Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a €15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced grant AI Stories: Narrative Archetypes for Artificial Intelligence (2024-2029), and of the ERC Consolidator project  Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024).

Current research

Rettberg is currently developing new research on how new language-based AI is impacting the kinds of stories we tell and that spread online. She argues that generative AI has deep cultural biases that are less easy to spot than the biases that are evident in, for example, facial recognition. This emerging work draws upon the research on AI and visual technologies in the Machine Vision project as well as on Rettberg's decades of narratological research into digital genres of storytelling, such as electronic literature, blogging and transmedia narrative.

Books

• Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity Press, 2023). Watch an unboxing video or listen to a conversation on BBC's Start the Week where Jill discusses how machine vision connects not only to contemporary AI art but also to the new technologies of impressionists like Monet.
• Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, was published as an open access monograph by Palgrave in October 2014, and can be freely downloaded.
• Blogging was published in a 2nd edition by Polity Press in 2014, and has also been translated to Korean and Polish.
• Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader. Co-editor with Hilde Corneliussen. (MIT Press 2008).

Bridging the humanities and technologies

Since the start of her career Rettberg has participated in cross-disciplinary research arenas with the goal of increasing the understanding of each other's methods and research questions.

Rettberg is on the steering board of UiB AI, a cross-faculty platform for AI research at the University of Norway, and a PI in LEAD AI, a university wide COFUND network supporting postdocs in AI across disciplines. She is an elected fellow of both The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. She is a frequent participant in NORA events, and keynoted NORA's 2023 conference.

The first conference she presented at was Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext in 1999, where she won the Ted Nelson Newcomer Award for the best paper by a newcomer to the conference. 24 years later Rettberg keynoted the 2023 edition of the same conference. 

Jill Walker Rettberg has shared her research in social media since October 2000, when she started her still-active research blog, jill/txt. In 2016, she began making research stories for Snapchat, which you can follow by adding jilltxt on Snapchat, or you can see an archive of selected Snapchat Research Stories on YouTube. Rettberg's pioneering use of Snapchat was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April 2016, and was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Award by Kairos Journal in June 2017. Rettberg is also an active participant in debates on Bluesky, LinkedIn and in Norwegian newspapers, and is a frequent expert source in Norwegian media. 

Maskinsyn was a dissemination project connected to the MACHINE VISION research project. The project developed an exhibition in collaboration with the University Museum (open to the public 18.03.2021-29.08.2021) and a live action roleplaying game (a larp) called Sivilisasjonens venterom that was held in November 2021.

Rettberg won the Meltzer Foundation Prize for Excellence in Research Dissemination in 2006 and the John Lovaas Award for Research Dissemination in Social Media in 2017.

Course development and teaching 

Professor Jill Walker Rettberg is not teaching at the undergraduate or MA level between 2023-2033, as her time is fully allocated to research. She taught in the Digital Culture BA and MA programs from 2004-2023, where she responsible for developing and teaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on games, electronic literature, digital art, social media, critical digital culture theory, web design and machine vision.

PhD Supervision

Current:

• Mick With Berland: The Empire of AI (2025-2029)
• Ella Holi: Fat social media narratives, and how they resist and shape the stigmatizing hegemonic narratives of fatness (2023-2027)
• Jasmine Mattey: Dear Africa/You Have Many Narratives (2023-2027)

Completed:

• Marianne Gunderson: The Nexus of Algorithmic Visions: Agency, Imaginaries, and the Self in Sociotechnical Situations (2024)
• Linda Kronman: Performing Bias: Conceptions of Machine Vision Bias in Digital Art (2024)
• Ragnhild Solberg: Playing posthumanism : A study of machine vision and tensions of human-machine relations in digital games
• Magnus Knustad: Comment sections and their role in a democratic society (2023)
• Elisabeth Nesheim (co-supervisor): Haptic Media Scenes (2020)
• Sara Raffel (dissertation committee member, University of Central Florida): Narrative Transportation and Virtual Reality: The Emotional Impact of Social Justice Stories in the Virtual World. (2018)

See a complete overview of publications in NVA.

Jill Walker Rettberg is the author of four books:

• Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity Press, September 2023)
• Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Palgrave, 2014)
• Blogging (Polity Press, 2008/2014)
• Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (MIT Press, 2008; co-edited with Hilde Corneliussen)

Most of Jill Walker Rettberg's publications are open access, and can be accessed either through her Google Scholar profile, her ResearchGate profile or Bergen Open Research Archive.