Who we are
We are two researchers affiliated with Leiden University, working at the intersection of social science, digital humanities, and artificial intelligence.
Steven Denney is a political scientist and assistant professor in the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), with an affiliation at the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH). Aron van de Pol is a PhD candidate and digital humanities researcher whose work focuses on computer vision and historical media. Together, we combine expertise in surveys, experiments, computational text analysis, computer vision, and large language models to study how people, ideas, and institutions shape the world around us.
The name Pixels & Patterns reflects the two sides of our work. We are interested in pixels: images, scanned documents, newspapers, books, maps, photographs, and other forms of visual and textual data. But we are equally interested in patterns: the social, political, and cultural structures that emerge when we analyze those materials using computational tools and techniques.
Why subscribe?
This Substack is where we think with the garage door open, borrowing a phrase from Andy Matuschak. Rather than waiting until research appears as a finished paper or book, we use this space to share ideas while they are still developing, document new methods as we test them, and engage with a broader community of researchers, students, and curious readers.
If you are interested in how AI, computational methods, and digital tools are changing the way we study society, history, politics, and culture, you’ll find something here worth reading.
What you’ll get
Some posts will explore developments in AI, machine learning, and computational methods. Others will examine historical archives, survey data, and contemporary social questions.
We will document successes, failures, and unexpected findings from our own research, as well as the datasets we collect, curate, and analyze. We will also share workflows, tools, visualizations, and practical lessons from our work.
Above all, we believe scholarship is most valuable when it is transparent, accessible, and open to the public. And, least you forget, you’re absolutely right.
