Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:
Anthropeum
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

Abeba Birhane on Twitter / X
a classic case of “the human mind is afforded less complexity than is owed, and the computer is afforded more wisdom than is due.” Baria and Cross (2021)that "vibe" is at the core of what makes us human. it defies formalization and datafication https://t.co/AXELAqlYcq— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) February 17, 2024


RTMH: Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas on AI
His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI.

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…

Orion Reed
My research investigates the intersection of computing, human-system interfaces, and emancipatory politics. I am interested in the potential of computing as a medium for thought, as a tool for collective action, and as a means of emancipation.

Anthropic on Twitter / X
New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026
On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges
We present an overview of the last ten years of research on visualizations that support close and distant reading of textual data in the digital humanities. We look at various works published within both the visualization and digital humanities
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

Human perspectives on AI · Global Voices
This GV Spotlight edition will explore how the use of, promotion of, and resistance to artificial intelligence is playing out for the Global Majority.

The Fifth Cycle of Humanity
Complementary Intelligence
In the following, I will try sketch a way of thinking about human intelligence and human nature through emphasizing its difference from the...

New and useful vocabulary to learn here: "Information Civics, a marriage of software engineering and civic design." 👇👇
Paul Frazee
New blogpost about atproto It's not federation, it's not a p2p mesh. It's a secret third thing: practical. pfrazee.com/blog/practical-decentralizati…