Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦

Overused Academic Book Cover Art (with images, tweets) · DrLeonJ In March 2014, I snagged a copy of *Transatlantic Literary Studies.* As soon as I had unwrapped it, I noted that it had the same cover art as Michael Kammen's *A Season of Youth.* It got me to wonderi...

I was looking through an old laptop and came across a thing on overused academic book cover art I put together years ago that I thought might raise a chuckle or two 🗃️

web.archive.org/web/20180222...

Unmasking the Denisovans The Harbin cranium, linked to Denisovans via mitochondrial DNA, broadens their known range and provides the first insights into Denisovan morphology. …

Vanessa Villalba-Mouco and I wrote a little preview piece for Cell on the new mtDNA and proteomics results from the Harbin skull. It is free for 50 days at this link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

RStudio + SageMaker + LLMs? Yes! 🚀

Discover how to seamlessly integrate Amazon Bedrock LLMs using the gander R package – all within a managed RStudio environment on AWS.

Say goodbye to on-prem headaches!

Check out the blog post here: tinyurl.com/yv5ndpzp

Book cover by Simon Kirby

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪

Learn Stan with brms, Part I | A. Solomon Kurz y ~ 1

New #rstats blog up!

solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07...

This is the first in a brief series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code.

Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social and @stephenjwild.bsky.social for their helpful reviews.

I love the visual style of these! Many great ideas, some of which I may steal :D

Put your manuscript about computational poetics in the trustworthy hands of @artjomshl.bsky.social

Super cool. Congratulations!

✍️ Our paper is finally out!

All poetic forms come from somewhere, but figuring out their relationships is hard.

We use sequence alignment on scansion (010.10) to measure metrical similarity between poems. This allows us to detect related forms across languages and times 1/
tinyurl.com/metronome25

institutional/institutional-books-1.0 · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Institutional Books: Massive Historical Text Corpus

- 983K books, 242B tokens, 386M pages
- 19th-20th century texts in 254 languages
- Refined OCR with quality scores & metadata
- Noncommercial early-access release

huggingface.co/datasets/ins...

Another cool workshop from the Workshops for Ukraine series – on how to use LLMs via R. Really handy for the R-team, like myself

Great new paper by @harinlee.info & colleagues: big data, cultural evolution, music!

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

I quickly skimmed the intro chapter (already available). Looks like these words are somewhat simplified (say, "physics" doesn't really mean only physics), but the idea of two sciences is very prominent in the book, it seems

I'm quite intrigued by this upcoming book about (among many things) cultural evolution. From publisher's website: "Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems."

Thanks to everybody who chimed in!

I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.

So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Besides the gorgeous journal cover, the article it links to uses 724 classic Chinese poems to estimate the range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise over 1400 years.

These animals are threatened by human activity, have intelligence comparable to a gorilla & are critically endangered.

We are recruiting two postdoctoral scholars for a research project in human collective intelligence and creativity at UC Davis and Cornell. Joint project with @enfascination.com, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @oferon.bsky.social & Dalton Conley. Please forward this thread to relevant people. 1/n

Thank you @stefanmilo.bsky.social for having us on your channel! :)

We’re thrilled to announce EHBEA2026 will be in the beautiful and historic city of Leiden!

Woooow! Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) is such a vivid childhood memory for me. I even had episodes 1 and 2 on a pirated VHS tape. Now, 25 years later - new WWD 🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖

decision trees in human play in the game of go before and after the arrival of superhuman AI, showing gradual change rather than revolutionary disruption

🚨 New preprint! 🚨

I looked at 400+ years of cumulative cultural evolution in the Game of Go from feudalism to superhuman AI. Did AlphaGo etc. completely disrupt human play? No! More like human-machine convergence, rather than revolution.

Check out these decision trees!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal) | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Music traditions worldwide are subject to remarkable diversity but the origins of this variation are not well understood. Musical behaviour is the product of a multicomponent collection of abilities, ...

The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal).

New paper (w Greg Bryant) on a weird social phenomenon, with a general model of how such phenomena evolve as ways to distinguish subcultures.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Poster for our conference "Linked Open Data and Literary Studies" at Freie Universität Berlin.

Just published @hsozkult.bsky.social:

Conference report · "Linked Open Data and Literary Studies"

www.hsozkult.de/conferencere...

@luntner.bsky.social @viktor.im @kuremhs.bsky.social

@freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @temporal-communities.de

Slide sets:
www.temporal-communities.de/events/2024/...

🚨 Our Call for Papers is out! 🚨

We continue our tradition of providing a dedicated platform for presenting computational work that bridges formal methods and traditional inquiry in the arts and humanities.

Check out the website for all details: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/

You’re welcome…

Poetry's Data Why literary studies must confront digital mediation

You can get my book even though it still says "pre-order"! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... (for a 30% discount, use code P327 on the PU Press website)!

Thank you @folgertk.bsky.social for the photo, and, with Marijn Koolen, for organizing this visit!

This week I had a pleasure to present my research at Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. What a wonderful place, really! I preached my usual gospel about the cultural evolution of the arts. Mostly – about the decomposition analysis of literature (see royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...)