Mark J. Hill

Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse Mark Hill. Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH). 2025.

Paper here if anyone wants to read it: aclanthology.org/2025.woah-1....

Having a lovely time at #acl2025 and the @woahworkshop.bsky.social in Vienna!

Our best theme paper goes to Mark J. Hill for "Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse".

This paper investigates how real-world events trigger toxic behaviour that spreads across unrelated online communities. Losses have a stronger impact than wins!

On my way to #acl2025 Vienna by train. Currently in county 4 or 5. Unfortunately the last two are the longest to get across.

Huh. This will be interesting to see play out. Stadiums upping and moving out of town has real North America vibes (I say as a Canadian), so surprised to see it in Paris. Although I fear something similar (but *much* less extreme) happening to Brisbane Road.

Out of context exhibition reviews.

The Unpaywall browser plugin is quiet genius, finding non-paywalled / open access versions of research articles unpaywall.org/welcome

Will be presenting Catching Stray Footballs (arxiv.org/abs/2506.01642) at PreTrain at KCL next week (pretrain2025.github.io/pages/schedu...). Title-wise, it's very much an odd paper on that list! Looking forward to it. #acl2025 #woah2025

Worth it for this beauty. Reiss Nelson's late winner against Bournemouth never looked so good.

Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit. By analysing millions of posts from dozens of subreddits, it demonstrates th...

A new preprint of mine up on arxiv: "Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse" (arxiv.org/abs/2506.01642). An analysis of posting behaviours of fans of English professional football on Reddit. Fill your (football) boots.

Honestly wanted a piece of the pottery...

Quick trip up to Oxford to see some old friends talk about serious things!

Pretty good day, yesterday.

Teach coding to novices in higher education (e.g., intro to python)? Finding AI has made the process difficult/less successful? Have novel ways of integrating/overcoming LLMs? Want to have a chat about this? Drop me a message! Organising a cross-institutional/discipline group to discuss the topic.

King's AI+ Academic Fellowships (leading to an open-ended academic post) King’s is making a major strategic investment into driving AI activity across our nine academic Faculties. Our ambition is to accelerate growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data-driven research...

Applications are now open for 20 interdisciplinary jobs in AI at King’s College London: King’s AI+ Academic Fellowships, advancing AI across *all* disciplines (yes, inc. Arts & Hums — come and work with me!). www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/role/ki...
@kingsdh.bsky.social @kings-dfi.bsky.social

@buffalobillbike.bsky.social

More than ever, history and historians need a collaborative and co-ordinated approach 26th February 2025

We are increasingly concerned about the crisis in UK Higher Education. Read our joint statement with @royalhistsoc.bsky.social , History UK and the @histassoc.bsky.social https://buff.ly/4hSg16N #history #skystorians

Reminder! Tuesday (4 March), 16:00 Brian Ball (Northeastern London) is presenting to the Computational Humanities Research Group at @kingsdh.bsky.social on "Structure Meets Strategy in the Misinformation Age: a Simulation-Based Study." Hybrid event, register here: forms.office.com/e/79m7nUwu6d

Everything Is Awful, But Maybe We Can Change Things: Digital Humanities in Times of Crisis King’s Public Lecture in Digital Humanities delivered by Professor Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College.

Delighted to be welcoming @roopikarisam.bsky.social to give the second King's Public Lecture in Digital Humanities in May: "Everything Is Awful, But Maybe We Can Change Things: Digital Humanities in Times of Crisis". Details and registration here - www.kcl.ac.uk/events/every...
@kingsdh.bsky.social

Perfect timing - straight into the section on digitisation projects for Monday's lecture.

Dear DH/CompSci/coding people - anyone know of formal or informal discussions taking place about experiences/best practices for teaching coding and integrating (or not) LLMs? I'd be keen to hear how others are managing it and whether we can learn anything from each other. #programming #teaching

Huge thanks to @miaout.bsky.social who gave a guest lecture to our KCL DH @kingsdh.bsky.social MA students, touching on work with the @britishlibrary.bsky.social, Living with Machines project, Turing Institute! Really cool to see the intersections between research, GLAM, and professional DH work!

Not sure I've many followers in Helsinki/Finland who wouldn't already be aware of this, but: good lineup, that.

The Computational Humanities Research Group at KCL continues research seminars this term. Join us on 4 March to hear Brian Ball (Northeastern London) give his talk "Structure Meets Strategy in the Misinformation Age: a Simulation-Based Study." You can register here: forms.office.com/e/79m7nUwu6d

When I read this my first thought was "uh oh, does my most recent proposal look like AI?!" So I went back to re-read it. Found a typo almost immediately, so I guess I'm in the clear...

Startup pack of my academic colleagues doing amazing digital research at @kingsdh.bsky.social! go.bsky.app/SXpvQhQ These are the ones I know who are on Bsky - drop me a message if I missed anyone 😅 #academia #digitalhumanities

Computing Koselleck: Modelling Semantic Revolutions, 1720–1960 (Ryan Heuser and KCL) Explore the evolution of language and thought through history with Ryan Heuser and KCL at Computing Koselleck: Modelling Semantic Revolution

The Computational Humanities Research Group at KCL continues research seminars this term. You can find events here: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/serie... - however, one that's not yet on the calendar is a talk by @heuser.bsky.social - click below to register. #digitalhumanities #intellectualhistory

Bit of research I'm working on. Football matches both engage fans more (they post more on Reddit, in this case), and make them (their posts) more negative on the whole (using Cardiff NLP's roberta twitter model).

Give me my nobel prize, plz. #coyg

Asked #ChatGPT to create a ggplot for me. This was it's suggestion for handling label colours by gender.

gender_colors <- ifelse(gender_id == "MALE", "blue", "red")

Uh oh!

It made me laugh, but it's a good example of how underlying biases feed through and into things. #generativeai #genderism

The Man City effect? Comment sentiment on English football club subreddits has been dropping, and has in an inverse relationship to Reddit sentiment as a whole.