Jill Walker Rettberg

Jill Walker Rettberg is a Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Excellence funded by a €15M grant (2023–2033). She leads the ERC Advanced Grant project AI STORIES (2024–2029) and previously directed the ERC Consolidator project Machine Vision in Everyday Life (2018–2024). Her research focuses on how technologies like AI and machine vision shape narratives and cultural practices.

Education and Background: Rettberg holds a PhD in Humanistic Informatics from the University of Bergen and has a background in Comparative Literature. She has been a pioneer in digital culture studies since the late 1990s, winning awards such as the Ted Nelson Newcomer Award (1999) and the John Lovas Memorial Award (2017).

Research Interests: Her work spans AI narratives, machine vision ethics, social media storytelling, electronic literature, and the societal impacts of algorithms. Recent projects include analyzing generative AI’s cultural biases and exploring how machine vision influences human perception.

Publications: Rettberg authored Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World (2023), Seeing Ourselves Through Technology (2014), and Blogging (2008). Her articles and datasets investigate topics like AI-generated narratives, facial recognition bias, and digital art interfaces.

Grants and Awards: Besides ERC grants, she has been recognized with the Meltzer Foundation Prize (2006) and serves in leadership roles at UiB AI and LEAD AI networks.

Teaching and Mentoring: Rettberg supervises PhD students in digital culture, including work on conversational apps for chronic patients and haptic interfaces in digital art. She teaches courses on machine vision, critical digital theory, and AI ethics.