Ben Miller

Towards my quest to write five blog posts this month, I wrote up some musings on the two DH conferences I attended this summer and where different pieces of the community are going.

So we opened 2026 nominations early for the #DH2026 conference.

ChatGPT vs. the Duplex: A Collaborative Student-Centered Inquiry into the Limits of Gen AI's Poetic Capabilities!, Lena Marchese, Elizabeth Garcia, Brittany Whelan, + working with @laurenfklein.bsky.social found Jericho Brown's poetry is resistant to LLM dupes: all repetition, no presence #DH2026

Great first day #DH2026 workshop on "Engaging Difficult Audiences: Designing Games for Bored Students, Visitors, and DH Scholars," by Sophia Booij (Australia National Uni) and Nellie Seale (Uni of Melbourne). Awesome real thoughtful framework for game design in GLAM, community, and teaching spaces.

@dh2026daejeon.bsky.social It turns out, most everywhere is a 10+ hour flight from New Zealand, including #DH2026, my first DH since moving. Got mine and Kevin Qu's poster on spatiality and topology of interactive fiction for the #SIG-DLS & DCL mini-conference, icla-dcl.quarto.pub/info/news/20...

"Fela understood that corruption is rarely just about losing money. It is about losing legitimacy. It is the theft of a nation’s faith in itself." In the US again, briefly, reading Fahamu's consideration of what it should mean to celebrate America. fahamupecou.substack.com/p/authority-...

got reminded of this piece today, one of the great intersections between games and weird fiction

I'd wait an hour in the rain for a lecture half as good as Peter Caviello's grounded, informed, scathing, funny takedown not of a single NYT author, but of the whole rhetorical framework on which lazy Crossfire journalism is built. Didn't Jon Stewart demolish that mode ages ago?

I just finished "There Is No Place for Us" by @brian-goldstone.bsky.social It's a modern, non-fiction, "The Jungle", about the purposely designed-to-fail housing system in this country - an unholy abomination of government & corporations - and the resulting dystopia www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...

We knew in our guts while hiding that the shooter was targeting us. This violence is driven by anti-vaccine propaganda. And the rot start at the top. Just this week RFK Jr canceled all mRNA vaccine research while lying about the technologies safety and effectiveness.

How did we so quickly go from the GDPR's Right to Be Forgotten (2014) to the (2025) EU AI Act's solution to bias being more data in the system? Yes, each approach deals with a different problem, privacy and algorithmic violence by administrative regimes. Did we cede the finacialization of speech?

The penguin is quilted and ready to protest! It’s a bit crooked, but I have had vertigo off and on all week, so I’m okay with crooked.

👉 👈 Meta announced that they're changing their models to reduce "left-leaning [political] bias"--that means leaning them to the political "right". Lots to unpack about what that might mean. So I ran a quick "shot in the dark" study...and found a *political right* bias in Meta models. Some notes.🧵

Spending the day at the Africana DH convening at Clark Atlanta U. Panel 1, @drtonieshat.bsky.social, Rico Chapman, Marco Robinson, Charmayne Patterson. So much good work on sharing local knowledge, imagining the future, and why Starbucks needed to think before putting a slogan on a coffee cup.

There are just nine days left to get the World SF Bundle! storybundle.com/scifi Supporting independent publishers, benefiting authors directly, and also supporting non-profit Locus Magazine! Re-posts much appreciated!

NarraScope news: we have keynote speakers and a schedule! narrascope.org/schedule We have registration open! narrascope2025.eventbrite.com We have other info on the web site too. narrascope.org Join us in Philadelphia in June. Hope to see you there.

"It’s not that OpenAI picked something cute and accidentally the co-founder of that studio hates. OAI picked Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach It is display of power: You, as artist, animator, illustrator, writer are powerless. We will take what we want & do what we want. Because we can"

🚨 Our Call for Papers is out! 🚨 We continue our tradition of providing a dedicated platform for presenting computational work that bridges formal methods and traditional inquiry in the arts and humanities. Check out the website for all details: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/

Atlanta friends! I'll be launching my book this Wednesday, 3/26, at Decatur Library, 7pm. I’m honored to be joined in conversation by the brilliant journalist and author Malaika Jabali. The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there.

Join me on Reddit for an AMA about housing precarity and homelessness in the U.S. Why are so many people—even those with multiple jobs—unable to afford a place to live? The AMA is live now, and I’ll be answering questions starting Monday at 1pm ET.

Yes, and laid the model for disparate bailouts post-2007-2010 foreclosure crisis that enabled the subsequent rise of institutional single family home investors. Some recent related work. www.lewis.ucla.edu/2023/02/08/4... quantitative.emory.edu/images/11-4-... doi.org/10.1080/0735...

I'm deeply sorry and upset that the wonderful people at the NEH who have spent careers helping people tell essential American stories are being anything but praised and rewarded. "Appalachia Youth," "Up from the Dust," HiPSTAS. Nationwide library programs. The NEH made public humanities possible.

They adopted a posture of total submission and it bought them precisely nothing. A lesson for the Trump era www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...

I wish all of our institutions would have an equally forceful rebuttal as unqualified Republicans (often illegally) try to tell us what to teach. These people are the inheritors of TN in State of TN v. Scopes. They continue to be wrong, reactionary, repressive, and regressive.

This year's tourney is a bit different: which Division I NCAA team will be the first to go under b/c their institution and students are casualties of Republicans' assault on Federal government and higher ed? Grand Canyon w/ $1.3b in debt? Clemson and their $194m athletics program? Place your bets!

Vermont understood the assignment. Take notes, America.

Terry Eagleton argued the humanities, and by extension universal education, provided social cement as religion's cultural dominance died. Of course the Right attacks education as they instantiate their version of religion, a cult of personality and influence(rs) in a Big Tech attention economy.

Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts. Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

Compelling and persuasive critical assessment about what humanities research is and does, and why generative AI is not just problematic but confounding. Will be sharing widely. Thanks @laurenfklein.bsky.social and co! Link to arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190

As of today, more NIH study sections have been cancelled in 2025 then held. What does this mean for groundbreaking research that urgently needs funding? Critical proposals in aging, cancer, health outcomes, and bacterial virulence are now left without review. #standupforscience2025