Teddy Roland
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teddyroland.bsky.social
Teddy Roland
@teddyroland.bsky.social
Postdoc @ School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. American Literature, Media Theory, Data Science. I publish under "Edwin Roland" but don't tell anyone.
Reposted by Teddy Roland
Great news! This is out: Opening the black box of EEBO academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...
Opening the black box of EEBO
Abstract. Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access t
academic.oup.com
November 9, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
It’s very much a prototype but I have to share a preview of the interface @djevans.bsky.social is working on for our Viral Texts data—it maps reprinting data back onto the newspaper page, allowing users to browse what reprints appeared together on each page—with links back to full reprint clusters
November 7, 2025 at 4:49 PM
I have been encouraging students to use (and disclose) generative AI for their assignments. Those not using AI have produced stronger responses until this task: "Brainstorm two distinct titles for your project and describe the audiences they wld appeal to respectively."

It's what GPTs are made for!
November 6, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
Job alert!

@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year

Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
November 6, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
What happens when we model the detective archetype at scale? 🕵️‍♂️📚
Our new paper, accepted for #CHR2025 combines literary history and computational modeling to trace how the figure of the detective evolves across 150 years of French fiction.

arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00627
November 4, 2025 at 5:36 PM
“But I do feel confident that the strategic move is not to hope AI never learns to solve our problems, but to demonstrate that we are the ones who can teach it how. And then to invent new, more difficult problems to solve together.”

An invigorating vision!
Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +
Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.
If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.
www.chronicle.com
November 5, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
Job alert: the University of Illinois Library is hiring a Humanities Librarian to serve as liaison to African-American Studies and English Literatures. I’m sure someone here would be a great fit for this job—& we’ve got a pretty phenomenal community here

Please share!
Humanities Librarian - (African American Studies and English Literature)
Duties & Responsibilities
illinois.csod.com
November 3, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Finished slides a full hour before class and am now wandering bewildered from room to room
October 30, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that.

So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more.

Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort!

bit.ly/ach-anthology
October 29, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
A coalition of seven charitable organizations led by the Mellon Foundation plans to award at least $50 million to nonprofit literary organizations over the next five years through the Literary Arts Fund, a new initiative headed up by Jennifer Benka.
New Fund to Grant $50 Million to Literary Arts Orgs
A coalition of seven charitable organizations led by the Mellon Foundation plans to award at least $50 million to nonprofit literary organizations over the next five years through the Literary Arts…
buff.ly
October 28, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Every clause in this (on AI science) !!! 👇👇
It’s also a resource allocation problem: deciding what matters, which hypotheses to test, and which results to trust.

Automation can produce knowledge, but meaning comes from human judgment.
October 23, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
Wow. This is the paper I have been waiting for. Mobile apps are brain rot, with meaningfully bad economic consequences for those who overuse them.
October 17, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Tonight only!! For the heavyweight title: Stylometry vs Topic Modeling.

Will style beat out content? Can they ever be delineated? Find out here and on pay-per-view.
Someone in computational humanities needs to write a paper about the premise of style/content separation. We've got whole subfields (like "stylometry") that seem to promise you can achieve it, and my sense is that there's a lot of quiet skepticism that hasn't crystallized in explicit statement. +
October 23, 2025 at 2:48 PM
Pleased to report that class was basically uninterrupted by the Canvas outage. That’s all.
October 21, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Every time you find a typo in your dissertation, take a drink!
October 20, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Metadata is the ideological formation that happens when you conceive data relationally
October 16, 2025 at 2:21 PM
More like Iowa Writers' Workslop amiright
October 14, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
DH as critical praxis and worldbuilding with @laurenfklein.bsky.social and @roopikarisam.bsky.social. An intellectual-pedagogical-feminist dream symposia come true through, hosted through my Critical Data Lab at UCLA Data X. datax.ucla.edu/news-events/...
October 13, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
Mathematical discovery in the age of artificial intelligence

They consider how artificial intelligence tools are reshaping the way mathematical research is conducted and discuss how future developments of this technology will transform mathematical practice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Mathematical discovery in the age of artificial intelligence - Nature Physics
In this comment, we consider how artificial intelligence tools are reshaping the way mathematical research is conducted and discuss how future developments of this technology will transform mathematical practice.
www.nature.com
October 6, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Insightful demo of agentive AI as “Humanities RA.” 2 thoughts:

1) Alan is up front about limitations of the tools in ways that seed a round of “Debates in DH”

2) He teases a move past/thru some of the critiques, where he wld have AI create a map of what it *omits* from its main report. Love it!
My blog post reporting on testing the use of agentic AI (the Fellou.ai browser) to start a research project on gathering definitions of the humanities: “Humanities Definitions Research Project: An Experiment with Agentic AI” (liu.english.ucsb.edu/humanities-d...).
October 6, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
"It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline."

By @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

www.ft.com/content/a072...
October 3, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
I made a lil game inspired by the Wordle universe. It's called Versedle (pronounced Verse-a-dle). You guess who wrote famous lines of literature.

As my parents can attest, it's hard! I made them an Easy Mode, but it's still kinda hard. Maybe you'll like it!

▶️ 📚: melaniewalsh.github.io/versedle/
VERSEDLE
Test your literary knowledge with Versedle!
melaniewalsh.github.io
October 2, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Teddy Roland
I made a short 3-page essay from part of my “Data Science & the Post-Liberal Arts University” in Critical Inquiry that had to be cut due to length: Liu, Alan. “Liberal Arts Pantocrator.” KCWorks, 24 Sept 2025, doi.org/10.17613/y9e...
September 24, 2025 at 7:56 PM
Gave this a closer look today and wow it really benefits from the many hands that touched it. Every point -- every sub-point -- is thoughtfully substantiated by connecting it to multiple discourses in CS and humanities. The rigorous thought at scale, so to speak, is truly impressive.
New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.
Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology
<div> <div> <div> <p>Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat cul
papers.ssrn.com
September 30, 2025 at 1:42 AM