Kai Li

A screenshot of the front page of the Data by Design website, featuring a bunch of charts in a jumble and one, of a mountain and measurements by Francisco José de Caldas, featured at the top right.

I am beyond thrilled to share that DATA BY DESIGN: AN INTERACTIVE HISTORY OF DATA VISUALIZATION, 1789-1900 is now open for community review at 💚 📊 dataxdesign.io 📊 💙. It's the work of 15+ people across 5 institutions, 2 continents, 2 babies, and a global pandemic. A 🧵 but first:

2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society

Applications are open for the Doctoral Consortium at the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society rcais.github.io. Taking place October 27, 2025.

Applications received by September 15 will receive full consideration.

This is really interesting. However, I want to point out that if you select "case-insensitive," "however" is still becoming more popular during the past century.

I'm glad to share the new data paper in the Journal of Open Humanities Data with my wonderful collaborator @nalsi.bsky.social and students!! 😇 Check out our work here: openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....

Assistant, Associate or Full Professor, AI & Society The Department of AI and Society (AIS) at the University at Buffalo (UB) invites candidates to apply for multiple positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor. The new AIS ...

AI & Society faculty opportunity posted just this month with a start date of Fall 2025 and beyond: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734 ‼️🐂

For "interdisciplinary scholars whose research agenda connects the study of AI with humanistic and/or social scientific line(s) of study"

And the paper is published here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

Congratulations, Naz!

We analyze projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (2010–2015) and find persistent gender gaps in PI roles and team structure.
HOWEVER, gender-diverse teams = more publications 📈
#GenderEquity #STEM #ChinaResearch

🚨 Excited to share our latest study (forthcoming in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) collaborated with Dr. Chaoqun Ni and Xiang Zheng::
Gender disparities in STEM research enterprise in China
👉 ssrn.com/abstract=523...

Where there’s a will there’s a way: ChatGPT is used more for science in countries where it is prohibited Abstract. Regulating AI is a key societal challenge, but effective methods remain unclear. This study evaluates geographic restrictions on AI services, focusing on ChatGPT, which OpenAI blocks in seve...

Really glad that this is out! Fantastic collaboration with @honglin-bao.bsky.social and @innovation.bsky.social!

Key insight: Knowledge diffusion is nearly impossible to constrain—where there's a will, there's a way. From the atomic bomb to ChatGPT, determined minds always find a path.
1/3

Rethinking Reuse in Data Lifecycle in the Age of Large Language Models - Information Matters In the world we are living in, a digital world, some data slips past our awareness, but very little data ever truly disappears. As we, information scientists, are concerned with reproducibility and re...

🚀 New article out on @InformationMatters!
I had the pleasure of collaborating with Dr. Jaihyun Park from NTU Singapore to rethink data reuse in the age of #LLMs.
Check it out 👉
🔗 informationmatters.org/2025/04/reth...
#DataLifecycle #OpenScience #AI

Feel free to share with colleagues who work in #SciSci #Scientometrics #STIpolicy #DataCuration or #OpenResearch!

This is a great opportunity to publish datasets that explore:
📊 R&D investments and funding flows
🔬 Scientific collaboration and infrastructure
📚 Research outputs like publications, patents, software
📈 Impact metrics and societal outcomes

🎉 Excited to share that Scientific Data is launching a new collection: "Data on Science and Innovation Processes, Outputs and Outcomes." This special issue welcomes data descriptors of datasets that shed light on how science and innovation work—from inputs to outcomes. www.nature.com/collections/...

Just published on the blog, Assistant Professor Kai Li gives new perspectives on challenges and opportunities for large-scale analyses on data use and data citations. makedatacount.org/read-our-blo...

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

I am also a long-time fan of his and just read the City a week ago. I would say the story itself is not as interesting as Hard-Boiled Wonderland (that shares a key plotline). At least I am less impressed for various reasons. But it is still clearly Haruki in terms of key theme and style.

The economic, psychological, spiritual, technological, and intellectual needs of a human being are usually more difficult and less profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated "wants" inculcated by fad and fashion

The more I read and think about generative AI and what its creators want us to do with if, the more I'm reminded of this quote from Victor Papanek's 'Design for the Real World'

Advising governments about science is essential but difficult. So train people to do it A great scientist doesn’t necessarily make an effective science adviser — but schooling and practice can help to bridge the gap.

Every government needs effective science advisers; not every scientist is a born adviser but schooling and practice can help to bridge the gap, as we argue in this week’s Nature’s editorial
@natureportfolio.bsky.social 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

RESSH2025 Conference RESSH2025 conference of the international association ENRESSH (European Network for Research Evaluation in the SSH) is organized 19-21 May, 2024, in Helsinki, Finland. It brings together specialists o...

Call for submissions: RESSH2025 Conference on research assessment reform in the humanities and social sciences. Held next May in Helsinki.

vastuullinentiede.fi/en/events/re...

how do researchers use LMs in their work & why?

we surveyed 800 researchers across fields of study, race, gender, seniority asking their opinions on:

🐟 which research activities (eg coding, writing)
🐠 benefits vs risks
🦈 willingness to disclose

findings in @simonaliao.bsky.social's thread 🧵

I guess I am surprised to see so many academic friends who are super interested in birds. This kind of answered my question of why Wingspan is such a popular board game.

A poem about information organization and retrieval written by ChatGPT. Read it in the last session of my class. The students seem to like it.

Pereira, M. do M. (2024). Rethinking power and positionality in debates about citation: Towards a recognition of complexity and opacity in academic hierarchies. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261241274872

Science is political in so many ways. One of them is reflected in #citation politics. And we all do it, willingly or not.

This paper is a glimpse into how some strategies (e.g. decolonizing or diversifying citations) that aim to undermine existing hierarchies have limitations worth thinking about.

I will assign this in future classes—it nails one common argument I find unconvincing in regards to students, which is the idea of LLMss as interlocutors to help refine thinking—that only really works if you’re an expert who can spot the mistakes—students are typically not in a position to do that

This is interesting but not surprised given the importance of academic and research libraries in the source of Google Books. Given the scarcity of infrastructure of book data, I don't think any existing book dataset will be too representative of anything.

A very personal thought: I really don't like how #StarterPack is designed in Bluesky. It creates a structure where the creators get all the power to manage the list and the credit for the list. So as useful as it is to share certain information, it is also a barrier to more equal communication.

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem with the Structured Podcast Research Corpus Podcasts provide highly diverse content to a massive listener base through a unique on-demand modality. However, limited data has prevented large-scale computational analysis of the podcast ecosystem....

Podcasts are a popular medium, but data for computational research is limited! We introduce the Structured Podcast Research Corpus (SPoRC - huggingface.co/datasets/bli...), a large, multimodal dataset of English podcasts 🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2411.07892

Doing a research on books in the #REF2021 project. One weird finding is that political science has very high share of authored books among all books (vs. edited books and book chapters). #bibliographicdata #scisci #scientometrics

Once again, millennials are the real greatest generation