New Books in Technology

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture
(University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how
that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for
today’s generative AI. 

With original research and clear
explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s
known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated
twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and
communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with
early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human
speech, she demonstrates
how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs
and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in
favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually
abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting
instead for work-arounds
that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution
became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals,
transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the
routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied
content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access,
circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But
this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and
ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines
illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and
images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This
connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given
rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic
culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratulations on his accomplishments. In the talk, Vinsel argues that we are missing a synthetic social and economic history of how our adoption and use of digital technologies over the past fifty years has affected everyday life in many social spheres, including work, religion, politics, schools, and family life. He also points to some exemplary scholars who have laid some initial groundwork on these topics and gives some suggestions for primary and secondary sources we can use to do this work. Most of all, the talk is an open invitation to collective work - because doing this project well goes far beyond what any individual can do alone.
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What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?

In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).

For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of
acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer
resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with
less really what journalism needs?

Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue
that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an
opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores
what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can
increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI
companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI
means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether
journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen,
rather than erode, its democratic purpose.

The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether?

Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here.

About the authors

Seth C. Lewis is the
inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of
Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of
Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé
Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of
Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of
emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life.

Rodrigo Zamith is an
Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching
interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a
focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies
for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient
of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award.

Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab.
His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and
technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can
develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve
the public interest.
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Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology