi.bsky.social - I truly appreciate it!

29.09.2025 05:50 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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β€œBut what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?”

The grandson of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor grapples with the use of AI to reanimate the dead.

A new essay on @longreads.com, by @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

25.09.2025 15:24 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 2

I’m incredibly grateful to @cherilucasrowlands.com for working with me on this piece and providing such thoughtful edits throughout the writing process!

25.09.2025 17:11 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Uncanny Testimony - Longreads As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

For @longreads.com, I wrote a personal essay about AI Holocaust testimony, my grandmother, memory, and memory loss

longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

25.09.2025 17:11 β€” πŸ‘ 14    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
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Survey on Serendipity and Information Seeking in Digital Collections Purpose of the Study We are seeking to understand the different methods of information seeking in digital collections. In addition, we would like to understand what the participants' perceptions of se...

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

12.09.2025 19:14 β€” πŸ‘ 19    πŸ” 15    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much! Yes, we're planning to publish on the survey - we're hoping it'll be useful to the community!

12.09.2025 20:02 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Survey on Serendipity and Information Seeking in Digital Collections Purpose of the Study We are seeking to understand the different methods of information seeking in digital collections. In addition, we would like to understand what the participants' perceptions of se...

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

12.09.2025 19:14 β€” πŸ‘ 19    πŸ” 15    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

Pls help spread the word: We are hiring! πŸŒ²β˜•βœ¨
@ischool.uw.edu is recruiting two tenure-track assistant profs in AI. Areas include human-AI collaboration, AI & society, comp social science, NLP, and AI applications.

Apply by Nov 15, 2025: apply.interfolio.com/171020

Happy to answer questions!

10.09.2025 17:21 β€” πŸ‘ 22    πŸ” 13    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News

CFP - AI for DH: Research Problems and Critical Approaches.

DHQ seeks 500-word abstracts for a special issue on AI (research problems, critical approaches, responsible applications, case studies, etc.).

Deadline: Sept 15, 2025.

More details: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

01.08.2025 21:56 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 11    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: News

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches
dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

09.09.2025 20:28 β€” πŸ‘ 21    πŸ” 10    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1

Thanks so much! Really appreciate it!

03.07.2025 00:30 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

By all means - that sounds amazing! Really appreciate the kind words and interest. I’d love to catch up sometime soon over zoom - I’ll send you an email to find a time if that sounds good!

02.07.2025 23:59 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Really appreciate it, Katie! And hope all is well with you!

02.07.2025 23:57 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much! Hope all is well with you!

02.07.2025 21:09 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

It was fantastic to collaborate with Ying-Hsiang on this project, who did such incredible work!

02.07.2025 20:56 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Search results for "tattered and worn map" showing that the results are accurate (most are tattered and worn).

Search results for "tattered and worn map" showing that the results are accurate (most are tattered and worn).

The public demo (digital-collections-explorer.com) enables searching over 500,000 map images from the Library of Congress's API. For example, search for "tattered and worn map"

02.07.2025 20:56 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
https://github.com/hinxcode/digital-collections-explorer

https://github.com/hinxcode/digital-collections-explorer

With our Digital Collections Explorer, a collection steward can spin up a local viewer with just a few lines of code. An overview of the Digital Collections Explorer architecture can be found in this overview figure.

The full codebase is available here: github.com/hinxcode/dig...

02.07.2025 20:56 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital col...

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961
Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

02.07.2025 20:56 β€” πŸ‘ 76    πŸ” 26    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 3

Thanks so much, Heather!

21.06.2025 19:32 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Very excited to have this article in Internet Histories with @tjowens.bsky.social and Jonah Estess! In the article, we study Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN Security Council and trace the PowerPoint through web archives

15.06.2025 20:24 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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AI and the Future of Holocaust Research & Memory: A Public Symposium Please mark your calendars for Tuesday, May 20, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., for a public symposium on AI and the Future of Holocaust Research &amp; Memory, to be held i...

The full day’s schedule can be found here: ischool.uw.edu/events/2025/...

20.05.2025 17:02 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Title slide for the public symposium β€œAI and the future of Holocaust research and memory,” hosted by the University of Washington.

Title slide for the public symposium β€œAI and the future of Holocaust research and memory,” hosted by the University of Washington.

Today, I’ll be sharing about the public symposium, β€œAI and the Future of Holocaust Research and Memory,” hosted at @ischool.uw.edu on Udub’s campus in Seattle. Wonderful to be here with such incredible colleagues across the world and across disciplines.

20.05.2025 17:01 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

@bcgl is following 20 prominent accounts