Ben Schmidt
LightNews LightNews
banner
bschmidt.bsky.social
Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
6.7K followers 830 following 1.6K posts
VP of Information Design at Nomic building new interfaces to embeddings; former history professor/digital humanist. Bsky for humanities/dataviz-y things, @benmschmidt@sigmoid.social for techy stuff, the bad place for business.

https://benschmidt.org
Posts Replies Media Videos
bschmidt.bsky.social
This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.
Bumper sticker that says "No Farms No State" above a mesopotamian cityscape and the phrase James C. Scott 2017
December 10, 2025 at 3:21 AM
bschmidt.bsky.social
Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.
December 7, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
mmasnick.bsky.social
IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal.

www.imls.gov/news/stateme...
Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants
Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants Washington, DC– Upon further review, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has reinstated all federal grants. This action supersede...
www.imls.gov
December 3, 2025 at 10:25 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.
The land and waterhemispheres. Equal-area projection. Map from wikipedia.
December 3, 2025 at 5:25 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
dael.bsky.social
Best thing Staten Island has going for it, imho, is fact that the bridge at Outerbridge Crossing is named after a dude, Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
cacasey.bsky.social Caroline Casey @cacasey.bsky.social · Nov 5
this is objectively hilarious
November 5, 2025 at 3:25 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
michaelcaley.bsky.social
Cuomo spent months obsessively courting conservative voters and he drove Sliwa's vote% down to 7% but he was bleeding moderate Dem base voters with every new right wing message and Trump endorsement

and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it
michaelcaley.bsky.social Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · Nov 5
to me this is the story of the election

there was never any way for Cuomo to win if he didn't win the Bronx, central Brooklyn and southern Queens

and he lost all three

Zohran convinced the crucial swing voters in this race that he was the Democrat and Cuomo was not, and that's why he won
November 5, 2025 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
adam-lg.bsky.social
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
The first is a working paper by three economists—Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu—from 2017. While the authors are economists, the actual contribution—summed up in a title that few historians would think debatable, “Ideas Have Consequences”—is about legal or intellectual history. It presents a powerful and discrete account of the transmission of ideas across social networks through textual analysis. The substance argues that privately funded Manne seminars in law and economics—which were attended by a substantial proportion of the federal judiciary—affected the language, decisions, and sentencing of federal justices who attended them and thus, by implication, allowed large-value conservative donors to capture the federal judiciary. The effect seems robust to a variety of covariates [...] Reading this paper was exciting, but looking through the tools and tricks and sources also made me feel like someone in a science fiction movie encountering an artifact sent back from a few decades in the future. The extraordinary quality of data that economists can obtain is almost unimaginable to humanists. It is not just a million or so circuit court votes and 300,000 opinions but also the institutional capacity to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the exact years of attendance for every judge who went to the Manne program and the disciplinary capacity to casually use relatively new methods like word embeddings without spending pages slowly, gently analogizing them to some “simpler” concept. Humanists wandering through algorithms seem to have to justify using an algorithm by first identifying which Borges short story—whether about the Map of the Empire, the analytical language of John Wilkins, or Pierre Menard and the Quijote—it most closely resembles.
November 4, 2025 at 3:34 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
mariaa.bsky.social
So much good stuff in here. I'm reading @bschmidt.bsky.social's piece on computational history: "The split in American digital history shows a way to make computation focus not on making the humanities more scientific but instead making them more creative."
dmimno.bsky.social David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · Nov 3
"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit."

This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
November 3, 2025 at 8:57 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
Consensus among the developers standing at the Chelsea CitiBike station is that the special code for pedal assist bikes is routed through us east 1 while non-electric bikes are unaffected.
October 20, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
karimdouieb.bsky.social
🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.

🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold

Why a donut? Let me explain 👇
September 29, 2025 at 11:29 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.
A line chart captioned "The big humanities majors were mostly still falling in 2024", showing drops since 2008 for most humanities fields between 10% (Study of the Arts) to 68% (religion) with history, english, and foreign languages all clustered around 50-55%
September 28, 2025 at 2:20 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
gracekind.net
Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon
September 16, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
robertkelchen.com
I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward.

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
"I was not sure if we would see any new data coming out any time soon, so this is a good sign. But looking under the hood, there are clear signs that they’re struggling to do the same quality of data collection and posting as they have in the past,” said Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who flagged some of the issues in a Bluesky thread. “I worry about the ability to continue to get data out on time, especially with the changes to the proposed new admissions survey, which is going to be a massive data collection effort.”
September 25, 2025 at 9:19 AM
bschmidt.bsky.social
Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?
September 19, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
dael.bsky.social
Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.
blakeprof.bsky.social Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · Sep 15
These are the Trump Administration’s demands on UCLA, in addition to a 1.2 billion dollar fine, as reported by the LA Times today. I must note again that the Trump Administration’s attempt to use title vi to enforce conservative agenda items is flagrantly illegal.
3:164 • Make five years of payments — $200 million annually - and set up a $172 million fund for people with claims of civil rights violations. • Ensure foreign students who are "anti-Western" will not be admitted. • Pay for all costs of the settlement, including the fee for an outside monitor. • Annually release demographic data for hires as well as students who have applied or have been admitted, broken down by "race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests." • Make a public statement declaring that transgender people's identities are no longer recognized. • End gender-affirming care for minors at medical facilities. • Give the government access to "all UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement" not protected by attorney-client privilege.
September 16, 2025 at 12:48 AM
bschmidt.bsky.social
They’re cleaning up at the Herald Square station and briefly scraped the place back into December 1979. Hard for me to imagine living in such a two-tone world.
Photo of old black and white printed placards on a black surface, advertising a town hall on January 4,1980 Photo of many different scraps of old placards on a black background, mostly political, some involving protests against the atgemtine government at the YN.
August 22, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
jacklynch000.bsky.social
I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.
Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession
August 17, 2025 at 1:51 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
Really excited to learn from ‪@scaldararu.bsky.social‬ about this new pixel-based, over-time embedding model DeepMind -- has anyone started to poke at it? There are a lot of interesting uses I can imagine, quoted in my reply-guy answer below… medium.com/google-earth...
August 15, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social
... Then they came for the Goldman Sachs economist and I did not speak out because the WSJ article was paywalled and so I wasn't sure if they were a real economist with a PhD or just some MBA faking credentials
August 12, 2025 at 10:55 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
I always look at college major data, but this article (with star turn from @robertkelchen.com) confirms that the layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics included all 7 employees who work on IPEDS. (Which the Times calls only "the college dataset")…
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...
Trump Wants Admissions Data on Grades and Race, but Who Will Collect It?
www.nytimes.com
August 9, 2025 at 2:56 PM
bschmidt.bsky.social
It's fun that the Fortune article saying historians are the #2 job affected by AI includes what's clearly an AI-generated stock image of a creepily female robot "teaching" (i.e., looking at a computer) while the real teacher gets fired.
Fortune headline: Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most exposed to AI—and even teachers make the list Accompanying Getty image of a robot with breasts at a computer while a woman packs a box with her belongings, captioned "Sorry, Gen Z: AI is coming for safe and secure teaching jobs, as well as grad roles."
August 5, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
jenhoward.bsky.social
Wow.
August 4, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
cristiproist.bsky.social
People always ask me : “Cristi, how do you manage parenting a baby while going up for tenure?”

It’s easy. The secret is *flow-based-scheduling*. Here are its three core strategies for new academic parents:

Sleep when the baby sleeps
Cry when the baby cries
Publish when the baby publishes
July 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM