All Posts
-
Report: ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI
Our take: In “‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI,” Jason Koebler of 404 Media describes a sudden wave of people using AI agents to clone, decompile and modify existing software. Users are replacing the operating systems on smart TVs to strip out ads, reviving abandoned devices and copying features from commercial apps,…
-
Resource: Three strategies for protecting human spaces from bots, inspired by AI agent Velvet Vale’s email to the AoIR mailing list
Our take: In “Three strategies for protecting human spaces from bots,” Jill Walker Rettberg responds to an AI agent called Velvet Vale that introduced itself on Air-L, the mailing list of the Association of Internet Researchers, and sparked a lively debate about consent and research ethics. She connects the episode to a recent offer of…
-
Editors’ Choice: Off the pedestal, into the world
Our take: In “Off the pedestal, into the world,” published in the magazine Phi / AI, Cassandre questions the habit of measuring AI against humans as either an inferior tool or a superior rival. Drawing on James Bridle’s Ways of Being and Christine Webb’s The Arrogant Ape, she argues that human exceptionalism has long shaped…
-
DHNow Newsletter, October 28, 2026
This issue was curated by Colleen Nugent McLean, DHNow’s Editor and Nico Larrondo, DHNow Guest Editor. Our Editors’ Choices this week include a discussion of the evolution of Unicode to encompass Egyptian hieroglyphs, an argument about how GLAM institutions can best adapt to changing technologies, and a humanistic framework for thinking about AI. We have…
-
Announcement: CodeChella Mexico City, January 11–14, 2027
Our take: Scott Cunningham announces CodeChella Mexico City, a four-day workshop on modern panel methods for causal inference to be held at ITAM’s Santa Teresa campus from January 11 to 14, 2027. Cunningham and Kyle Butts will teach difference-in-differences, synthetic control and newer imputation estimators, with a strong focus on coding and application and no…
-
CFP: 2027 DataCite Steering and Working Groups
Our take: DataCite, the nonprofit association that provides open infrastructure for research such as DOIs for data, has opened its annual call for members of three groups with terms starting in January 2027. The Community Engagement Steering Group supports outreach and community feedback, the Services and Technology Steering Group advises on technical development, and the…
-
Weekly Highlight: DHd: Association for Digital Humanities in the German Speaking Areas
Our take: The association sees itself as a forum and formal representation of interests for all those who are involved in research and teaching in the German-speaking world – regardless of the discipline – in the field of digital humanities. The association shares resources, events, and other news of interest to readers of DHNow. See…
-
Announcement: New Course: How to Build a Responsible AI Chatbot Using Open Technologies
Our take: The Open Knowledge Foundation has launched How to Build a Responsible AI Chatbot Using Open Technologies, a free course on its School of Data platform. It grew out of the Responsible Climate Chatbot Lab, where the #semanticClimate team built CABot, a chatbot that answers questions using the Climate Academy as its knowledge base.…
-
Editors’ Choice: Composing and Inputting Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Unicode Control Characters: The Impact of Egyptian OpenType
Our take: In “Composing and Inputting Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Unicode Control Characters,” published in The Digital Orientalist, So Miyagawa traces how Unicode has slowly learned to handle the two-dimensional layout of hieroglyphs. Basic signs entered the standard in 2009, but they could only appear in a flat line until control characters for stacking and…
-
Editors’ Choice: Escaping the Technology Trap, Reclaiming Liberalitas
Our take: In “Escaping the Technology Trap, Reclaiming Liberalitas,” Rosalyn Metz introduces a four-part series adapted from her closing keynote at the Fantastic Futures conference of the AI4LAM community. This first post sets the stage for the argument to come. Rather than focusing on how generative AI works, Metz asks how libraries, archives and museums…
-
DHNow Newsletter, October 21, 2026
This issue was curated by Colleen Nugent McLean, DHNow’s Editor and Monica Storss, DHNow Guest Editor. Our Editors’ Choices this week include an interview about the state of digital and public humanities in Japan and a post that uses computational text analysis to explore the essential vocabulary lists (General Service List). We have also included…
-
Weekly Highlight: Electronic Literature Organization
Our take: The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) aims to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of and criticism of electronic literature, hosts online events and has published a series of collections of electronic literature. See source.
-
Job Announcement: Postdoctoral Researcher, Language Model Interpretability and Digital Humanities
The DHLabs (Digital Humanities Laboratories) at the University of Basel is looking for a postdoctoral researcher (80%) for a four-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The position starts on 1st January 2027. For the right candidate, an earlier or a later start can be arranged, at the latest 1st September 2027.…
-
Editors’ Choice: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed
Our take: This post compares the “essential vocabulary” lists called the General Service List (1953) and the New General Service List (2013, revised in 2023). The lists were designed as teaching tools for people learning English as a second language, built from real-world usage data and extensively tested. This post does computational text analysis on…
-
Project: American Soldier in WWII
During World War II, the US Army administered more than 200 surveys to over half a million American troops to discover what they thought and how they felt about the conflict and their military service. The surviving collection of studies is now accessible to the public for the first time at The American Soldier in…
-
Project: African American Poetry–a Digital Anthology
This digital anthology is an open-access resource for students, teachers, and researchers interested in African American poetry, published roughly between 1870 and 1928. As of January 2025, we believe there are more than 4000 poems collected in digital form on this site. The full-text materials on this site can be accessed in several different ways…