Miguel Escobar Varela

Benchmarks of LLM common sense overwhelmingly rely on correct labels to report an accuracy score. But what if your "ground truth" genuinely differs from mine?

In a new @pnasnexus.org paper, @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, @whiting.me and I explore the implications of this intriguing question.

🧵⤵️

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

Postdoc positions at UC Berkeley, including with the fabulous Cultural Analytics group: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05222

We're thrilled to be hosting Meredith Martin (@mmvty.bsky.social) in Singapore and honored to have her as the keynote speaker for the launch of CSSH!

After two years in operation, we'll officially launch the Centre for Computational Social Science & Humanities on 4 March! The day will feature a keynote by Prof. Meredith Martin (@mmvty.bsky.social) & the announcement of the Singapore History + AI Hackathon winners. cssh.nus.edu.sg/cssh-launch-...

Why Ghost References Still Haunt Us in 2025—And Why It's Not Just About LLMs Ghost references existed long before LLMs. This post examines how Google Scholar's [CITATION] mechanism and web pollution may undermine RAG verification.

[blogged] Why Ghost References Still Haunt Us in 2025—And Why It's Not Just About LLMs aarontay.substack.com/p/why-ghost-...

Computational Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, _Computational Humanities_ redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to n...

Syllabus time. Computational Humanities from Debates in DH series is OA! Co-eds with @dmimno.bsky.social Jessica Marie Johnson. Articles from @dbamman.bsky.social @kmcdono.bsky.social @roopikarisam.bsky.social @bschmidt.bsky.social @barbaramcgilli.bsky.social @quinnanya.me @tharsen.bsky.social 👇🏼

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now!
@elgarpublishing.bsky.social

Schmidt Sciences awards $11M in grants to bring AI to humanities research - Schmidt Sciences Contact: Carlie Wiener; cwiener@schmidtsciences.org NEW YORK—Schmidt Sciences has awarded $11 million for up to 23 teams of researchers around the world to develop and apply artificial intelligence to...

Big congrats to these 23 projects that just won awards from the @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program! Please spread the word. (NB I've been helping the HAVI team on this program. This is a broad slate of terrific DH projects!) www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2025-an...

Edited by Taylor Arnold, Margherita Fantoli, and Ruben Ros

Proceedings for the Computational Humanities Review conf #chr2025 happening now in Luxembourg (I am not at it and am sad): anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

Looking forward meeting with folks at #CHR2025 @comphumresearch.bsky.social

Learning more about the impressive newspaper research projects by @impresso.bsky.social #chr2025

Screenshot that reads: Introducing the Anthology for Computers and the Humanities Taylor Arnold, Maria Antoniak, Miguel Escobar Varela, Marie Puren, Mila Oiva , Amanda Regan, Lauren Tilton, and Melanie Walsh 1 Data Science and Statistics, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 2 Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.A. 3 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore 4 Laboratoire de Recherche de l'EPITA, Paris, France 5 History and Archaeology, University of Turku, Finland 6 History and Geography, Clemson University, U.S.A. 7 Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 8 Information School, University of Washington, U.S.A. Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.63744/HHsQG7hNWyxG Published: 25 September 2025

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that.

So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more.

Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort!

bit.ly/ach-anthology

Edinburgh University Press Journals - Table of Contents - ijhac: Vol 19, No 2

Available volume 19.2 of IJHAC: A Journal of Digital Humanities, dedicated to AI and Digital Humanities. Guest editors @miguelev.bsky.social and @javiercha.bsky.social. Amazing work from them and from all the authors. With 3 articles in open access😍!
www.euppublishing.com/toc/ijhac/19/2

Registration for #CHR2025 is now open! Visit our website for details on registration fees and how to register: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/venue/

See you in Luxembourg!

From Ancient Greek to 20 century Yiddish, and from Spain to Georgia: the #DraCor Corpora Conference at #DraCorSummit 2025 is starting right now! 18 @dracor.org corpora presentations to go! The first one is by @juliajbeine.bsky.social about the #NeoLatDraCor

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

Logo of the DraCor Summit 2025, designed by Mark Schwindt.

Picture of the keynote speaker of the upcoming DraCor Summit, Clarisse Bardiot. Source for the picture is her personal website clarissebardiot.info.

We're very happy to welcome Clarisse Bardiot (@univrennes2.bsky.social) as our keynote speaker at the #DraCor Summit! Join us on Mon, 1 Sep 2025, 18:00 @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social.

summit.dracor.org/opening_keyn...

Remember to register for the Summit (it's free).

summit.dracor.org/registration

Please come and join us at CUHK!

Stylo got the Zampolli prize for outstanding output in #DigitalHumanities 🏆 Congrats to Maciej Eder, @mikekestemont.bsky.social, Jan Rybicki, Joanna Byszuk, and all involved with the Computational Stylistics Group!👏 Prev. recipients were Voyant Tools, TEI, R. Siemens, C. Gaffield
#DH2025 #stylometry

Only four days left to @adho-org.bsky.social #DH2025 and everything is getting ready as you can see here!

Thrilled to share that our Deputy Director @miguelev.bsky.social will be delivering a keynote at this conference!

We are excited to announce our Inaugural Research Symposium July 29–30, 2025! This event will bring together leading researchers and practitioners to explore cutting-edge developments at the intersection of computational methods, social science, and the humanities.

www.cssh-symposium.com

I am very honoured by this invitation. Looking forward to @comphumresearch.bsky.social 2025!

Computational Social Scientist for Tenure Track faculty position in AI Media APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

Penn State faculty position in computational social science/AI: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

Finally officially out (only took 1.5yrs), in @natureportfolio.nature.com HumSocComms, #open🔓

"Machine-assisted quantitizing designs: augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial intelligence"

A proposal to efficiently harness #LLM& #AI assistants in research (longer thread on monday)

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

Our open review portal is down, but our team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. In light of this, the submission deadline has been extended to Feb 26, 23:59 AoE. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience caused.

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

Had a great time at the first HKADH conference! Caught up with many old friends from ADHO 2024 and met new colleagues and experts from around the world! Wonderful keynote speeches by @miguelev.bsky.social and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social. Next year, HKADH will be held at my university, CUHK! 😉