Dallas Card

Finally, many thanks to Stuart Soroka (@snsoroka.bsky.social) for championing this work!

When it Rains, it Pours: Modeling Media Storms and the News Ecosystem Benjamin Litterer, David Jurgens, Dallas Card. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. 2023.

If you've made it this far, you might also want to check out Amber's earlier work on media storms: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1..., or my student Ben Litterer's (@blitt.bsky.social) ACL paper on the same topic: aclanthology.org/2023.finding...

Catching Fire Appendix Cambridge Political Communication Element APPENDIX FOR   CATCHING FIRE IN THE NEWS

For additional details, including coding protocols, teaching resources, and side-by-side case comparisons, you can refer to the accompanying website: www.amber-boydstun.com/catching-fir...

We also discuss additional factors that can influence the course of a storm, such as journalistic gatekeeping, attention fatigue, political activism, and strategic communication online.
For a more in-depth summary, please take a look at Jill's thread here: bsky.app/profile/jill... or read the book!

The book is build around a series of paired case studies -- similar events, where one became a full-fledged media storm, and the other did not -- such as the Titan Submersible Implosion vs. the Messenia Migrant Boat Disaster, occurring just days apart in 2023.

The heart of this work uses the fire triangle model (heat, fuel, and oxygen) as a metaphor to characterize the necessary conditions for an event to become into a media storm -- those stories that are so pervasive in the news that they are practically inescapable.

Catching Fire in the News Cambridge Core - Politics: General Interest - Catching Fire in the News

I'm a little late in sharing this news, but thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Amber Boydstun, @jilllaufer.bsky.social, and @nlpnoah.bsky.social, our book on media storms, "Catching Fire in the News", is now published and available fully open-access from Cambridge! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Congratulations!!

The deadline for the 2026 FAccT DC is next Tuesday, February 24! If you are a student working on topics relevant to the FAccT's scope, this is an opportunity to interact with a diverse set of peers and mentors! #facct2026 #facct26 #facct

Details here: facctconference.org/2026/callfor...

Congratulations!! That's such fantastic news!

Ugh, that's awful....

Apparently they are now seeing cases of senior people asking to be removed from ARR submissions, rather than doing their assigned reviews, so that their students' submissions don't get desk rejected!

I've found people were a bit later than usual this year, but in the end all but two of my reviewers came through with their reviews! Of those who didn't, one was apparently assigned more papers than they requested, so they are choosing to only do the number they asked for.

Hmm... seems like Google's AI Summaries are using a not-so-great (possibly quantized?) model at the moment. Lots of double commas...

It's somehow so endearing to still encounter occasional glitches like this

No worries, I totally get it! (I should also say, I think this is great work, and obviously very timely!)

It might also be interesting to check how many self-identify one way or another (e.g., "this review ..." or "in this position paper ...", etc.)

There is also ML Feed, although I'm not sure which came first bsky.app/profile/smcg...

Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Potential Future In a glimpse at what the beginning of the technological singularity might look like, researchers at Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence platform after the bots went off script and developed ...

Yeah, it seems like the interesting part is that this type of story tends to capture so many people's attention. I guess there is something about social simulation and emergence that people find exciting? Reminds me somewhat of this classic from 2017: www.forbes.com/sites/tonybr...

Cool, that definitely makes sense in terms of practicality, although they do seem kind of different conceptually. Do you have a sense of what proportion in your sample are just straight up reviews (i.e,. here's what's been written on this topic) vs. what proportion have more of a normative argument?

I wrote a short post touching on this a while back. Seems like we are seeing somewhat polarized reactions to this idea... dallascard.github.io/granular-mat...

It would be interesting to look at papers which explicitly refer to themselves as position papers (which seems reasonably common) to see how things line up!

Like any social category, the boundaries are going to be fuzzy, but I would think the key feature would be something like whether or not there is an explicit normative claim that is central to the paper.

Just to clarify, you describe this as position vs non-position papers, but in the paper you frame it as review vs non-review papers. I am understanding correctly that you just lump these in together (position papers and review articles)?

There are probably some good solutions out there that I'm not aware of, but I don't know. I'd love to hear whatever ideas people have or are trying!

The first issue seems relatively easy to deal with by containerization. The second can be mitigated by limiting access to information. Those might limit capabilities, but seem manageable. But the output seems like a bigger problem. How can you safely make use of the thing that Claude produces?

To be a little more specific, I'm sure security researchers are working hard on this, but I can think of three basic levels of concern. One is Claude damaging something locally. Two is sharing information inappropriately online. Three is ending up with something malicious or harmful in the output.

Out of curiosity, how are you all dealing with the security risks that arise when using a system like Claude Code?

This major release of my lab's annotation tool, Potato 2.0, was a long time in the making but I'm really excited by all the new features (and quality of life improvements). If you're doing data annotation of any kind, check it out. Need any other features? We'd love to hear from you too!

I’m excited to share this opportunity for an early-career social scientist on the @aip.bsky.social research team. Please share with anyone interested in putting social science research skills to work to empower positive change in the physical sciences. workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...