David Bamman

Assistant Professor - Open Field - Sociology University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Berkeley Sociology is hiring faculty! Sept 1 application deadline. Two positions: (1) open area junior search. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05013, (2) associate or full professor in Anti-Black Racism and Social Inclusion aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05012 Please help spread the word!

A poster for "Culture is not Trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" which takes the form of a flow-chart. The central question, and the starting point of the flow chart, is "What is culture in cultural NLP?" An arrow is labeled "wait, so what's cultural NLP?" This leads to a block explaining that the goals of cultural NLP are described in section 2 of the paper. They include inclusivity, depth, discerning, and adaptiveness. That leads to an arrow that says "that sounds great!". But there are recurring challenges in this kind of work! Section 3 surveys some of these: a discomfort around the proxies being chosen, a lack of coverage, and a lack of dynamicity. That in turn leads to an arrow labeled "Hm, sounds like we need to figure out..." and it leads back to the main question: "What is culture in cultural NLP?" A final arrow extends below this block: "Well, who's to say, really?" This points to sociocultural linguistics. Section 4 explores how other disciplines, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis have faced similar challenges in the past. Section 4.2 gives an overview of sociocultural linguistics, which is a set of principles tying together some convergent themes: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness. One arrow extends from this asking, "what's that have to do with cultural NLP?" Section 5 gives a case study of how indexicality clarifies how to think about stereotypies in the context of mining cultual knowledge from the web. Another arrow says "How can I build safe NLP systems?" Section 6.2 explores how localization can serve as a useful model from building culturally aware technologies because it forces developers to define culture explicitly and tractably. Finally, an arrow asks "how can I study culture with NLP methods?" Section 6.1 lays out theoretically motivated directions for future empirical and theoretical work in computationally modeling culture.

I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards!

(thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!)

aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

One of the fun parts of policy work is that you have a handful of extremely important, esoteric, but load-bearing legal concepts (like fair use) that only ever make it into public consciousness when they're being targeted for destruction, and public opinion about them is entirely outcome-dependent.

Creative people and people of good will who are allies and advocates for creativity need to come to grips with the fact that AI training is generally fair use for the same deep reasons that critique, parody, teaching, scholarship, and other daily creative practices are fair use.

Go to WI and work with Lucy! And stay for the farmer's market, memorial union, orpheum, willy st coop, chocolate shoppe, american players theater, and the million other things that make Madison an amazing place to live. PhD app deadline in December.

Congrats David!

I’m a week late with my #thanksbrett but just want to add my appreciation too — in thinking of all the careers that ODH has given space to and supported (including my own), words can’t suffice. @brettbobley.bsky.social maybe at least it’s now permitted to let us buy you a beer.

And the Städel museum in Frankfurt is a new favorite

Thank you all for being such kind hosts! @evelyngius.bsky.social @jberenike.bsky.social @fotisjannidis.bsky.social @sobchuk.bsky.social

Flying back today from a circuit of some (not all!) of the great DH centers in Germany (Darmstadt, Bielefeld, Leipzig and Würzburg). Such great energy and amazing people moving the field forward at each one. I'm bringing back lots of ideas.

My course proposal for Cultural Analytics @berkeleyischool.bsky.social has been approved for Fall 2025! This is the fullest expression of my vision for CA: a radical interdisciplinary experiment for rethinking knowledge production at the intersection of the humanities and machine learning. (1/9)

Our class was so much the better with you a part of it, thanks for all of your amazing work! Congrats on the award and have fun at DAIR!!

That was a nailbiter! (Rooting for okc now that our warriors are out)

Wisconsin-Madison's tree-filled campus, next to a big shiny lake

A computer render of the interior of the new computer science, information science, and statistics building. A staircase crosses an open atrium with visibility across multiple floors

I'm joining Wisconsin CS as an assistant professor in fall 2026!! There, I'll continue working on language models, computational social science, & responsible AI. 🌲🧀🚣🏻‍♀️ Apply to be my PhD student!

Before then, I'll postdoc for a year in the NLP group at another UW 🏔️ in the Pacific Northwest

📚 Check out the newest JCA article by Li Lucy (@lucy3.bsky.social), Camilla Griffiths, Claire Ying, JJ Kim-Ebio, Sabrina Baur, Sarah Levine, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, David Bamman (@dbamman.bsky.social), and Dorottya Demszky. culturalanalytics.org/article/1316...

At Perseus, the vast majority of hits have always been from non .edu addresses. NEH means the Greek and Roman world is available to everyone, not just academics.

Among these is one working with me -- if you have a background in literary/cultural theory and are interested in the ways in which computational methods, including LLMs, are able to provide support for empirical sensemaking about literature, media and culture, please get in touch!

We'll hire for some subset of those areas (Obviously there may be uncertainty with the UC hiring freeze but the search is going forward as planned until we know otherwise.)

Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar - School of Information University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

We just launched an open search for postdocs at the @berkeleyischool.bsky.social in a bunch of areas (social informatics, climate informatics, communications, econ, behavioral science, literary theory, algorithmic justice), all mentored by different faculty: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04845

The people at the NEH are among the most knowledgeable and professional public servants I know. They operate with a shoestring budget already. Just let them be.

If you're an international student at UC (or beyond), know your rights: www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sites/defaul...

It's been delayed a little, but here — at last — is the CFP for Schmidt Sciences' Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, to support research "at the intersection of AI and the humanities." Expressions of interest are due April 4th. Pls RT! www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

Not sure if I can imagine a bigger driver for protest turnout out than being commanded not to protest — happening in dozens of cities nationwide this friday! standupforscience2025.org

Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research This paper presents a set of provocations for considering the uses, impact, and harms of generative AI from the perspective of humanities researchers. We provide a working definition of humanities res...

arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190

we're still tinkering, but couldn't wait to share.

Postdoc opportunity at the School of Information Sciences, Urbana-Champaign. Teaching one course a semester. Application deadline April 1, but they recommend conversation with potential faculty mentors in advance of that date. Renewable for a second year. Pls RT! ischool.illinois.edu/research/pos...

Culture is not trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP. By Naitian Zhou and David Bamman from the Berkeley School of Information and Isaac L. Bleaman from Berkeley Linguistics.

There's been a lot of work on "culture" in NLP, but not much agreement on what it is.

A position paper by me, @dbamman.bsky.social, and @ibleaman.bsky.social on cultural NLP: what we want, what we have, and how sociocultural linguistics can clarify things.

Website: naitian.org/culture-not-...

1/n

Study Finds Persistent Spike in Hate Speech on X A new analysis by UC Berkeley School of Information Ph.D. student Dan Hickey has found that weekly rates of hate speech on the social media platform X rose about 50% in the months after its purchase i...

A new study by Ph.D. student @dan-hickey.bsky.social found that weekly rates of hate speech on X rose about 50% in the months after its purchase. 🔍

“We need to know when we’re getting content moderation right and when we’re getting it wrong," he said.

More:
www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2025/st...

Yes I'm not even sure how such a retrieval system would be considered "AI" (or how AI is central to the complaint -- rather than just the issue of displaying content that is infringing)

Yes I ask bc a quick read of the judgment gives search engine vibes to me (e.g. ask a question, retrieve the most relevant bulk memo), which seems to make the issue of "training" irrelevant -- an untrained system that just retrieves a bulk memo at random would also be infringing.