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Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the (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 (2024-2029), and of the ERC Consolidator project   (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

•  (Polity Press, 2023). Watch an or listen to a conversation on  where Jill discusses how machine vision connects not only to contemporary AI art but also to the new technologies of impressionists like Monet.
• , was published as an open access monograph by Palgrave in October 2014, and can be .
• 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 a member of , a cross-faculty platform for AI research at the University of Norway, and a PI in , a university wide COFUND network supporting postdocs in AI across disciplines. She is a frequent participant in NORA events, and .

The first conference she presented at was Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext in 1999, where she won the . 24 years later Rettberg 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, . 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 . Rettberg's pioneering use of Snapchat was in April 2016, and was . Rettberg is also an active participant in debates on Twitter, Facebook and in Norwegian newspapers, and is a frequent expert source in Norwegian media. 

is a dissemination project connected to the where we have made (open to the public 18.03.2021-29.08.2021) and are called that will be 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 

Jill Walker Rettberg has been 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

Rettberg is currently the main supervisor for one PhD student, , who was recently awarded a public sector PhD. His project is a collaboration between Digital Culture at ºÚÁϳԹÏ×ÊÔ´ and the hospital, and will develop a conversational app for chronic patients, combining humanistic theories of digital culture with human-computer conversational design. 

She is also co-supervisor for here at ºÚÁϳԹÏ×ÊÔ´, who is writing a PhD on haptic interfaces in digital art, and is a dissertation committee member for , who is writing her PhD on storytelling in virtual reality, at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Rettberg has been an opponent at three PhD defences, at the University of Copenhagen, Tallinn University and the University of Stavanger. She was a mentor at the Doctoral Consortium at the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers conference, and in 2017, she was a jury member for the Association of Internet Researchers' prize for best PhD dissertation.

Reader opinion

Conference lecture

Podcast

Lecture

Academic article

Radio or TV participation

Academic monograph

Media interview

Academic book chapter

Journal review

Research report

Master’s thesis

Popular science article

Media feature article

Encyclopedia entry

Doctoral thesis (PhD)

Other presentation

Exhibition production

Academic literature review

Non-fiction book chapter

Jill Walker Rettberg is the author of four books:

• (Polity Press, September 2023)
•  (Palgrave, 2014)
• (Polity Press, 2008/2014)
• (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 , her  or .