Curated Reading List
Readings for the NEH workshop series, organized by stage. Each reading is tagged for time commitment so you can build a path that fits your schedule.
- Required required this week (everything else is optional / pick-what-fits)
- Light ~20 minutes; a short essay, blog post, or news piece
- Standard ~60 minutes; a longer essay, chapter, or substantial newsletter
- Deep ~3 hours or more; a book section, multi-essay arc, or full book
A reading or exercise can carry both flags — for example, Required Light means a 20-minute piece you’re expected to do this week.
Books listed in the Recommended Texts section are referenced across multiple weeks. UCF affiliates have library access where noted; open-access alternatives are listed first.
Recommended Texts (Cross-cutting)
These four anchor the series. You do not need to read them cover-to-cover — workshop pages point to specific chapters.
- Bender, Emily M., and Alex Hanna. The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper, 2025.
- Johnson, Emily K., and Anastasia Salter. Critical Making in the Age of AI. Open access.
- Littman, Michael L. Code to Joy: Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming. MIT Press, 2023. (UCF library ebook)
- Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Stage 1 — LLM Fundamentals and Text Analysis (Weeks 1–4)
History, the ELIZA effect, what an LLM is
- Light Berry, David M. “The Limits of Computation: Joseph Weizenbaum and the ELIZA Chatbot.” Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society 3.3 (2023). The history piece W1 opens with.
- Light Mollick, Ethan. “A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era.” One Useful Thing, February 18, 2026. The model / app / harness frame for choosing tools. (W1 pre-reading.)
- Light Mollick, Ethan. “Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class.” One Useful Thing. (W1 pre-reading; required Light reading for W2.)
- Light Willison, Simon. How Coding Agents Work. The plain-English introduction to LLMs, tokens, and agents (W7 pre-reading).
- Standard Bender, Emily, and Alex Hanna. The AI Con, Chapter 1: An Introduction to AI Hype.
- Standard Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Part I: Background.
- Standard Emerson, Lori. “Interfaced.” In Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (eds.), Further Reading. Oxford Academic, 2020.
Vibe coding, harnesses, agents — the working vocabulary
- Light Willison, Simon. “Not All AI-Assisted Programming is Vibe Coding (But Vibe Coding Rocks).” March 19, 2025. (Required Light reading for W2.)
- Light Mollick, Ethan. “Claude Code and What Comes Next.” One Useful Thing, January 7, 2026.
- Light Anthropic. “Use Projects to organize your work.” Help-center docs. (Required Light reading for W2.)
- Required Light Anthropic. “Introducing Skills.” The launch context for Claude Skills (required for W4).
Text analysis, distant reading, and the copyright conversation
- Light Houston, Natalie M. “Text Analysis.” Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.
- Required Light Cohen, Dan. “The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition.” Humane Ingenuity. (Required for W4.)
- Light Underwood, Ted. “A More Interesting Upside of AI.” The Stone and the Shell, July 2, 2025.
- Light “Authors celebrate historic settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action.” Ars Technica, August 2025. Background for the W3 copyright discussion.
- Standard Underwood, Ted. “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.2 (2017).
- Standard Bender, Emily, and Alex Hanna. The AI Con, Chapter 3: Leisure for Me, Gig Work for Thee. The labor critique.
- Required Standard Willison, Simon. “Notes on the Vatican’s encyclical on AI.” simonwillison.net, May 25, 2026. A practitioner reading of Leo XIV’s encyclical — bridges the labor critique and the daily-use perspective. (Required for W4.)
- Required Standard Religion Dispatches. “Leo XIV Links AI Histories to Enslavement and Exploitation.” May 26, 2026. Pairs with Bender & Hanna Ch. 3; situates the labor and extraction critique inside a longer moral genealogy. (Required for W4.)
- Deep Walsh, Melanie, and Maria Antoniak. “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study.” Post45, April 2021.
Stage 2 — Visual and Multimodal (Weeks 5–6)
Visual analysis, generation, and ethics
- Light Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI.” 2019. The structural critique.
- Light The Washington Post. “This is How AI Image Generators See the World.” 2023. Bias made visible, prompt by prompt.
- Light Demsky, Ian. “My Month with Midjourney.” Electronic Book Review, April 2, 2023. Iteration as method.
- Light Jebb, Louis. “On Process: Refik Anadol Seeks to Demystify AI Art.” The Art Newspaper, April 5, 2024.
Copyright (the live news)
- Andersen v. Stability AI — class-action suit by visual artists. Background.
- NYT v. OpenAI — copyright infringement claims by major news publisher. Background.
- Getty Images v. Stability AI — UK court ruling, November 2025. Coverage.
Multimodal AI in the wild (W6)
- Required Light Willison, Simon. “Build and share AI-powered apps with Claude.” June 25, 2025. Artifacts that can call Claude — the capability behind the W6 voice-interface exercise. (Required for W6.)
- Required Light Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI.” The structural critique, carried over from W5 — required for W6 if you skipped it.
- Light WebAIM. “Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Descriptions.” Why caption accuracy matters; background for the W6 caption-correction exercise.
- Light Halperin, Brett. “Hollywood Film Workers Strike Against AI.” ELO 2024. The labor side.
- Light Coverage of generative video and image: Microsoft Surface AI ads, ILM Star Wars Field Guide, Netflix in El Eternauta, Yelp restaurant videos, Grok deepfake controversy.
- Light Anne Marie Oliver on AI embroidery — practitioner perspective, surprisingly transferable.
- Standard Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence, Part II: Looking and Seeing.
- Standard Bender, Emily, and Alex Hanna. The AI Con, Chapter 5: Artifice or Intelligence?
Stage 3 — Claude Code and Public DH (Weeks 7–10)
Programming with AI, agents, planning mode
- Light Evans, Julia. So You Want to Be a Wizard. Wizardzines.
- Light Farrell, Henry. “After Software Eats the World, What Comes Out the Other End?” October 3, 2024.
- Light Ford, Paul. “Timing My Vibe Coding.” The Aboard Podcast, July 29, 2025.
- Light Willison, Simon. “Beyond Vibe Coding.” September 4, 2025. When chat-driven breaks down.
- Standard Martin, Meredith. “Command Lines for the Humanities.” PMLA 139.3 (2024): 541–547.
- Standard Littman, Michael L. Code to Joy, Chapters 1–3.
Bias, justice, labor, accessibility
- Light Benjamin, Ruha. “The New Artificial Intelligentsia.” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 18, 2024.
- Light Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Algorithms Aren’t Neutral.” My Robot Teacher podcast.
- Standard Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression, Chapter 1. (UCF library ebook)
- Standard Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice, Introduction and Chapter 1. Open access.
- Standard CAST. “UDL Guidelines.” The authoritative reference.
Pedagogy, AI policy, and assignment design
- Light MLA Executive Council. “Educational Technologies and AI Agents.” MLA News, January 30, 2026.
- Light Mollick, Ethan. “The Future of Education in a World of AI.” One Useful Thing.
- Light Locke, Brandon. “Digital Humanities Pedagogy as Essential Liberal Education.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.3 (2017).
- Light Your disciplinary association’s current AI statement. MLA, AHA, AAA, ACRL, NCA, MAA, APA, ASA, etc. Most have published one in the last 18 months.
Stage 4 — Agentic Futures (Weeks 11–12)
- Light Underwood, Ted. “The Marionette Theater of AI.” The Stone and the Shell, February 8, 2026.
- Light Cohen, Dan. “AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled.” Humane Ingenuity.
- Light Anthropic. “Introduction to Model Context Protocol.” Anthropic Documentation.
- Light Vincent, Jesse. “Superpowers: How I’m Using Coding Agents in October 2025.” blog.fsck.com.
- Light Mollick, Ethan. “On Holding Back the Strange AI Tide.” One Useful Thing.
- Standard Willison, Simon (with Grace Huckins). “How to Run an LLM on Your Laptop.” MIT Technology Review, July 17, 2025.
- Deep Willison, Simon. Agentic Engineering Patterns (full guide; updated regularly).
Practitioner blogs worth subscribing to
- Mollick, Ethan. One Useful Thing
- Willison, Simon. simonwillison.net
- Cohen, Dan. Humane Ingenuity
- Underwood, Ted. The Stone and the Shell
Companion course materials
The full reading lists for related courses are linked here for reference:
- Salter. ENG 6806 Humanities in the Age of AI — see the HumanitiesAI course site.
- Salter. ENG 6819 Critical Making in Digital Humanities — see the CriticalMaking2026 course site.
- Salter & Murray. AI+DH 2026 — see the DHSI 2026 course site.