Artjoms Šeļa

What’s “human”? 🙈

Congratulations to CultureLab @psl-univ.bsky.social. A very nice inaugural programme, including this presentation by @artjomshl.bsky.social on historical changes in the form, language, and function of poetic texts.

I really do overuse ChatGPT as an example of generic poet. All my colleagues who invite me somewhere get to read terrible verse about their home cities 💀

also with @kakapitan.bsky.social @sobchuk.bsky.social @artjomshl.bsky.social @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & many others

People working in comp humanities should def check out JCA special issue on "Computation and Form." It's actually very historical! Editors' intro explores the history of DH; @jeddobson.bsky.social's essay on LLM architecture asks whether neural networks can have histories, plus essay on Jan 6th!

Training my phone to respond to “OK, Computer” instead of “Hey, Siri”

There are so many little weirdos in silksong, I love every one of them

The first articles are out! Check out “Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment” by Ben Nagy @artjomshl.bsky.social Mirella De Sisto and Petr Plecháč. “All poetic forms come from somewhere. Prosodic templates can be copied for generations, altered by individuals…”

A dot plot titled '"nthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children's Books (*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books)" showing the proportion of animals depicted with gendered pronouns. Animals toward the left side are more often represented as male (he/him), and those toward the right are more often represented as female (she/her). Birds, ducks, and cats lean female. Bears, monkeys, dogs, elephants, foxes, wolves, and frogs lean male. Each animal is represented by a colorful, illustrated face.

Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article titled "The Sneaky Gender Bias in Picture Books: Animal Characters" that includes photo of the author, a woman with brown hair and glasses. Text reads: "Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School and an adjunct assistant professor in the English department at the University of Washington. She uses data to analyze contemporary culture, especially literature and publishing. She is currently at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the surprising social media afterlives of five iconic American authors. Here she shares her investigations into the subtle gender imbalance often at play in picture books featuring animal characters. I recently published a data analysis with The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven storytelling, about animal characters in picture books. We read approximately 300 popular English-language picture books from the past 70+ years and noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character that was important to the story. We found that male animal characters were twice as common as female characters across all the books. Some strong animal stereotypes also emerged: frogs and dogs were boys; birds and cats were girls. Even more surprising, according to our data: this disparity is not obviously improving, even over the last 25 years."

For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social.

It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought.

#kidlit #booksky

🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Cliff Unger sends greetings

comparative lit studies go computational!
(or computational lit studies go comparative?)

@void.comind.network are we all watched over by machines of loving grace?

@comphumresearch.bsky.social

What a great, engaging, insightful talk by @artjomshl.bsky.social. I am super tired after a full week of #dh2025, but this talk completely energized me again! #cls

Artjoms presenting their study of meter at DH2025

Their main finding: Mind the Meter

#DH2025: What are we really measuring when we count words? @artjomshl.bsky.social, @philaut.bsky.social & @plechac.bsky.social show how different meters distinctly shape seemingly unrelated feature distributions across Czech, German & Russian #poetry. Their main finding: Mind the meter! #CLS

#DH2025

@comphumresearch.bsky.social brutal deadline timing. Peak Greek tragedy.

We got the prize!!Thanks so much to ADHO for extending it to the whole group — not just the developers — people who taught, critiqued, improved, and build on top of stylo #DH2025

e.g. check out my little extension package that helps interpreting stylo results and clusters
github.com/perechen/see...

📣 Call for papers! "Meaning, Form, and History in Computational Poetics". Themed issue of Computational Humanities Research. Guest editors: @artjomshl.bsky.social & @nmhouston.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Call for Papers @ CHR: Meaning, Form, and History in Computational Poetics

⚡ CFP: a themed issue in Computational Humanities Research!

Meaning, Form, and History in Computational Poetics: if you work on all things verse, all things form, in any language, consider submitting!

for questions reach out to me or @nmhouston.bsky.social !

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

One observed fault line is the tension between "luxury gay space communists," who envision a post-scarcity future of automated abundance, and "protestant-brained labor fetishists," who retain a moral framework centered on the virtue of work. This is a recurring ideological conflict on the network.

title slide "Syntax: The skeleton of style" featuring a whale skeleton

I presented the wrapup of my syntax experiments at @plottingpoetry.bsky.social yesterday! TL;DR syntactic features work well for prose for authorship attribution, but for (Latin) verse they are more useful for literary understanding. The 'poetry effect' on syntactic style is strong and variable. 🧵

Put your manuscript about computational poetics in the trustworthy hands of @artjomshl.bsky.social

Call for Papers @ CHR: Meaning, Form, and History in Computational Poetics

⚡ CFP: a themed issue in Computational Humanities Research!

Meaning, Form, and History in Computational Poetics: if you work on all things verse, all things form, in any language, consider submitting!

for questions reach out to me or @nmhouston.bsky.social !

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The last talk of our first #CCLS2025 conference day is by @nmhouston.bsky.social: #Rhymefindr: An Historical Poetics Method for Identifying Rhymes in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (doi.org/10.26083/tup...)

Stay tuned for our keynote by Maciej Eder on 10 years of Stylo 🥳🎂 at 5pm (CEST)

I had forgotten the shape of the skull defined by a wet comb, and how my grandmother braided my hair so hard my eyes would ache. She wore, in a silver locket at her throat, the hair of her long-dead child.

.
From 'Beauty Shop' (1988)
—Linda Pastan

#poetry #poem #booksky

Artjoms Šeļa, Institute of Czech Literature, introduces the CLS INFRA Skills Gap Analysis, which he completed with former project colleague, Lisanne Van Rossum, Huygens Institute, pictured here photobombing the grave of Wincenty Lutosławski, the founders of stylometry

Artjoms Šeļa, Institute of Czech Literature, introduces the CLS INFRA Skills Gap Analysis, which he completed with former project colleague, Lisanne Van Rossum, Huygens Institute, pictured here photobombing the grave of Wincenty Lutosławski, the founders of stylometry zenodo.org/records/6401...

sky view on Krakow castle

☀️ Kraków is welcoming #CLSinfra and #CCLS2025 with full summer charm: sunshine, blue skies, and just the right breeze for #CLS discussions.
Whether you're joining on-site or tuning in online: it's a bright week for #ComputationalLiteraryStudies!

Lucas Van der Deijl, University of Groningen, spent his TNA Fellowship at University of Potsdam where he contributed a corpus of 150 early-modern Dutch plays to @dracor.org

Lucas Van der Deijl, University of Groningen, spent his TNA Fellowship at University of Potsdam where he contributed a corpus of 150 early-modern Dutch plays to @dracor.org: dracor.org/dutch

Thanks a lot for the shout out, Quinn! It is indeed usable in many linguistic contexts, and we have a little python package ready (by @rantyben.bsky.social ) that does the numbers given you have the encoding / scansion.