unc∞rdinated

Sitting on my bed typing this, my apartment is in disarray. The movers come tomorrow, and everything we are taking with us to Denmark (aside from our suitcases) is packed into 22 small cartons, 9 plastic tubs, and 1 garment case. Books, stationery, clothes, a few toys, some mementos, coffee equipment, cast irons and Indian stainless steel and brass kitchenware. This is 20 years (13 for Aditi) of stuff we have accumulated in North America that we will take when we go. Reflecting on what w leave behind, I notice furniture, beds, linens, clothes, toys, almost everything in the kitchen, so many electronic devices and appliances and gadgets, so very many plants and ceramics. I remember that I left my car behind in Atlanta, 7 years ago. Headed to Copenhagen next Friday with Lara. Aditi will follow in a few weeks after getting in some more fieldwork. We have an apartment there already, and Lara and I will feather the nest in anticipation. I'd like to explore the city with her, maybe take ...

I'm working on an empirical project with two co-authors, where a significant part of the central phenomenon we are studying unfolded online on twitter.  We have a massive multi year tweet and factiva news corpus that we sense-make together by periodically meeting to discuss the data and to theorize qualitatively from algorithmically generated representations of and algorithmically sampled texts from the corpus, previously drawn models of the phenomenon, memos, manuscripts, etc. We each of us have varying familiarity/expertise around the special phenomenon, the substrate upon which it unfolds (online discourse), the theoretical/research conversation in which are participating, and NLP. In collaboration, we see things.  I'm currently working on creating a visual representation of key themes (based on a BERTopic model) in the corpus, in particular the twitter discourse, over time and across our own interpreted actor categories. An interesting macro pattern emerged in convers...

What is AI? I've written about this before , and given that it is an emerging technology, I understand that there are many conceptions of AI. In this post I'm referring specifically to generative AI. However, after having reviewed the Nth management/IS manuscript that treats genAI as some amorphous blob that does everything and nothing, and learns from everything and nothing, I decided I should try and break it down into components. My emphasis here is function and modularity of the various components that come together to perform "genAI". Will keep iterating on this for a class Samer is teaching.