Ben Lee

1/ Announcing GovScape – a public search system for 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages)! GovScape offers visual search, semantic text search, and keyword search. Explore below: Website: www.govscape.net ArXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010

Very excited to share that my @longreads.com essay, "Uncanny Testimony," received the 2026 American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Award in the Technology category! Enormously grateful to the judges for selecting my essay! longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

Our faculty are leading in the classroom, the lab and beyond – and we want to bolster support for this vital work. Make your gift today for #HuskyGivingDay to support faculty teaching, research and student mentorship: bit.ly/ischoolHGD26

I’m thrilled to have an essay in the latest print issue of the Bennington Review! It’s about my year working at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the convergence of collective and inherited memory. Enormously grateful that the editors selected it! bcgl.substack.com/p/new-essay-...

@rjainrjain.bsky.social's Gates Cambridge Scholarship is such exciting news and so well-deserved! Can't wait to hear what the year at Cambridge brings! grad.uw.edu/rijul-jain/

Our new class aims to help students across the University of Washington gain a broader, better understanding of AI. Assistant Professor Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social has been teaching Informatics 110 as part of an effort to build robust AI literacy for all students. ischool.uw.edu/news/2026/02...

Calling all technologists, artists and other creative visionaries: The Library of Congress has opened the call for the next Innovator in Residence! Apply by 2pm ET April 10 newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...

The plenary videos from the CNI meeting are now available: 🤝Shaping CNI’s Future Together 📚A Landscape of AI in Libraries @bcgl.bsky.social 🏆AUPresses Stand UP Award @brettbobley.bsky.social @aupresses.bsky.social 💰The State of Funding for US Higher Ed, Science, and Technology in a Time of Change

Publication day! My article on how to read an 18C newspapers, on digital remediation, and on the unfree press out in the world. Thanks @andy-schocket.bsky.social @historymatterssyd.bsky.social & M. Karrs for making it all possible. @universitypress.cambridge.org lnkd.in/eEwbdbSw

Figured I’d wait to post anything for this, but I can’t tell you how excited I am for us to have the opportunity to be funded to do this work. We really do believe that our project connecting communities, digital archives of the early Black press, and human-AI systems will have a large impact

For "Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives," congrats to: Jim Casey, Christopher Dancy, @snblickhan.bsky.social, Tiffany Smith, Benjamin Lee. (And I must also include @profgabrielle.bsky.social !)

Seconding all of this — so much fun not work with so many people I deeply admire, and we can’t wait to share out as our project progresses!

Honored to be giving an opening plenary talk on AI & libraries later today at CNI 2025! I’m excited for the conversation with Kate Zwaard and for the full program by @cni-org.bsky.social! www.cni.org/events/membe...

I am beyond thrilled to share some good news: 1. I've moved to a new job at UC Santa Barbara. 2. We have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Both, we hope, will allow us to continue building the work! + hfa.ucsb.edu/news/schmidt...

Guest Post on GovScape. It is a great example of how we can build on each other's systems and work to enable access to government information! Follow @govscape.bsky.social for more! www.datarescueproject.org/guest-post-g...

Thank you to @datarescueproject.org for publishing this blog post by @kdeeds.bsky.social and myself on GovScape! Extremely grateful to @datarescueproject.org for all their incredible work!

Very excited to have a software paper with @yh-huang.bsky.social in the CHR journal on the Digital Collections Explorer, our open-source multimodal viewer for digital collections!

New Research Tool: GovScape (US Gov PDFs) govscape.net ||| Research Paper (preprint) About #GovScape arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010 #govdocs @eotarchive.org

Anyone interested in govt transparency and public access should check out GovScape from @bcgl.bsky.social and his team👇 It's an incredibly powerful tool that allows visual, semantic text, and keywords search of 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages!) and counting: www.govscape.net

We’re live! Search 10 million+ U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages)! GovScape offers visual search, semantic text search, and keyword search. Explore below: Website: govscape.net ArXiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11010

Huge step forward in enabling access and use of content archived from government websites!

Assistant Professor Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social's essay on the topic of AI and Holocaust Memory, “Uncanny Testimony,” was published by @longreads.com: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

“For all its futuristic appeal, I felt myself turning to the past. I yearned to speak with my grandmother about her life.” A scholar at the intersection of AI and Holocaust memory wrestles with technology that speaks with the dead. By @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

For @longreads.com, I wrote a personal essay about AI Holocaust testimony, my grandmother, memory, and memory loss longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

Appreciated this thoughtful piece from @bcgl.bsky.social. Eloquently puts into words some of concerns about a particular use of AI that I've been grappling with.

“But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?” The grandson of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor grapples with the use of AI to reanimate the dead. A new essay on @longreads.com, by @bcgl.bsky.social: longreads.com/2025/09/25/a...

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

Pls help spread the word: We are hiring! 🌲☕✨ @ischool.uw.edu is recruiting two tenure-track assistant profs in AI. Areas include human-AI collaboration, AI & society, comp social science, NLP, and AI applications. Apply by Nov 15, 2025: apply.interfolio.com/171020 Happy to answer questions!

CFP - AI for DH: Research Problems and Critical Approaches. DHQ seeks 500-word abstracts for a special issue on AI (research problems, critical approaches, responsible applications, case studies, etc.). Deadline: Sept 15, 2025. More details: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

Very excited to have this article in Internet Histories with @tjowens.bsky.social and Jonah Estess! In the article, we study Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN Security Council and trace the PowerPoint through web archives