I study Information Science at Cornell University, where I’m advised by Matthew Wilkens and David Mimno. My research uses large language models to identify rhetorical portrayals of people and institutions in written text. Parallel, I consider the affordances of large language models when studying highly domain-specific communities and settings. So far, these I have studied Supreme Court Justices, book reviewers, botanists, and an endometriosis online health community.
I co-authored, with Matthew Jockers, the recently published second edition of Text Analysis With R.
Recent News
- Summer ’23: I started a new position as an Apple Services Engineering Intern in AI/ML, Personalization and Recommendation 🍏
- Spring ’23: I passed my A-Exam and am officially a ✨PhD candidate✨
- Spring ’23: I gave a visiting talk on LLMs for humanities research at the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities
- Fall ’22: I TA’d for INFO 2950: Introduction to Data Science
- Fall ’22: I shared research on rhetoric in Supreme Court opinions at the Cornell CIS Groundbreaking ceremony. The Cornell Chronicle story about the event highlights this work.
- Summer ’22: I received the Siegel Public Interest Tech Impact Fellowship and spent Summer 2022 working with the New York Botanical Gardens to automatically identify and disambiguate scientific names. My scientific names generative model is now available on HuggingFace!
Prior to returning to my graduate studies, I was an Instructor at Washington State University in the Department of English, the Digital Technology and Culture program, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. I received my Master’s degree in Literature at WSU with an MA thesis that investigated the strategic and rhetorical tactics of Supreme Court Justices. Before that, I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska in English and Film Studies. At Nebraska, I got involved with the digital humanities through the Nebraska Literary Lab and the early days of the George Eliot Archive.
If you’re looking for advice on applying to grad school, I’m happy to chat and share any advice/experiences I might have. Send me an email at ret85[at]cornell.edu!
Rosamond Thalken 