No Happy Medium for Books
A court ruling curtails the circulation of the written word
Break Expectations
Where does the ability of AI to mimic human expression end? Poetry provides a helpful case study
AI Comes for Music
As the record labels sue AI companies for generating derivative songs, let us ask: What makes a song original and human anyway?
Books are Big AI's Achilles Heel
AI companies may have the money and the data centers, but they are badly in need of what humble libraries have in abundance
Is Science Becoming Conceptual Art?
A combination of new technologies may represent a new era for science, but one in which the lone scientist may no longer need her lab mates. Is that a good thing?
Apple's Vision + The Cost of Forever
Revisiting the original design documents for the Macintosh computer to understand why we’re in a love/hate relationship with Apple, and a comparison of how much it costs to save a book and a web page forever
The Power Broker at 50
Why Robert Caro’s monumental book remains vital for understanding how power is acquired, used, and preserved
Style and Personality
On the small but important difference between these two expressive notions
Reading and Writing
My letter to students about using AI bots to write
AI Is Coming for Scholarship Next
AI models are now ingesting scholarly content in an attempt to dispel their hallucinations. But another possibility looms: that AI will instead drag down scholarship into its muddy realm.
Can Engineered Writing Ever Be Great?
Will tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) ever be able to create truly great and unique prose, rather than plausible-sounding mimicry?
What AI Tells Us About Art
A discussion of text-to-image AI tools like DALL•E and Midjourney, with cameos by Herman Melville and Dolly Parton
Bookwork and Cloud Labs
On the relationship between new genres of writing and new technologies for publication; what putting the laboratory in the cloud might mean for access and science
Humane Ingenuity 43: Your Own Personal Paul McCartney
Whenever I check out a library book that has been underlined or annotated, I think about the two anonymous students who aggressively marked up Widener...
Humane Ingenuity 42: Not So NFT
(Noah Kalina, Lumberland / 20180716) Noah Kalina is a gifted photographer who has a commercial practice and also works as an artist. He is probably best...
Humane Ingenuity 41: Zen and the Art of Winemaking
Here are sixteen "sketches of a 3D printer by Leonardo da Vinci," as envisioned by AI using those words as a prompt: By Rivers Have Wings and John David...
Humane Ingenuity 40: In Sight
I'm back from a summer hiatus — perhaps not into the carefree fall I (and you) had hoped for. But with students streaming once again into my library, the...
Humane Ingenuity 39: A Circle of Keytars
(Alice Baber, Noble Numbers, 1964-1965, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.) The Leventhal Map & Education Center has a new tool called...
Humane Ingenuity 38: The Vigoda Verification
Sixty years ago, illustrator Arthur Radebaugh drew scenes from the future — that is, our present — including, quite presciently, remote education and work,...
Humane Ingenuity 37: Data and the Humanities
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the many datasets we’ve wrestled with this year, it’s that all the data — every single point — is the result of...
Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster
In a wonderful new article, film and television scholar Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and...
Humane Ingenuity 35: Bounded and Boundless
The Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design has digitized their collection of books created by artists. It is an exhibit of the infinite...
Humane Ingenuity 34: Making Data Physical
Although we regularly use and rely on numbers, human beings are simply not very good at understanding them. Most of us can effortlessly feel the shading of a...
Humane Ingenuity 33: Bring Back the Color
A visualization of the colors of the objects in our lives over the last two centuries: Cath Sleeman took the digitized images of household and commercial...
Humane Ingenuity 32: Faint and Loud Signals
If for some reason you could use some relaxation right now, I recommend heading over to Faint Signals, an interactive work of art that was one of the clever...
Humane Ingenuity 31: An Adaptive Painting
Pattern recognition, as it was practiced before computers: (Via William J. Paisley, "The Museum Computer and the Analysis of Artistic Content," in Computers...
Humane Ingenuity 30: Escape Disappointment With Your Machines
The Vienna Museum has just put online 47,000 objects and 75,000 images, with the vast majority of them available to freely download and reuse. Kudos to Evi...
Humane Ingenuity 29: Noticing the Neighborhood
Like you, I've been spending a lot of time near home this year. Without the stimuli and novelty of travel, I've tried to be more aware of my well-trodden...
Humane Ingenuity 28: Cornucopia of Cleverness
It’s stressful out there; maybe some of you could use a little levity right now. My old colleagues at the Digital Public Library of America, along with our...
Humane Ingenuity 27: Reopening Time
Sorry that it’s been over a month since I last wrote. I’ve been working overtime with my colleagues to reopen a large library that adheres to Covid safety...
Humane Ingenuity 26: Considerate Over Clever
Next month in Barcelona at the PH21 Gallery there will be an exhibit of photography documenting the aching feeling of being alone in normally crowded urban...
Humane Ingenuity 25: Out of Body Experiences
If you need a break, have been at home for a very long time, or are sick of the view out of your window, you can try Window Swap, which shows a video clip of...
Humane Ingenuity 24: Witness and Withness
Over the past month, our library has been discussing ways to address—and more concretely take action to oppose—racism in the aftermath of the murder of...
Humane Ingenuity 23: Reframing Time and Saving Culture
Carrie Ferrin, the first female bicyclist in Nobles County, Minnesota. Photograph by E. F. Buchan, c. 1880. (From the Nobles County Historical Society, via...
Humane Ingenuity 22: More Creative Reuses
Yes, people are re-enacting and re-creating artworks in their homes during the quarantine. No, this is not a new pastime—people have been doing this for...
Humane Ingenuity 21: Functional and Eternal
Tomb relief of the official Ptahshepses, also called Impy, Egyptian, Old Kingdom, Dynasty 6, 2323–2150 BCE. Carved limestone. Harvard Art Museums. During...
Humane Ingenuity 20: Physical Distancing, Social Cohesion
Drawing of the set for John Taverner's opera Thérèse, designed by Alan Barlow, 1979, via the Victoria and Albert Museum's opera exhibit. What would you save...
Humane Ingenuity 19: Credit Where Credit Is Due
Viola Canady, Cathedral Window Quilt, Anacostia Community Museum. CC0 photograph from the Smithsonian Institution’s new open access collection. In January...
Humane Ingenuity 18: Closing Time
Metamorphic library table-steps, by Thomas Sheraton, c. 1795. (CC0-licensed image from the Smithsonian Institution’s new open access collection, which I’ll...
Humane Ingenuity 17: All THAT and More
A rather nice letterpress QR code from Northeastern University’s traditional print technology lab, Huskiana Press. (Via Ryan Cordell, who is the founder and...
Humane Ingenuity 16: Imagining New Museums
David Fletcher is a video game artist in London who on the side creates hyper-realistic 3D photogrammetry models of cultural heritage sites and works of art,...
Humane Ingenuity 15: Close but Not Quite
The Picture Description Bot, by Elad Alfassa, runs random Wikimedia Commons images through Microsoft’s Computer Vision API, and then posts the best-guess...
Humane Ingenuity 14: Adding Dimensions
The Library of Necessary Books. An art installation in Singapore where visitors can leave their favorite books. (Via Seb Chan’s newsletter.) In HI12 I...
Humane Ingenuity 13: The Best of Both Worlds
Happy New Year, and welcome to 2020! My constant reminder of the passage of time is a small lake near where we live, which transforms itself delightfully...
Humane Ingenuity 12: Automation and Agency
In this issue of HI: dispatches from the frontiers I traversed at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked information. Automation and Agency Ben...
Humane Ingenuity 11: Middle-Aged Software
The National Gallery of Denmark has a nicely designed new website that makes all of their digitized artworks openly available, and about two-thirds...
Humane Ingenuity 10: The Nature and Locus of Research
It's getting to be that time of the semester when extracurricular activities, like writing this newsletter, become rather difficult. My day job as a...
Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You
Carlotta Corpron (1901-1987) was an artist and photographer who used light to create abstract works from which figures would sometimes emerge. (“Strange...
Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It's Complicated
René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the...
Humane Ingenuity 7: Getting Weird with Technology to Find Our Humanity
One of the best ways that we can react to new technology, to sense its contours and capabilities, and also, perhaps slyly, to assert our superiority over it,...