Never thought this day would come. We're officially past the midpoint of the semester, and the students who are brave enough to stay in my sometimes crazy—but always radical—interdisciplinary experiment are now submitting their final project proposals. We've covered a lot of ground in just 7 weeks!

To ensure wider reach: our Cultural Analytics class will meet in a larger classroom, 210 South Hall, on 9/2. (And no, pun not intended.)

That, to me, is the ultimate question cultural analytics must confront, interrogate, and answer for itself. The course site is now live: ca.kentkc.org. Note to prospective students: the syllabus may adapt to meet your needs—feel free to reach out! (9/9)

In Act III, we ask what scale affords: we move from individual texts to institutional structures and discuss how interpretation and knowledge is not simply accumulated but shaped, by labor, ideology—power, against the backdrop of the scaling laws that launched the LLM era. 6/9)

In Act II, we trace how meaning emerges not from marks on a page, but from entangled pathways through learned, latent spaces—across modalities, over time, as logic and sense scatter and settle across layers of neural networks, tokens, and video frames. (5/9)

We begin, paradoxically, with ends—a series of “deaths”—not as closure, but openings. We explore how interpretation becomes a problem of representation learning: how to operationalize what matters, estimate a construct from data, and treat sense as that which is mediated through modeling. (4/9)

The course is structured in three acts, each organized around a conceptual tension (a dramatic conflict, if you will) that implicates both theory and modeling. (3/9)

The course expands the argument I make toward the end of my "Queer Gap" in CA essay: that students working in cultural analytics must know not just how to apply tools, but how to modify, invert, or reinvent them in pursuit of questions that matter—matters of concern, in every sense. (2/9)

My course proposal for Cultural Analytics @berkeleyischool.bsky.social has been approved for Fall 2025! This is the fullest expression of my vision for CA: a radical interdisciplinary experiment for rethinking knowledge production at the intersection of the humanities and machine learning. (1/9)

Just came back from Happy Pleasant Valley (TheatreWorks Silicon Valley) and still hyped. Dear Evan Hansen meets A Man on the Inside with Mrs. Kim from Gilmore Girls taking the stage to sing her heart out. Defies expectations on all counts, originality definitely puts Broadway to shame.

Prepping for my remote OH for applied NLP

Last stop in Denmark -- had a blast in Copenhagen, despite operating on only 3 hours of sleep. @mariaa.bsky.social handles every detail with such grace and @arnicas.bsky.social gave a wonderful talk that really shows me how much farther applied NLP can go, from learning and pedagogy to game design.