people

Hoyt Long is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests range from literature, media, and book history to platform studies, cultural analytics, and generative AI. His most recent book, The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (2021), offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. Since then, he has written articles that rethink literary translation in the wake of neural machine translation; that explore how platforms are reshaping global televisual attention and response; and that consider the possibilities of generative AI for cultural co-intelligence. He is currently collaborating on projects that include Niche Worlds: How Streaming Platforms Changed Attention and Reception and a set of studies that investigate the limits and affordances of large-language models as readers, writers, and instructors of literature.

Richard Jean So is Rhodes Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He specializes in the use of computational and AI methods to study culture and the arts at scale, and increasingly, studies the role that cultural and humanistic theory will play in shaping and improving AI systems. He publishes in both humanistic journals and science proceedings, such as Critical Inquiry, PMLA and ACL and PNAS. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP 2021).