Projects

I am currently working in two areas: Cultural Analytics and Cultural AI

Cultural Analytics

The use of computational, AI, and data science methods to study and analyze culture, particularly contemporary digital and online culture.

Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Storytelling and Social Movements in the Digital Age (book in progress)

A case study of #BLM in 2020 exploring how platforms like Twitter and Wattpad transformed public storytelling and galvanized social movements.

Split Screens: Aesthetic Preference and Political Polarization (with Tess McNulty and Hoyt Long, under review)

A study of the relationship between TV aesthetic preference/viewing and US political voting from 2016–2022, focusing on polarization.

Cultural and Aesthetic Sources for Political and Social Behavior (with David Bamman, Hoyt Long, and Tess McNulty)

A series of papers combining machine vision analysis of popular TV shows with political/social data to understand how aesthetic and narrative preferences shape political behavior.

Cultural AI

The experimental testing of generative AI models to perform and enact cultural tasks and behaviors (e.g., authorship, interpretation), aiming to improve AI systems through cultural insight and theory.

The Social AI Author (with Edwin Roland and Hoyt Long)

Generative AI simulations exploring how AI agents behave as authors and model social preferences and creative success.

Close Reading and LLM Co-intelligence (with Mina Lee, Jiayin Zhi, and Hoyt Long)

HCI experiments testing whether LLMs can enhance students' ability to close read and enjoy poetry.

Cultural AI: Building a New Research Field (with Aarthi Vadde)

A methodological paper outlining goals for enriching AI with humanistic insight and creating tools for cultural research.