Tootfinder

The latest salvo in Trump's fight to remake America’s elite cultural institutions:
This time, the attack has foundered!
So far, Sajet, a 60-year-old Dutch art historian with a long career in American and Australian art museums who became the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director in 2013, is still at her desk.
Trump lacks the legal authority to dismiss Sajet or hire her replacement
—although you can bet that administration lawyers are looking for legal …

Why Is Trump Trying to Fire This Museum Director?
If he succeeds, it could put the whole Smithsonian under his thumb.

UNDERNEWS: Why Cultural Decline in the U.S. Is a Threat to Democracy
https://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2025/06/why-cultural-decline-in-us-is-threat-to.html

Whispers of Many Shores: Cultural Alignment through Collaborative Cultural Expertise
Shuai Feng, Wei-Chuang Chan, Srishti Chouhan, Junior Francisco Garcia Ayala, Srujananjali Medicherla, Kyle Clark, Mingwei Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00242

Whispers of Many Shores: Cultural Alignment through Collaborative Cultural Expertise
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into global applications necessitates effective cultural alignment for meaningful and culturally-sensitive interactions. Current LLMs often lack the nuanced understanding required for diverse cultural contexts, and adapting them typically involves costly full fine-tuning. To address this, we introduce a novel soft prompt fine-tuning framework that enables efficient and modular cultural alignment. Our method utilizes vectorized prompt tuning to dyn…

🦸 Mexico’s ‘lucha libre’ makes the leap into American entertainment: Cultural appropriation or an opportunity for growth?
https://english.elpais.com/sports/2025-05-19/mexicos-…

Mexico’s ‘lucha libre’ makes the leap into American entertainment: Cultural appropriation or an opportunity for growth?
The purchase of AAA by the US wrestling giant WWE has sparked curiosity, suspicion and even fantasies among fans who dream of fights between top American and Mexican stars

A Reference Architecture for Gamified Cultural Heritage Applications Leveraging Generative AI and Augmented Reality
Federico Martusciello, Henry Muccini, Antonio Bucchiarone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04090

A Reference Architecture for Gamified Cultural Heritage Applications Leveraging Generative AI and Augmented Reality
The rapid advancement of Information and Communication Technologies is transforming Cultural Heritage access, experience, and preservation. However, many digital heritage applications lack interactivity, personalization, and adaptability, limiting user engagement and educational impact. This short paper presents a reference architecture for gamified cultural heritage applications leveraging generative AI and augmented reality. Gamification enhances motivation, artificial intelligence enables ad…

We Animals Media – Bringing visibility to hidden animals worldwide through compelling photo and videojournalism. #AnimalRights

We Animals | Animal Photojournalism
Our mission at We Animals is to advocate for animals through photojournalism. Our global investigations and stories expose our complex relationships with animals, create ethical and cultural shifts in society, and empower human capacity for compassion and change.

💡NFDI4Culture schreibt für die Teilnahme an der Konferenz / Autumn School "Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI” (8.– 12.09.2025 an der Universität Siegen) mehrere Reisestipendien für Nachwuchswissenschaftler:innen aus, um neue Forschungsperspektiven zum Thema Generative KI zu fördern und die interdisziplinäre Vernetzung in diesem Forschungsfeld zu unterstützen.
👉 Weitere Infos findet ihr hier:

Europeana want you to 'Share your views about AI and digital cultural heritage' to inform the common European data space for cultural heritage https://pro.europeana.eu/post/share-your-views-about-ai-and-digital-cultural-heritage…

When art meets blockchain: Ukraine’s new frontier in wartime cultural preservation: https://benborges.xyz/2025/05/29/when-art-meets-blockchain-ukraines.html

TIL: »Specific typographic rules have been developed for each language for centuries, but in recent decades, especially due to globalisation and the unification of software tools, they have been disregarded. The international project of a typographic proofreader for European languages will preserve these rules as an expression of European cultural diversity for future generations.«
Source:

I wrote a brief essay on hepaticas and rue anemones and their roles in cultural ecology.

Scotland's travellers suffered 'cultural genocide', report says - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8de3ld05yo

Scotland's travellers suffered 'cultural genocide', report says
New research claims social experiments on Scotland's Gypsy Travellers were a form of "cultural genocide".

"Putin believes Russia is a “civilization-state” with cultural-cum-religious significance, rights and responsibilities that justify the erasure of other nations."
Opinion | Putin’s agenda in Ukraine has long been clear. Trump ignores it. - The Washington Post
https://archive.ph/2025.06.07-145813/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/06/putin-russia-ukraine-trump/#selection-1277.0-1281.114

I’m well out of my depth here: my historical knowledge to speak to the issues is thin; my cultural knowledge is almost nonexistent. Reading that Standing Together site, seeing how they’ve crafted what they write, I see just how much nuance and awareness I •don’t• have.
I’m grateful to the people who’ve helped me learn, and who’ve pointed me to these resources — in this case @… and @…. Sometimes the Internet really is good for something.
/end

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the "tides have turned" in Silicon Valley, making it more acceptable for the tech industry to support the US military's efforts (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Excellent keynote in the #SemDH2025 workshop by Laura Hollink on Cultural Bias in Linked Open Data. Laura is addressing all bias related aspects in cultural heritage items itself, in the data representing it, the data schemata, vocabularies, and ontologies on which the data are based, as well as in the knowledge representation languages used to create the schemata.

“We need to go beyond legislation to a cultural change, where disability is treated as an identity to be celebrated.”
Brilliant article in the FT on housing design for disability and the aesthetics of accessibility
https://www.ft.com/content/05309cf9-96d9-460…

The aesthetics of accessibility: design for disability that’s dynamic not dreary
Architecture is at a fertile inflection point. But while housebuilding goals, sustainability and retrofitting are dominating the agenda, why does accessibility too often remain an afterthought?

CFP> Panel on Tibetan Yoga at the 17th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (Kathmandu, August 23-29, 2026) https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20070111/panel-tibetan-yoga-17th-seminar-in…

Fluent but Culturally Distant: Can Regional Training Teach Cultural Understanding?
Dhruv Agarwal, Anya Shukla, Sunayana Sitaram, Aditya Vashistha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21548 …

Fluent but Culturally Distant: Can Regional Training Teach Cultural Understanding?
Large language models (LLMs) are used around the world but exhibit Western cultural tendencies. To address this cultural misalignment, many countries have begun developing "regional" LLMs tailored to local communities. Yet it remains unclear whether these models merely speak the language of their users or also reflect their cultural values and practices. Using India as a case study, we evaluate five Indic and five global LLMs along two key dimensions: values (via the Inglehart-Welzel map and Gl…

Since returning to office in January, Trump has sought to crush dissent at cultural institutions, law firms, media companies and universities. Many believed it was only a matter of time before he took the fight to the streets.
The protests against ICE raids present him with an antagonist that can be used as a focal point for anger, hatred and fear, ensuring that dissent is redirected away from the government and toward “an enemy within”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/08/trump-la-protests-enemy-within?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Do people recommend any good, properly researched books/articles on Ukraine & Russia & their histories?
So that I can get to know the views of both sides (even if I'm biased to believe one side more than the other). I'm most interested in socio-cultural and political explanations, I'm not interested in military strategy etc

"Fixer les prix des livres au détail est une politique commune en Europe, mais comment la prévention de la concurrence affecte-t-elle les libraires et les acheteurs ? Christos Genakos, Lorien Sabatino et Tommaso Valletti constatent que lorsque la possibilité d'offrir des prix plus bas aux clients est limitée, les vendeurs se tournent vers la concurrence sur le service Š la clientèle et la variété des livres - améliorant ainsi l'expérience des acheteurs."

Trump White House puts preschool funding first on its list of "woke programs" to be eliminated.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Cuts-to-Woke-Programs-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Various Artist – Madrid Austral
#byncsa

A global urban road network self-adaptive simplification workflow from traffic to spatial representation
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05164-9
Data for 35 cities. Looks similar to the neatnet method

A global urban road network self-adaptive simplification workflow from traffic to spatial representation - Scientific Data
Urban road network is crucial for understanding and revealing the spatial logic of urban organization and evolution. However, existing urban road network datasets like OpenStreetMap are designed for traffic studies, treating each lane as a distinct spatial unit of mobility, which may not align with urban studies considering each road as an integration space for social and cultural dynamics. This study established a novel workflow to self-adaptively transform the global urban road network from t…

Webinars this Wed and Thu tackle AI's impact on archives—Sara and Ben Brumfield of FromThePage on combining AI and human crowdsourcing, and yours truly on the long-term threat to cultural heritage of irresponsible AI use. More at https://blog.still-water.net/should-yo

New paper alert:
Finkel & Lamm, Cultural evolution beyond the individual: what human collective knowledge adds to high fidelity copying.
This is the third in the Distributed Adaptation series.
Many thanks to the diligent reviewers! #philbio #cultevo
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-025-09982-4

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21739 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXi…

Reflections of Cultural Wealth: Exploring Identity in Physics through Photo Elicitation
This paper presents a photo elicitation project that invites students to explore their identities in STEM and surface the cultural wealth they bring into the physics classroom. Grounded in critical race theory, educational theory, and affective neuroscience, the project asks students to take original photographs representing aspects of their lived experience-such as motivation, belonging, and support systems-and to write short reflections connecting these images to their journey in science. The…

There’s a new museum on Naoshima Island! This NYT article also describes the many other museums and exhibits installed there.
This is the “art island” that Lynn and I visited a couple months ago. Looks like we’ll have to go back! This time we’ll know to book rooms way in advance (and to stay longer than two nights).
🎁 link

Japanese Islands’ 10th Tadao Ando Museum Caps a Billionaire’s Quest
Benesse Art Site Naoshima, a sprawling art constellation on three islands, adds a 10th museum by the star architect Tadao Ando that caps the cultural quest of Soichiro Fukutake.

From Guidelines to Practice: A New Paradigm for Arabic Language Model Evaluation
Serry Sibaee, Omer Nacar, Adel Ammar, Yasser Al-Habashi, Abdulrahman Al-Batati, Wadii Boulila
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01920

From Guidelines to Practice: A New Paradigm for Arabic Language Model Evaluation
This paper addresses critical gaps in Arabic language model evaluation by establishing comprehensive theoretical guidelines and introducing a novel evaluation framework. We first analyze existing Arabic evaluation datasets, identifying significant issues in linguistic accuracy, cultural alignment, and methodological rigor. To address these limitations in LLMs, we present the Arabic Depth Mini Dataset (ADMD), a carefully curated collection of 490 challenging questions spanning ten major domains …

Knowledge Graphs for Digitized Manuscripts in Jagiellonian Digital Library Application
Jan Ignatowicz, Krzysztof Kutt, Grzegorz J. Nalepa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03180

Knowledge Graphs for Digitized Manuscripts in Jagiellonian Digital Library Application
Digitizing cultural heritage collections has become crucial for preservation of historical artifacts and enhancing their availability to the wider public. Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) are actively digitizing their holdings and creates extensive digital collections. Those collections are often enriched with metadata describing items but not exactly their contents. The Jagiellonian Digital Library, standing as a good example of such an effort, offers datasets acc…

Alley Stories V 🔣
巷弄故事 V 🔣
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

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Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

The current cultural drive towards #nonmonogamy feels to me like gay conversion therapy. I feel somehow inadequate, defective and inferior by not wanting it, and under pressure to convert.
#sex #monogamy …

Weaponized Storytelling: How AI Is Helping Researchers Sniff Out Disinformation Campaigns (The Conversation, 28 May 2025)
https://theconversation.com/weaponized-storytelling-how-ai-is-helping-researchers-sniff-out-disinf…

Weaponized storytelling: How AI is helping researchers sniff out disinformation campaigns
Disinformation campaigns are using AI to tell false but compelling stories. AI tools are also helping counter the campaigns by detecting incongruities in usernames, cultural references and timelines.

"Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else", but how to do this with Linked Data? Eero Hyvönen is quoting Leonardo Da Vinci as an intro to his presentation "How to Create a Portal for Digital Humanities Research Using a Linked Open Data Cloud of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs: Case SampoSampo"
paper:

The tape recorder (or any recording and playback technology) remains one of the most important inventions in its philosophical implications in human history, imo. For the first time, we gained new access to sound as raw material: almost as pure phenomena, potentially unfiltered by description, notation, or the cultural identifiers that usually shape musical/sonic experience. (I don’t mean that tape recording gave us direct, unmediated access - whether such a thing is ever possible with any p…

PREDATORS was excellent. A look into our cultural obsession with “True Crime” (by way of “To Catch a Predator” and what it means about us. #IFFBoston

GeoChain: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Geographic Reasoning
Sahiti Yerramilli, Nilay Pande, Rynaa Grover, Jayant Sravan Tamarapalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00785

GeoChain: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Geographic Reasoning
This paper introduces GeoChain, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating step-by-step geographic reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Leveraging 1.46 million Mapillary street-level images, GeoChain pairs each image with a 21-step chain-of-thought (CoT) question sequence (over 30 million Q&A pairs). These sequences guide models from coarse attributes to fine-grained localization across four reasoning categories - visual, spatial, cultural, and precise geolocation - annotated by d…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23018 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csMM_…

EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations
In recent years, emotion recognition plays a critical role in applications such as human-computer interaction, mental health monitoring, and sentiment analysis. While datasets for emotion analysis in languages such as English have proliferated, there remains a pressing need for high-quality, comprehensive datasets tailored to the unique linguistic, cultural, and multimodal characteristics of Chinese. In this work, we propose \textbf{EmotionTalk}, an interactive Chinese multimodal emotion datase…

Ten Simple Rules for Catalyzing Collaborations and Building Bridges between Research Software Engineers and Software Engineering Researchers
Nasir U. Eisty, Jeffrey C. Carver, Johanna Cohoon, Ian A. Cosden, Carole Goble, Samuel Grayson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03012

Ten Simple Rules for Catalyzing Collaborations and Building Bridges between Research Software Engineers and Software Engineering Researchers
In the evolving landscape of scientific and scholarly research, effective collaboration between Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and Software Engineering Researchers (SERs) is pivotal for advancing innovation and ensuring the integrity of computational methodologies. This paper presents ten strategic guidelines aimed at fostering productive partnerships between these two distinct yet complementary communities. The guidelines emphasize the importance of recognizing and respecting the cultural …

Reflections of Cultural Wealth: Exploring Identity in Physics through Photo Elicitation
Zosia Krusberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21739 https://

Reflections of Cultural Wealth: Exploring Identity in Physics through Photo Elicitation
This paper presents a photo elicitation project that invites students to explore their identities in STEM and surface the cultural wealth they bring into the physics classroom. Grounded in critical race theory, educational theory, and affective neuroscience, the project asks students to take original photographs representing aspects of their lived experience-such as motivation, belonging, and support systems-and to write short reflections connecting these images to their journey in science. The…

Alley Stories V 🔣
巷弄故事 V 🔣
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

CFP> Panel on Tibetan Yoga at the 17th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (Kathmandu, August 23-29, 2026)
https://ift.tt/afIAWEc
When did aliens become a problem? The Mediterranean Association for Marine Biology and Oceanology in…
via Input 4 RELCFP

In his presentation "Exploring and Visualizing Italian Advertising Fliers and Posters through an Iconographical Lens with Linked Open Data" Bruno Sartini is demonstrating how to bridge traditional art historical methods with computational approaches by using structured iconographical data to empirically validate qualitative findings from cultural studies.
paper:

Ramachandra Guha: Ignored by the ‘national’ media, a disaster is unfolding in Great Nicobar
https://scroll.in/article/1081027/ramachandra-guha-ignored-by-the-national-media-a-disaster-is-unfolding-in-great-n…

Concierto de metal en la biblioteca publica de Tampere. Chocante pero me gusta que sea un centro cultural

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04503 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arX…

When LLMs Play the Telephone Game: Cultural Attractors as Conceptual Tools to Evaluate LLMs in Multi-turn Settings
As large language models (LLMs) start interacting with each other and generating an increasing amount of text online, it becomes crucial to better understand how information is transformed as it passes from one LLM to the next. While significant research has examined individual LLM behaviors, existing studies have largely overlooked the collective behaviors and information distortions arising from iterated LLM interactions. Small biases, negligible at the single output level, risk being amplifi…

“The theories of textuality, discourse, and visuality at the heart of cultural theory remain largely unresponsive to the sonic, failing to confront the powerful, asignifying materiality that characterizes so much experimental work with sound.”

Extended Call for Papers: Theology, Religion, and Taylor Swift
https://ift.tt/LjZfrNd
Call for Papers: Theology, Religion and Taylor Swift Edited by: Alexis Bradford and Chris Swann…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Extended Call for Papers: Theology, Religion, and Taylor Swift
Call for Papers: Theology, Religion and Taylor Swift Edited by: Alexis Bradford and Chris Swann Taylor Swift is a cultural icon. As such, she is often used as a case study and her success has been …

Although many hoped otherwise, we do not seem to be returning to a world in which the center left and the center right compete over tax rates or budgets. Economic and policy arguments just don’t matter as much to people right now as these deeper cultural divides. That’s why all elections are now existential: Small numbers of voters swinging one way or the next will decide the nature of the state, the future of democracy, the independence of the courts.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/existential-election-poland-nationalism/683051/

Consideraciones para una formulaci\'on Termodin\'amica Neo-Gibbsiana aplicada a sistemas sociales
Victor Alcides Guzm\'an Rodr\'iguez, Esneiber Hibraim Solano Herrera
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01794

Consideraciones para una formulación Termodinámica Neo-Gibbsiana aplicada a sistemas sociales
This work proposes a first approach towards a neo-Gibbsian thermodynamic theory for social systems, grounded in quantifiable economic and cultural parameters, while deliberately avoiding direct analogies with classical thermodynamic equations of state. Building on previous thermodynamic approaches to economic modeling, we introduce a conceptual basis for defining intensive variables capable of characterizing equilibrium states and evolutionary dynamics in societies. Particular attention is give…

EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations
Haoqin Sun, Xuechen Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Wang, Jiabei He, Aobo Kong, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin, Yong Qin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23018

EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations
In recent years, emotion recognition plays a critical role in applications such as human-computer interaction, mental health monitoring, and sentiment analysis. While datasets for emotion analysis in languages such as English have proliferated, there remains a pressing need for high-quality, comprehensive datasets tailored to the unique linguistic, cultural, and multimodal characteristics of Chinese. In this work, we propose \textbf{EmotionTalk}, an interactive Chinese multimodal emotion datase…

"I don’t believe anyone was thinking about [the] 51st state idea. Truthfully, the intent was to not get political, but to focus on social, cultural, and economic ties."
I hate this nonsense. With great respect and in kindness: Mr. City Councillor in Bellngham needs to put on his big boy pants and admit that yes it is political and yes it is about the 51st state rhetoric and all the scary border stuff from his federal government.
His choice not to admit that and speak against that, and worse, to act like it doesn’t exist, is a further insult and will not help to get BC/Canadians to resume visits.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #51stState #NoFascism #TheAmericanFascist #Economy #Tourism
https://www.albernivalleynews.com/home2/video-bellingham-letter-of-support-sent-to-bc-communities-8034581