James E. Dobson

"Ideology, they argue, inhabits not only representational content: bias is 'embedded in the logic of representation itself.'" New in review, Chen Liying on Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert's Vector Media: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/chen_liying_...

Margaret Hamilton sat for a rare oral history with the Computer History Museum in 2017. With her death this week at 90, it is the best place to hear the Apollo software story in her own words.

Found live footage of the HuggingFace incident

On the 20th anniversary of Zotero's 1.0 release on October 5, 2006, I wrote a history of the collaboration and years it took to create the popular research tool now used by over 20 million people: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

Starting 'The State of Digital Studies' here in Basel today with @berrydm.bsky.social talking about the Vector Paradigm. Register via contralab.online/state-of-dig...

2020: cold emails with applications mentioning unrelated areas like Biology. Candidate didn't even check my/our webpage. 2026: cold emails which relate the candidate's CV with our work and latest papers. 100% LLM written, generic LLM language. Same effect, same probability of getting a reply.

Judson Hale, former editor of Yankee Magazine, has died. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/28/m...

Rice University's history department hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence!

I get this instinct, but in the world of AI, philosophy has been privileged for a long time. These aren’t questions with final answers, and we’ve had rigorous conversations about them for thousands of years. I find going to other parts of the humanities and social sciences more practical.

This is sure to be another landmark event in the development of Critical AI Studies.

What on earth happened to Ideologiekritik? I'm struck that - even among leftist cultural commentators - there is so little recourse to the language of ideology. Is it just that 'we tried talking like that, and the world didn't change in ways we hoped?'

Going into my present project with this kind of energy.

Undergrad English majors, language majors, theater, folklore, creative writing majors: for conversation with writers of romance novels, advice on job seeking, opportunities to apply for grants up to $5000, and lots more, join the MLA's new undergrad member program! www.mla.org/Membership/A...

Greatly enjoyed this essay on a foggy morning spent moving back and forth between nature and the couch. It’s a sharp review, autobiographical fragment, and much more.

Congratulations to Roopsi, Dartmouth’s new Provost Leadership Fellow for AI Strategy! Looking forward to what comes next.

This is why reading Derrida is so interesting and complicated. His writings--in both content and form--deliberately disrupt the common expectation that what has been written can be read as the expression of what the author of the text actually thinks. This is precisely what his texts deconstruct.

New German Critique has the Digital Theory Lab's Semiotic Machines special issue forthcoming, featuring a collection of essays by people at the cutting edge of AI and interpretation, politics, and culture ngc.arts.cornell.edu/forthcoming....

📚 Book Launch: 'Vector Media' by Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org & Leonardo Impett 🗓️ 22 Sept, 16.30 📍 KCL, Macadam Building MAC 106 Panel w/ @joannazylinska.bsky.social, @dchavezheras.bsky.social, @mrsbunz.bsky.social Hosted by Creative AI Lab 📝 Register: www.tickettailor.com/events/digit...

#Dartmouth professors Sarah Preum and Tim Burdick co-author a study that finds AI-generated patient messages can help with routine tasks, but models also tended to overdiagnose, overtreat, and miss key follow-up questions.

Wow. Blown away by this glowing review of Inventing ELIZA in the Wall Street Journal! My favorite line is that we were "talmudically annotating the code." archive.ph/fCcIy @sarahciston.com, @mitpress.bsky.social @wsj.com #critcode #ArtificialIntelligence #computerhistory #SoftwareHistory

There has been little scholarly work on the media history of the GPU. This freshly published OA article is my attempt to show the lines of influence from learning machines in the 1950s through 1980s HPC and MPP systems to the TPUs and GPUs of the present. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Earlier ms version had a reading of this bonkers ode to excess/the phallus but my readers were not having it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf8E...

This is a nice @seattletimes.com piece about our research paper, led by Imani Finkley! With some origin story lore about the @pudding.cool analysis that inspired it. Plus a goofy picture of me reading a Jimothy-coded kids' book about anthropomorphic raccoons. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Now available: John Thelin's magisterial History of American Higher Education, fully updated in its fourth edition. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/... @hopkinspress.bsky.social @universityofky.bsky.social #HigherEd

I feel this when I see folks circulating lists of work produced by journalists instead of humanists: "The extent to which humanists themselves distrust and despise humanities scholarship is depressing, and it’s paved the way for increasingly hostile calls from both inside and outside the house."

AI for Peace 2nd edition is back at @neuripsconf.bsky.social, Paris, December. The call for in person presentations is open. Submit, come, and be part of a community that is building up. AI for Peace @ NeurIPS 2026, Paris - One-page, non-archival, talk or poster. - Deadline 14 September 2026