BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:294@escience.washington.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251118T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251118T172000 DTSTAMP:20251114T204204Z URL:https://escience.washington.edu/events/uw-data-science-seminar-humanit ies-data-science-summer-institute-part-1/ SUMMARY:UW Data Science Seminar: Humanities Data Science Summer Institute P art 1 DESCRIPTION:Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring research teams from the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute on Tuesday\, Nove mber 18th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT. The seminar will be held in IEB G109. \n\n \;\n"Multimodal LLM Categorization for Humanities Research on Soc ial Media: A Case Study with Pepe the Frog"\nAbstract: Our project for HD SSI considered the utility of multimodal LLMs for humanities research\, sp ecifically concerning politically sensitive social media posts. Building o n research on the use of AI for qualitative image captioning and analysis\ , we compared how LLMs versus human raters assessed the political position ality\, hate content\, and sexually explicit content in social media posts . Our dataset comprises 3407 tweets with imagery pertaining to the Pepe th e Frog meme\, drawn from the months surrounding the January 6\, 2021 riot on the US Capitol. Using a zero-shot prompt\, we queried a range of multim odal models including Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4\, Mistral Pixtral 12B\, a nd LLaVa-NeXT to obtain their categorizations of the material. We show tha t while the Claude models are extremely precise and consistent in their as sessments\, Mistral and LlaVa are considerably less capable of capturing h atred content. But strikingly\, even the high-performing models tend to ta g in ways that downplay individual responsibility for the circulation of p olitically sensitive material\, a shift that has implications for notions of responsibility as they circulate in the digital public sphere. We concl ude that between LLMs’ still-growing ability to categorize qualitative\, multimodal material and the guardrails built into the models\, scholars a nd students of the humanities should exercise caution while engaging LLMs to understand politically explosive social media material at scale.\n\n&nb sp\;\n\nSpeakers: Adair Rounthwaite (Professor and Chair of Art History)\, Niko Nadirashvili (PhD student in Art History)\, Yuanxi Li (undergrad in Informatics and Sociology)\n\n \;\n\n"The Canon in Circulation: Tracki ng the Reception of Norton Anthology Authors in Library Checkout Data"\nAb stract: Which canonical American authors are the public reading\, and why? We explore this question by analyzing nearly two decades of book circulat ion data from the Seattle Public Library (SPL)\, one of the only public li braries in the United States to make anonymized checkout data publicly ava ilable. Focusing on the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (NAAL)\, we examine 1.6k unique w orks and almost one million checkouts to better understand contemporary li terary reception beyond the classroom. We present a novel dataset that can support future reception research and serve as a benchmark for future Wor k-level clustering approaches. Our findings suggest that the few genre fic tion authors in the NAAL—particularly writers of science fiction—domin ate the checkouts\, and that circulation spikes are often triggered by hig h-profile media adaptations\, the death of an author\, and potentially eve n scandal.\n\n \;\n\nSpeaker: Neel Gupta is a PhD student in the iScho ol at UW working in the fields of cultural analytics and the digital human ities. He received his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in Eng lish and Mathematics. He's interested in how economic changes in society h ave affected the cultural and aesthetic production\, specifically in the r ealm of prose fiction. Neel is more broadly interested in how digital and computational methods can be used alongside humanistic methodologies to st udy culture. \n\n \;\nThe 2025-2026 seminars will be held in person\, and are free and open to the public. ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://escience.washington.edu/wp-content/uploa ds/2025/11/Seminar_11.18-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20251102T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR