Press release from Columbia’s Committee on the AI in the Core Curriculum, which I co-chaired: In April, the working group shared recommendations that reaffirmed the Core’s commitment to human intelligence and human-centered pedagogy — but that also carefully aligned the realities and opportunities of technological change with the Core Curriculum’s guiding values and principles. Their…
As AI tools become a part of the research process, disclosure becomes a matter of academic integrity . At the same time, the call to disclose can be complicated by the sheer ubiquity of such tools, operating silently in the background of everyday scholarly activity, such as search or grammar correction. The transparency of intellectual labor has also been a major part of my recent work , a book…
Translated from Chinese. Originally published in Sanlian Life Weekly (2025, Issue 45, pp. 116–117). When we speak of intelligence, we often blur the line between what is natural and what is artificial. Artificial intelligence comes in many forms; “intelligence develops along a continuum, from partial assistance to full automation.” In our collective imagination, not all intelligent agents are…
A list of things I might have said in my 2024 Contemporary Civilization Class. Compiled by Olivia L. Do doggies hang out like, hey buddy! You’re my friend; I’ll protect you. But when you go to sleep, I will murder you with a stick! You have a nice yard. Don’t go to sleep! I took your cow? What are you gonna do, go complain to the king? You’re not gonna do anything about it. This cow is mine…
Read the full op-ed in the Columbia Spectator . Rather than signifying a singular entity, whatever is meant by “the University” entails the medical center and undergraduate schools; its grounds and labs; libraries, dormitories, offices, and cafés. The English department joins that same body, along with the rowing team, the custodial staff, the school and kindergarten, Columbia University…
When asked about the dangers of commoditising the outputs caused by the drive for efficiency in the creative process with AI, Dennis says: “Your body needs to go through the experience of exercise to derive the benefits. Let’s extend this to intellectual capacities… Maybe we need to get to the mental gym”. Many thanks to Paul Skinner and team for making it happen. Full interview here .
As appeared in L’Espresso November 8, 2024: “ Automi autori dai dizionari a ChatGpt ,” pages 80–82. Full English translation here . Consider the case of Hollywood Writers Guild of America (WGA)—representing 11,500 screenwriters—who went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in May of 2023. According to the agreement reached later that year in…
Il Sole 24 Ore is the leading Italian financial newspaper of record, owned by Confindustria, the Italian employers’ federation. L’intelligenza non sta dentro le macchine, è umana Nel suo ultimo libro Yi Tenen, docente di letteratura alla Columbia University, pone l’intelligenza artificiale dentro un contesto critico di Luca De Biase. Full text in Italian here . Automated translation as follows:…
Letter to the Editor Issues in Science and Technology Volume XL.3 Spring 2024 In her thoughtful essay, “ How Generative AI Endangers Cultural Narratives ” (Issues, Winter 2024), Jill Walker Rettberg writes about the potential loss of a beloved Norwegian children’s story alongside several “misaligned” search engine results. The examples are striking. They point also to even more significant…
[Close-up on a coarse, middle-aged woman, resident of Belgorod, smoking a cigarette in her kitchen.] What the fuck do they know anything about our war? What do they care if my son is dying? So fine, I don’t give a shit either that they die over there. More would be better. What is 130 men? They should have killed 2,130! That would satisfy the people here on the periphery.…
Season 6 Ep. 13 [Off-screen] NATURE WILL KICK YOUR ASS! [Scene in a Midwestern restaurant] Mother: Now, Bree, please tell us what you are eating for your last meal. Bree: Last meal with the family? This wasn’t planned—I got the “Fresh and Naked Basil Pesto.” Mother: Fresh and naked? [Father smiles.] Bree: Mmm, yeah, hopefully I’ll be fresh and naked when I get there. [Cut to Clarence] Okay, lets…
Can we survive, if Ukraine does not? That is a question that all of us should ask. Are we surprised that the forces of evil are alive and aggressive in today’s world? Huh. I’m not surprised. And you shouldn’t be either. I write and sing about it because I can feel it. You should know about it because you can see. Unless you have a blind eye to it and don’t want to do anything about it, you can see…
“Everything must be questioned. Every decision made, every plan, every operation. Critical thought has always brought doubts into my head. Did I make the right choices? But these doubts never left the bounds of reason. They didn’t prevent me from insisting on my point of view. There’s always risk in unit command. War doesn’t make secure operations. You are always taking a risk. Above all, you must…
I wrote the following document for the undergraduate concentration in Comparative Literature at Harvard University a few years ago. I was glad to hear recently that students and faculty at University College London also found it useful. An updated and versioned copy of the document can be found here. Please feel free to reuse with appropriate acknowledgements, linking to this post or its sources .…
This spring (before the George Floyd protests, but after Breonna Taylor and so many others) in my Contemporary Civilization class we ended the semester by reading W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston among those who wrote so powerfully about race in the 20th century. These voices and my students’ responses to them will keep me company through the summer, resonating…
I was recently asked to contribute a chapter on historical materialism for the Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age , edited by the inimitable 1 Adam Hammond. Given the topic, I worry about writing a theoretical piece that strays too far from actual material realities. Too often, a discussion on materialism in literary studies is inverted to privilege the “representation of,” and…
I am always inspired by Ted Underwood’s work and his research notes are no exception. “Do topic models wrap time?” he asks in a recent blog entry . At stake is a curious and somewhat troubling phenomenon, whereby all distributions of topics over time seem to show aberrations at the temporal edges of the sampled data. Please read his post before continuing, because what I am about to say only makes…
This is a short post addressing some of the appropriate security protocols that could be followed when publishing leaked information, in order to better protect the identity of a leaker. A printed document can be connected to its source in at least two different ways: The physical medium (e.g. paper) might contain invisible tracing inks or microscopic markers. For example, many modern printers…
How is a tractor like a writing desk? Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic…
An introduction to an article accepted to New Literary History in summer of 2017. Cite as Dennis Yi Tenen, “Towards a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space,” forthcoming in New Literary History . Space is a hard thing to pin down. It identifies dimensional continuity and a topography, that is, a relationship between objects. It is also itself an object: a limit-defining quantity even in its…
The boy Alexander whittled a piece of wood in the kitchen. Golden, delicious peels covered his scuffed hands. The kitchen opened into a yard. It was spring: doors would not shut, grass grew by the stoop, spilled water glistened against the rocks. A rat took refuge in the trash bin. Someone was frying potatoes. A kerosene stove was lit. The life of the stove began lavishly, in a plume of fire that…
Should programming languages count for the graduate-level foreign language requirement in a Humanities department? Yes and no. My initial thoughts towards a department policy are as follows: Knowledge of computer languages can both reveal new literary-cultural formations and serve as a powerful tool for the study of such formations. However, it should not be viewed as a substitute for foreign…
What are the minimal requirements to build an archive? How does a pile of haphazardly arranged papers differ from an archive? Look around you and notice the furniture; navigate through your mobile device where you keep your notes and your photos. Think of your social media usage, your habits of correspondence, the way you keep in touch with your family and friends, the habits of keeping a journal,…
What is the difference between critical and conspiratorial thought? My hobbies increasingly resemble my work. One way to take “time off” from research is more research, on a different topic. There is no better way to harness that feeling of surfing a deep archival flow, than to take on small, investigative tasks for others. Writing in public offers an opportunity to use university resources on…
The university paper recently asked me to comment on the University of Chicago’s free speech principles, which “affirm the University’s tolerance for all expressions of speech.” 1 This is an issue that deeply affects my thoughts, research, and teaching practice. My response, for the record, was as follows: Freedom of speech is an enviable ideal. Its practical affirmation requires also that we…
By Dennis Tenen. Edited by Rosemary Grennan, MayDay Rooms (London, UK). To appear in Schloss—Post . Figure 1: Article titles obscuring citation network topography. Image by the author. I am on my way to the Free Library Congress at Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart. The event is not really called the free library congress, but that is what I imagine it to be. It will be a meeting about the growing…
A few notes after spending a some time battling with Pandoc, YAML, and the Xelatex typesetting engine: Theoretically it is easier to specify fontsize in the YAML block instead of in the command line. You don’t have to retype it each time and you can better version control your attributes. For book projects, where your YAML headers are reused, separate the YAML block into its own file. Then pass…
The search for “Reddit community” on Google News returns no fewer than 12,900 results . Media coverage of the recent turmoil on the site often takes the “community” part of the equation as a given. The “Reddit community” acts both as subject and an object of action. It is apologized to, it wants to make its voice heard, and it demands. But to what extent is Reddit a community? What makes for a…
A citation network diagram before layout. This is meant to illustrate the influence of clustering algorithms on analysis. Read more at ACLA’s State of the Discipline Report, “ Digital Displacement ”.
It is my intention here to convince you that links are bad. They are bad when it comes to writing for the web in general, bad for books, bad for long-form journalism, and even worse in academic publication. It is not that I am against the idea of links. The problem lies in the way links are used. That is also to say that we can make links better. But first, why are links so bad? To start with,…
Sarah Laskow from Columbia Journalism Review stopped by the lab last week and wrote a great piece about piracyLab . Here is a short excerpt: “In anticipation of Congress’ next big fight over copyright, legal academics are working to gather data and learn how copyright actually works in the real world. But lawyers aren’t the only academics who have been using empirical techniques to gather…
Access might never be totally open or fully free , but there are such things as more open access and freer culture. I heed David Golumbia’s warning about leveraging (heh) corporate discourse. Publishing is indeed always public, in some sense of the word. And it is true, the old economic regime (e.g. Elsevier) is just being replaced by the new (e.g. Google). We should not, as David warns us, jump…
My first deposit to the university’s Academic Commons : The Studio at Butler Library, as we imagine it, will host mix of scheduled events loosely related to digital humanities, along with providing an unstructured, community-driven workspace for all those interested in the applied aspects of book culture, data curation, knowledge design, big history, complex social systems, experimental philosophy…
The problem with Wordpress as a content management system is that for the most part, my content does not live inside Wordpress. I write using LaTeX or Google Docs, brainstorm using virtual notecards , and send myself notes by email. Trying to back everything up is a nightmare. Thinking of ways to streamline the workflow is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night, literally. In a perfect world…
That special time of the year is here! Commence the recommendation letter-writing season. The old adage holds that recommendation letters, particularly those for the Ph.D. market, must be personalized, caressed, scented, and sent by carrier pigeon. I found a job using the Interfolio dossier service and I advise all my students, both graduate and undergraduate, do the same. My reasoning is as…
An interesting report written by the Human Rights Watch relevant to my Beyond the Human course. This 50-page report outlines concerns about these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s…
The students in my xpCrit course have asked me to start a wiki to share expertise related to tools and methodologies in digital humanities. I have a local install of MediaWiki, but I wanted something more light-weight, and after reviewing several “wiki farm” alternatives– Wikia , Wikispaces , and Hackpad –decided to go with Wikispaces. Using wikis in the classroom is a tricky thing because one…
Yet we shall reach really fruitful and luminous generalizations about vital phenomena only in so far as we ourselves experiment and, in hospitals, amphitheaters, or laboratories, stir the fetid or throbbing ground of life. If a comparison were required to express my idea of the science of life, I should say that it is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing…
Existent things consist mostly of nonbeing with a little bit of being thrown in. Everything is what it is by virtue of not being the infinite number of other things that it is not. It is fashionable these days to call this exclusion by self-righteous names such as ‘violence,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘power.’ I want to call it ‘finitude,’ the limitations of mortality, the ‘determinations’ of being when…
“Pragmatism is a rejection of hierarchical structure itself, of the stabilizing (kingly) forces of structure, which would always stand safely outside structure—outside the game, but ruling the game. Pragmatism is a commitment to the openness of time and a chance to for change; pragmatism, then, is the expression of the radical democrat and the experimental method, or scientific spirit of…
Dear Book Publishers, Please stop making me pay twice for your products. My library spans hundreds of volumes, many in duplicate for classroom use. I don’t see why I should pay full price for the digital versions. Let me pay a small upgrade fee for an online copy, or better yet, offer a subscription service to your catalog. See http://oreilly.com/ for details. With best regards, DT
I changed my name sometime in 2008, in part to celebrate my partner’s heritage and in part to signify a new start. It is a relatively trivial procedure in the US, but I did not take it lightly. My reasoning was as follows: I am a first-generation Soviet refugee, born in Moldavia, and for the second decade now, an American citizen. The USSR is no longer a real place. Since my family’s departure,…
A republican assemblyman from San Diego wants to force Google to blur Street View images of potential terrorist targets , like schools and hospitals. I got into an argument about the implications of such a law on Download Squad of all places. Such law would be asinine I argued, because in blurring the images the government would essentially be creating a “hit list” of potential targets. A…
Here is something to think about: the contract you make with Google in using ( most of ) their services. Their standard formula is: 8.1. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or…