Language Models as Cultural Technologies: Case Studies in Storytelling and Poetry
Theme: Joint Human–AI Systems (TDAI Speaker Series)
Speaker: Maria Antoniak
Assistant Professor, Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder
Date & Time: Friday, April 17, 2026 · 4:00–5:00 PM (ET)
Location: Pomerene Hall Room 350 (Project Zone)
Audience/Format: Research Seminar · Open to all
Food: Coffee & Light refreshments provided
Host: Sachin Kumar
This seminar explores language models as cultural technologies that can mediate, influence, and help study human culture. Maria Antoniak will discuss how language models are used in cultural research, with a focus on large-scale computational studies of storytelling, their role within storytelling ecosystems, and emerging questions in computational poetry.
Abstract
Language models are cultural technologies: they can be used to mediate, influence, and study human culture, and they are themselves cultural objects. In this talk, Maria Antoniak will discuss several applications of language models to cultural research questions, focusing on large-scale computational studies of storytelling while also examining how language models are now used as tools within storytelling ecosystems. The talk will also turn to computational poetry studies, considering how poems, when used as training data, challenge standard language modeling pipelines.
Speaker
Maria Antoniak is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Information Science and is a member of the Boulder NLP Group. Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoctoral researcher at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. She earned her PhD in Information Science from Cornell University and her master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington. Her research sits at the intersection of natural language processing, culture, and society.