“What will the new decade bring? Ducks, I hope.”

As the father of boy-girl twins, I consider Star Wars to be an extended metaphor.

Winter at its most beautiful is more beautiful than any other season.

World’s greatest holiday gift: my colleague Deb Smith’s 2020 calendar featuring her bunnies, Ella and Leo, in month-appropriate outfits

Toilet-paper ribbon-cutting ceremony to open new bathrooms in our library today.

In related news, I am now the proud owner of comically large scissors.

On the final What’s New podcast of 2019: a trio of young researchers and their innovative work on nanotechnology sensors for seeing color, improving the flow of patients in hospitals, and how we can achieve better self-knowledge about our personalities

Look at this beautiful new gadget I just put on my desk

A new issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 12: Automation & Agency”—can we have a high level of automation and a high level of human control at the same time? Some interesting new examples are pointing the way. (Subscribe)

Belle is having thoughts

Current status: I have been invited to a “Ride with the Rabbis” spin class.

The moon is perched right on top of the Boston Commons Christmas tree

It was a pretty punk move. I was paid $50 that December.

Whenever I see a “Best of the Decade” piece, I am reminded of when I was an intern at Spin in 1989, and worked that entire summer on a big 80s retrospective issue. At the end of the year, Legs McNeil threw everything out and instead wrote a diatribe about how much the 80s sucked.

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 11: Middle-Aged Software”—what can we learn from software we’ve been using for decades? Also: revisiting my 2010 prediction in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about 2020. (Subscribe to Humane Ingenuity)

Some good things going on at our library this week (aside from, or to help with, the stress of final exams)

Inequality has many deeply troubling effects on individuals and society, but one that is spoken of less than monetary concerns is mental health: the poor and marginalized receive much worse care, which creates a vicious circle. Listen to the latest What’s New podcast.

I love this note about how Nobuyuki Siraisi designed the 1979 version of the New York City subway map.

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 10: The Nature and Locus of Research”—what happens when research moves from academic to corporate environments; more on GPT-2, plus computer-aided music production. (Subscribe)

The universe is filled with great imponderable mysteries, such as the fact that these three songs were huge #1 hits, in a row, in the fall of 1977:

-The Emotions, “Best of My Love” -Meco, “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” -Debbie Boone, “You Light Up My Life”

On the latest What’s New podcast, we look at the mysterious and complex nature of human sight—“How We See,” with vision researcher Ennio Mingolla. Includes a discussion of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s insight; how frogs see flies; and the problems with self-driving cars’ vision.

Here at @NortheasternLib we have an opening for an Engineering Librarian, who will design experiential learning and research opportunities for engineering students using library content, spaces, tools, and services. I hope you’ll consider joining us.

The view from Northeastern’s library is spectacular right now

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You” — The act of reading in an age when texts might be artificially generated by a computer, & more on renovating a library. (Or subscribe for all issues—it’s free.)

I think GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd.

Teaching your kid how to drive is like being in a movie about a video game in which losing means you die in real life

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity is out: “Ebooks: It’s Complicated”—what went wrong with ebooks and e-readers, why Macmillan’s eight-week embargo on ebooks for libraries stings, and where to go from here. (Subscribe to the Humane Ingenuity newsletter.)

On the latest What’s New podcast, we go inside CERN and the Large Hadron Collider with physicist Louise Skinnari. Hear about the 40 terabytes of data produced per second, the search for dark matter, and how to write a paper with 4,000 authors. Tune in!

Belle has gotten good at blocking the stairs so you have to pet her.

Belle is concerned about the giant spider and dragon that have appeared on our neighbor’s porch

As the dean of a library, the possibility of a raccoon invasion is why I got a coonhound this year.

“You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.” —@brentsimmons (Yep.)

Fall has reached the Post-Impressionism stage

My sister’s dog is so droopy he melts into the rug

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 7: Getting Weird with Technology to Find Our Humanity”—weird tech art, gonzo data science, media archaeology, new life for old books and daguerreotypes, and much more. (Subscribe to get every issue in your inbox.)

On the latest episode of the What’s New podcast from the Northeastern University Library, I talk with Matthew Goodwin about using sensors to understand and predict behavior, with a special focus on caring for children with severe autism. Tune in!

Fall symmetry

Belle is enjoying a nice fall morning

Picked up a copy of @hodgman’s Medallion Status for my flight today and I’m sorry to report that it does NOT allow you to board the plane first.

Love this initiative from @AV_DiscoTech et al.: the Memory Lab Network, putting digitization/preservation tools and services into public libraries across the country. #DLFforum

This week my “Humane Ingenuity” newsletter comes to you from the Digital Library Federation forum, and I discuss the DLF Cinematic Universe after taking a stroll around Walden Pond.

My favorite slide from the first day of #DLFforum

Fun airport security line this evening on my way to #DLFforum: Doris Kearns Goodwin was right behind me, and the guy in front of me had a Super Bowl ring (couldn’t identify him, but yes, the ring set off the metal detector, which allowed him to say “Yeah, it’s a Super Bowl ring”)

“Go thou my incense upward from this hearth”

Walden Pond

Given that there are now over a half-million podcasts, and visibility is largely dominated by big producers, this is a good idea: the launch today of Lyceum, a community of educational podcasts and listeners that curates and connects: www.lyceum.fm

I know this is hard to believe, but there is a dog in this photo, camouflaged with the floor

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity is out—more on the use of AI/machine learning in libraries, archives, and museums; some pushback on a binary view of what libraries should be; and a very old piggy bank. (You can also subscribe to the newsletter.)

On the latest What’s New: supply chain expert Nada Sanders, who explains why many CEOs (like Tim Cook at Apple) are now operations rather than product gurus, how automation and AI are changing business, and how we can make all of this more humane. Tune in!

Our hound puppy now has a distinctive three-note bay that rivals the NBC chimes.

I was on The Agenda on TVO Monday with two other academics to talk about “The Lost Art of Reading,” and the video of that show is now available. Discusses my Atlantic piece on the decline of print books in colleges, and asks what we can/should do about it.

My iPhone just autocorrected “weekend” to “Weeknd” we are doomed

My teenage daughter just watched her first live television show.

Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper (broadly applicable and not just for bleak science papers)

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity is out, featuring a bit of a love letter to Micro.blog; how to teach a robot to crack a whip (and, um, why); and some follow-up on AI in libraries, archives, and museums. You can also subscribe to receive all the issues via email/RSS.

This week on the What’s New podcast: How ballet dancers communicate spatial information to their partners through their fingertips, and how to teach a robot to crack a whip—my conversation with Dagmar Sternad about her Action Lab. Tune in!

The technology of the printing press with moveable type arose during Leonardo da Vinci’s lifetime; did he ever consider publishing his notebooks?

If you want to get away from the world/social media, I wholeheartedly recommend Northeastern’s combination anechoic chamber + Faraday cage, which completely kills all electromagnetic and sound waves. Supremely quiet and no wireless signals of any kind. Nice and relaxing.

Some good notes and links from @mia_out about a workshop this week on museums and artificial intelligence that acts as a nice counterpart to my newsletter issue on AI in the archives yesterday.

We’re hiring a project archivist to work on the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice project, which collects and compiles documents and data on racially motivated violence in mid-20th century America. Important position on an important project—join us.

I met Cokie Roberts when Carla Hayden was sworn in as Librarian of Congress, and chatted with her for a while about history and libraries. She was really thoughtful, funny, and genuine.

The third issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity is now out, on using artificial intelligence in archives and what that tells us more generally about an ethical and culturally useful interaction between AI and human beings. Subscribe to get this and future issues.

10 points to the University of Chicago for having “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” as one of their application essays this year.

The third issue of my Humane Ingenuity newsletter, which will cover in depth the use (and potential abuse) of artificial intelligence in archives and special collections, will go out to subscribers tomorrow. Still time to sign up for your own copy.

Boston suburbs have an M. Night Shyamalan vibe today

After 9/11, Ruth Sergel and Here is New York set up a private booth so that people could record their memories, alone, unscripted, and unedited. Those recordings are now in the September 11 Digital Archive and watching them is still incredibly raw.

A corollary is that the remaining online venues that bring me agita, not joy, are free.

I’ll write about this in a future issue of my newsletter, but it has struck me recently that the remaining online venues that bring me joy, not agita, are services for which I pay $5 a month: Microblog (social media), Reclaim Hosting (blog), Feedbin (RSS), Buttondown (newsletter)

My favorite RSS feed right now is Stereogum’s “The Number Ones,” which is going deep on every Billboard #1 song from 1958 to the present. It’s currently in 1976, as disco is taking over.

If you’re new to the What’s New podcast, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast app by clicking on one of the links at the top of our home page.

The third season of the What’s New podcast starts today, with my conversation with Christo Wilson about revealing/auditing the algorithms that Facebook, Google, and Amazon use to personalize what they show you—based on the many things they know about you.

Subscribe to the Humane Ingenuity newsletter to get every issue delivered straight to your inbox. (It’s free.)

While you are waiting for Apple to unveil new gizmos, you can read the second issue of my new newsletter, Humane Ingenuity, this week covering the humane writing of the original director of Apple’s Mac project in 1979-80. Plus: how to audit algorithms.

Northeastern University is also seeking a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member with a scholarly focus on legal issues related to algorithms, machine learning, and other aspects of artificial intelligence.

ICYMI: We’re doing a faculty cluster hire in digital humanities here at Northeastern University, to further expand an already vibrant, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers, librarians, archivists, and developers. Think about joining us.

Belle and her extra-long legs are having a lazy Saturday

JR’s digital mural at SF MOMA, featuring over a thousand San Franciscans, is pretty incredible, and this is only a small portion of it. (And the individual people move, and the mural scrolls to reveal more.)

Today I’m launching a newsletter on technology that helps rather than hurts human understanding, and human understanding that helps us create better technology. It’s called Humane Ingenuity, and you can subscribe here. Here’s a preview of the newsletter on my blog.

Just finished reading Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and loved the way it traced the rise and fall of a newspaper (done in, of course, by the internet) through the interlocking stories of a dozen people associated with the paper. Recommended.

We’re hiring a Research Data Analyst at the Northeastern University Library to join our growing programming and services related to data analysis and visualization. Join our highly collaborative and fun-to-work-in library!

The old hotel where I’m staying makes you feel at home with some nice touches from The Shining

Can’t I just enjoy my Saturday morning coffee?

A proto-VOIP conference call from 1978, oddly featuring a Dan Cohen. (via David Crotty)

A glorious excerpt cabinet. (This one happens to be Leibniz’s. From the book Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929.)

Taxonomy!

Australians have made millions of corrections to the rough text generated by the digitization of their country’s newspapers by their national library. @wragge is analyzing these text edits, and it’s interesting to see where crowdsourcing draws big crowds

In case you’re wondering how scholars access articles at a large research university, here’s a full month’s worth of data from Wally Grotophorst at George Mason (spoiler: ResearchGate + Google Scholar = 30x the traffic Sci-Hub gets)

Great to see the return of the NetNewsWire RSS reader and its commitment to the open web. I particularly like @brentsimmons and co.’s “How to Support NetNewsWire” page on GitHub, which tells it like it is.

Still confused by the size and function of Belle’s legs

Who’s a good hiking companion? Belle’s a good hiking companion

There’s this sign for the “OCR World Championships” nearby and I had to google it to make sure that scanning old books hadn’t become a combat sport

Pretty sure this covered bridge is actually a time portal

Every sign on this trail sounds like an amazing Johnny Cash song

Over @kottke, a sampler of recent writing on how algorithms are draining serendipity out of our lives, featuring @gchicco, @chaykak, and yours truly.

With Boris Johnson assuming the office of Prime Minister of the U.K., we’ve got a rebroadcast and update of the “European Disunion” episode of the What’s New podcast, featuring my interview with European political history expert Mai’a Cross.

This is like finding out that Abbey Road is an actual road

Starting in November, Macmillan will let each library system, including those that serve millions of people, buy only one copy of their new ebooks for the first eight weeks after a book’s release.

I have successfully completed the mandatory parent training class so that I can teach my twins how to drive. Now I ask you to pray for me

Using computer vision to analyze the visual style and composition of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie

A bald eagle has moved into our neighborhood

I told her to sit

New on my blog: “Engagement Is the Enemy of Serendipity”—a seemingly minor change to the New York Times iPad app provides a good case study in what’s wrong with the algorithmic personalization of our media, and why we need to bump into the unexpected.

Recording a podcast today with a human/robot movement scientist, I asked if she could train a robot arm to crack an egg for cooking (à la @robinsloan’s Sourdough), and she said that was hard, but that she’s training a robot arm to crack a whip to hit a specific point in space.

Free local history talk

Nearby lake looking nice this evening

Good series on the Space Age and the race to the moon this week on News@Northeastern, which includes many rare photos from our Boston Globe collection.

Was the “Use the Force” moment at the end of Star Wars, when Luke switched off the computer and went to manual controls, based on the moment when Neil Armstrong decided to switch to manual controls with just seconds left on the Apollo 11 lunar landing?

On our second rebroadcast + update of the summer, @podcastwhatsnew revisits an interview with an intellectual property lawyer who used to be a rock star, and we look more closely at the Music Modernization Act that he hoped would pass (and it did).

Kind of sad to see music and theology as lacking relationships with other fields in this visualization of college departments and the books they assign in courses.

Kudos to @jjkaraganis and @clured for this incredible update to the @opensyllabus site, now with over six million syllabi and many new ways to explore the entire collection.

Here are the 50 most-assigned authors in economics courses in the United States (three are women).

Here is the new and improved Open Syllabus project site I mentioned earlier, now live: opensyllabus.org

An example of what you can do with it: here are the 50 most-assigned texts in history courses: opensyllabus.org/results-list/titles?size=50&fields=History

The Open Syllabus Project is undergoing a major upgrade, now with over 6 million college syllabi and the possibility of cool visualizations like this one by David McClure showing the 164,720 most frequently-assigned texts and clustering them topically.

Screenshot of the FrameMaker book-writing software for NeXT computers, 1989 (via @moritz)

just another manic monday

“From 1982 to 2017, the share of Americans with bachelor’s degrees who had read even one work of literature (a novel, short story, poem, or play) in the past 12 months fell 22 percentage points (from 79.7% to 57.7%).” % who have read lit 1982 vs. 2017:

The percentage of American adults who have read a book in the last year has fallen to its lowest level ever, 53%. Most of that decline is due to a sharp drop in readers under the age of 55.

Of course my local Little Free Library has a copy of Practical SGML

“Data Beyond Vision: experimental physical representations of humanities data” (via @suttonkoeser, who led the team that made these models)

The Digital Library Federation 2019 Forum schedule is now up and there’s still time to register—hope to see some of you in Tampa in October.

The Apollo 11 command module looks pretty cool in the lobby of my library. (Thanks, Smithsonian, for your 3D scans for AR use.)

Wally Grotophorst analyzed DNS queries to see how many academics were routing around paywalls for scientific journals by using Sci-Hub. The results, as the saying goes, will surprise you.

Wondering what my fellow Micro.bloggers make of Darius Kazemi’s “Run Your Own Social”

Also note that most government records are already digital, as I explained in my piece on the Obama presidential library: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…

That’s a fairly bold transition to electronic records that some may have been missed during the quiet holiday week last week. And it’s not just paper; after Dec. 31, 2022, NARA won’t accept anything analog from government agencies. It will all be digital after that.

Under a new directive from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records Administration, all U.S. government records will have to be digital (or digitized if they are analog) by Jan 1, 2023. NARA will no longer archive paper.

For a deeper dive into the Touch This Page exhibit and these tactile systems (including the many raised fonts that competed with Braille), you can listen to my interview with Sari Altschuler on the What’s New podcast: whatsnewpodcast.org/touch-thi…

The latest 99% Invisible podcast covers tactile reading systems for the visually impaired from the Touch This Page exhibit we hosted at the Northeastern University Library, and that my colleagues Sari Altschuler and Waleed Meleis worked on.

Does anyone else’s dog gnaw on its own foot when a chew toy isn’t available?

Spoiler alert on the Hydro-Pneumatic-Pulsating-Vacuo Engine

Yes please, I want to read this proposed book by @robotnik on the most notorious fake perpetual motion machine of the 19th c., John Keely’s Hydro-Pneumatic-Pulsating-Vacuo Engine, but for now, his good and fun article in Technology & Culture will do.

This summer we’re rebroadcasting a few of the What’s New podcast episodes in which there have been significant developments since their original air date, each with a new segment providing a brief update. First up, our episode on Facebook and privacy.

I cannot believe the New York Times app got rid of swiping between sections. What a bad and unnecessary change.

My puppy has become an extra large praying mantis

Send someone an e-postcard from the largest collection of postcards in the United States, thanks to the Newberry Library

From the excellent Apollo 11 exhibit at the Houghton Library, the first published photograph of the Earth from space, taken by the 1947 equivalent of a GoPro stuck on a V-2 rocket.

Been thinking a lot about this too since receiving my personalized story from @robinsloan’s AI. The lingering question is not whether AI can produce plausible sentences; it can. The question is whether, as chess AI eventually did, it can produce surprisingly beautiful text moves.

“Recently, I used an AI trained on fantasy novels to generate custom stories for about a thousand readers…”—@robinsloan on how he did it, and more importantly what the autogeneration of genre fiction might mean for readers and the concept of a library.

The first in a series of posts by @msmollyebrown @NU_Archives about the incredible Boston Globe collection (https://globe.library.northeastern.edu) we have acquired, including millions of photographs that few have ever seen: librarynews.northeastern.edu

Hey everyone, we have two great positions available at the Northeastern University Library:

1) Digital Metadata and Ingest Supervisor: neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/…

2) Metadata Librarian: neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/…

Join us!

X-Dog: Red Avenger

Great to see @kfitz generously thinking aloud about her next book project, which seems like it could be subtitled “Towards a More Generous Internet.” She is absolutely correct that the main issues are social rather than technical. (This is always true.)

OMG the story I just received in the mail, generated by @robinsloan’s AI program based on my interests, is SIMPLY DELIGHTFUL. Look at this banger of a first page.

I’m still at work but I see that my dog has eased into the weekend

New on my blog: “On the Response to My Atlantic Essay on the Decline in the Use of Print Books in Universities”—with thanks for all of the great feedback, and with additional statistics about this decline, including from Canada, the U.K., and Ireland.

Interesting: A new report from the British Library outlines five possible options for “a single digital presence” for UK public libraries, including potentially creating one platform for lending ebooks to the entire country.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who wishes that Apple had named their version of Google Street View “Look Around You” rather than just “Look Around”

100 years ago, on June 4, 1919, the U.S. Congress passed the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote. From Northeastern University Library’s recently acquired archive of the Boston Globe, some very rare photos from that time and its aftermath.

Excited to receive an AI-generated story from @robinsloan’s coding/fiction wizardry, esp. given this sneak preview of the map that was created to accompany the story. (My brain has already generated a story about the Great Rois-Copompsland Compromise.)

My first walk across the Richard Serra-esque bridge that now connects the library with the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex @Northeastern

May you all find a love like my puppy has with a sock she found in the park.

This from Samuel Johnson should be the epigraph for every book, not just those by @ayjay.

In the Letters to the Editor section of @TheAtlantic, readers of my essay on the decline in the use of library books at colleges and universities respond, and I respond to them. I’ve been truly impressed by the volume and thoughtfulness of the responses.

One of my favorite things we used to do at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media was make fun t-shirts every year using Photoshop. My daughter wore this one to school today. I think it’s from 2005.

Good overview from Cliff Lynch of the ways that the privacy of readers (of ebooks, online articles, digital textbooks, etc.) is being compromised by various forms of eavesdropping and disclosure: “Reader Privacy: The New Shape of the Threat”

For more on the idea of “collective collections” of books that I mentioned in @TheAtlantic, see @lorcanD (who coined the term) et al. @OCLC: “Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections”

My latest piece for @TheAtlantic looks at the hidden and steep decline in the use of books within universities—why it’s happening, and what it means for the future of the research library: “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper”

Can’t wait to read Cut/Copy/Paste, the forthcoming book by @whitneytrettien on 17th-century collage/assemblage boutique book makers, especially after reading a draft chapter.

I was walking through Central Park today and thought I hallucinated this but it’s still on my phone

Chronicling America, the initiative to digitize historic American newspapers (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress), has reached 15 million pages, and they have some nifty visualizations of the collection

The best and most up-to-date article I’ve read on the possibility and challenges of storing digital data on DNA

In a parallel universe, the game company Milton Bradley became a trillion-dollar tech company after the success of its prototype 1980 computer that had “voice command, speech synthesis, and an action-input keypad”

Nice evening in Boston, finally

Single purpose electronic devices from the 1980s are my jam, like this lottery number picker I found in our archives (thx, @NU_Archives)

My middle-aged neck would like to know how this is a comfortable resting position

TIRED: The New York Times “Gen X” feature.

WIRED: @ftrain’s funny/sad bildungsroman of nuclear anxiety, Web euphoria, tech disillusionment, and…a new hope? In many ways a better summary of the conflicted feelings of (the nerd quadrant of) Gen X.

Playtime with my puppy is indistinguishable from BASIC programs in which the last line is always GOTO 10

“What’s New Season 2 Wrap-up” — looking back on the diverse topics we covered this year on @podcastwhatsnew, and some further notes about the growth of academic/educational podcasts like ours.

Thinking about writing a (nonpolemical) piece on college students wanting to be around books but decreasingly checking them out, and was wondering if other libraries have stats like these from Yale (64% decline in undergraduate circulation in the last 10 years). Pointers welcome.

Beautiful morning for hounding around

Tomorrow @Northeastern: “About Face: The Changing Landscape of Face Recognition” — conference on the regulatory, legal and human implications of face recognition technology.

Pupdate: legs now too long to fit on the ottoman

This post by @ayjay on the typos and other errors you find after publishing a book is so incredibly, painfully true.

My niece @person_1123’s clever and fun game, Situations, where players co-create an absurd writing prompt and then compete to write the best story based on it, is now available to all following a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Over 50 years ago, a student borrowed Alice in Wonderland from our library and never returned it—until today.

2019 Northeastern University commencement!

Bipedal tree

More May Day Morris dancing near the University Church this morning in Oxford

Morris dancers celebrating May Day at dawn this morning in front of the Bodleian Library

Johann Remmelin, A Survey of the Microcosme, 1695, with numerous 3D flaps

A printed sheet of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, reproduced on a Bodleian letterpress in original Caslon type, and folded into the 12 pages it would be in the book.

Having dinner with some fellow librarians at the Divinity School in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Giving this five stars on Yelp

I’ll be at the Bodleian library next week and can’t wait to see two exhibits, one celebrating 500 years of books having three-dimensional elements, like geometry primers with pieces that fold upward from the page, and another on the incredible variety of translated works.

Fascinating talk by @phonedude_mln on the hidden and disturbing instabilities of web archives, with appropriate cross-references to Philip K. Dick: “Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals”

Want to be at the intersection of digital scholarship, important community and newspaper archives, and creative discovery and access platforms? Join us at the Northeastern University Library as the Supervisor of Digital Metadata and Ingest!

It’s nice to see some new deals between libraries and journal publishers that account for both reading (subscription) costs and publishing costs (article processing charges), but I’d really like to see a deal that also accounts for the huge value of free peer review for journals.

It has finally happened, I have been Kondoed by my offspring

Me: “Could you run some errands with me?”

My daughter: “Running errands with you no longer brings me joy, so I am discarding it.”

There are no meals during Passover—only constant noshing.

—Yiddish proverb

Squirrel!

Y’all do know that Google Drive can OCR PDFs, right?

“The principles for a Shared Digital Europe, a proposal for a new framework for thinking about the digital space in Europe, are: Enable Self-Determination, Cultivate the Commons, Decentralise Infrastructure and Empower Public Institutions” (via @jilcos)

“The abundance of data from large scientific experiments, such as earth observation programs, radio astronomy sky surveys, and high-energy physics already exceeds the storage hardware globally fabricated per year.” The huge challenge of archiving it all

As the tense process of Brexit winds on, I talk with Mai’a Cross (@keapuolani), Professor @NUCSSH and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, about Europe’s long struggle to unify—and stay unified—on the last podcast of Season 2 of What’s New.

And here’s maybe the most evocative image of Notre Dame I found via @dpla: what looks like a home movie of a visit to Paris in 1955, in early color, from @uwmlibraries (skip to 5:00 for the cathedral)

Here’s a customized search for images of Notre Dame cathedral, from the oldest to most recent, in @dpla’s unified collection of digitized items from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.

“Oh, is this your chair? Are you sure? Maybe it could be my chair.”

And if you haven’t read his trilogy on slavery, starting with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, you really should do so.

David Brion Davis was a groundbreaking and great historian, but you wouldn’t have known it from his fairly shy and quiet demeanor. I was lucky to have taken a couple of seminars with him in graduate school and found him always incredibly insightful. RIP

#BostonMarathon

Whoa the finish of the men’s race is going to be crazy with 15 runners within 5 seconds of each other at the base of Heartbreak Hill #BostonMarathon

Worknesh Degefa in the lead by two minutes (!) at the base of Heartbreak Hill #BostonMarathon

I am only now realizing that it is National Pet Day. Here is my dog Belle sleeping.

Thanks so much to everyone who contributed to our library today—still time to drop a small (or big) donation our way if you would like to see things like this digitized and made more widely available: givingday.northeastern.edu/campaigns…

If I could time travel to 1982, I would definitely buy an Apple computer from Sherman Howe

Prince, with Sheila E. and Cat, 1987

Metallica, 1984

Hall & Oates, 1982

Donna Summer, 1981

Devo, 1980

Anyhow, some other fun things from our Boston Phoenix archive to follow.

I was looking through our archive of the Boston Phoenix today, and the topic of their comedy column, called “Spurious,” for January 15, 1988, was…Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination by allying himself with the religious right.

BONUS OFFER: If we get 50 donations of any size ($5 is a-ok with me) from the distant lands of the internet, I’ll go down to our archives and post pics of bands from the 80s. So please be a flock of seagulls and rush to donate a few bucks! Thank you.

Hey all, if you like some of the things that come out of my library, including the What’s New podcast, unique archival materials, and digital research, please consider throwing a few bucks toward the Northeastern library on Giving Day today. Thanks!

More on the design and functionality of that “next-generation paper,” and how the prototype travel book was assembled and coded: quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/333…

Prototype of a new kind of paper that has Bluetooth embedded in it—books made of this paper can interact bidirectionally with your smartphone: www.youtube.com/watch

I am confused, Denver

New by me @TheAtlantic: “Obama’s Presidential Library Is Already Digital”—When the record of a presidency is largely email and JPEGs rather than handwritten memos and black-and-white photos, we need to think differently about its nature and use.

“Why You (A Humanist) Should Care About Optical Character Recognition” by @ryancordell #cni19s

Really looking forward to hearing @kfitz talk about her book Generous Thinking, live at #cni19s. (Wrote about that book on my blog a few weeks ago—tl;dr: you should read it.)

OUT: Betting on the Final Four

IN: Betting on your dog’s DNA test

“I’m sorry, this couch is taken”

We’ve just added banks of these portable chargers, which can power a laptop and several devices, to make it easier for patrons of our library to study or collaborate wherever and in whatever configuration they want. They look kind of Cylon too.

New to me, from the Touch This Page symposium on tactile reading systems, which we’re hosting @Northeastern today: “The Holy Braille”=the real need, currently unmet, for a page-sized Braille reading device that can change on the fly like a Kindle, and is reasonably priced.

oh, hello

On the latest What’s New podcast, my guest is the vice-chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control at the United Nations, Denise Garcia. She’s working to stop the autonomous, AI-driven warfare machines that will soon exist.

Loving our new, and very meta, laptop stickers

“I’m on the couch. I’ve got my bone. Do I look like I want to take a walk?”

I remain confused about our new dog’s oversized legs, but she’s a cute octopus.

Delighted we are hosting a conference on how to enable and pursue digital scholarship, a joint effort of the Northeastern University Library, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Coalition for Networked Information.

All of these phishing scams are going to make it hard for me when I actually need my staff to send me Amazon gift cards.

“Has the emergence of facial recognition technology proven that surveillance technology has finally gone too far? This conference @Northeastern will explore the encompassing regulatory, legal and human implications in facial recognition technology.”

Alyssa Loyless on how to create a highly detailed model of York Minster cathedral through digitization, Adobe Illustrator, and papercraft. So clever.

For the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, I spoke with @KyleKCourtney, legal scholar @Northeastern and copyright advisor @Harvard, about how the Web forever changed the way we access and share creative works, on the latest What’s New podcast.

My daughter is trying to convince me that I’m a robot

Finished a book chapter and a couple of long-ish blog posts this week and, as always, it feels good to be writing at length.

“Robin Sloan’s Fusion of Technology and Humanity”—in which I look at why @robinsloan abandoned a first draft of his novel Sourdough, and what that tells us about the intersection of the artisanal and the digital, technoskepticism and cyberenthusiasm.

I’m eating ice cream straight from the container and my daughter just asked me if I was going through a bad breakup.

“Presidential Libraries and the Digitization of Our Lives”—My deep dive into the analog and digital record of several presidencies, including the Obama Center/Library, and how they reflect the quieter changes to our personal record over recent decades.

Our last two dogs were dachshunds, so Belle’s legs are hilarious

Read an abandoned draft of the 1st chapter of @robinsloan’s novel Sourdough and have some thoughts about why he decided to rework it, largely due to what he wanted to explore at the intersection of the artisanal and the digital. Might be worth an artisanal, digital blog post.

On the latest What’s New podcast, “How College Students Get the News,” we dig into the fascinating results of a recently released large study of the news consumption habits of college students. Featuring @alisonjhead and @wihbey—tune in!

We’ve got a little room left for those who would like to attend the @cni_org/@ARLnews Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop, but please register over the next week as we plan to close registration soon. Join a great group of attendees and institutions!

“Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking” — my review of @kfitz’s important new book on how the university should and must become more integrated with, and helpful to, the world beyond its gates.

Let’s ditch our smartphones for phones from 1983

Start of the 2019 baseball season! @RedSox vs. @Northeastern

.@davidlazer tracked down a representative sample of 16,000 Twitter users from across the political spectrum and recreated their tweet streams from the fall of 2016. How many sketchy news sources did they see and share? Listen on the latest What’s New.

There’s a good section in Linda Colley’s Britons, for instance, on how early 18th-century Brits often went no farther than about 10 miles from their home town. Opportunity went 28 miles from its landing site.

Opportunity traveled farther on Mars during its lifetime than most people traveled from their birthplace before the 19th century.

I believe my puppy is now teething

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to last week’s @podcastwhatsnew, “Seeking Justice for Hidden Deaths,” please give it a stream. Margaret Burnham is remarkable, as is her Civil Rights and Restorative Justice project.

With the addition of a letterpress lab, an exhibit on tactile writing systems, our wide variety of digital humanities projects, and research around hard OCR problems, I’m really excited about the constellation of work around technologies of reading/writing here @Northeastern.

I’ve been introducing my new dog to other dogs in the neighborhood, but her favorite new friend is a long-haired panda. 14/10 didn’t know you could have a panda for a pet

“February 12, 1809, and Wikipedia’s Evolution”—Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on this day, an odd fact that used to be highlighted in their Wikipedia entries. How fights over these factoids have changed Wikipedia’s historical writing.

One more from @Huskiana

Loving the trays of type @Huskiana (nice combination of Futura Bold and old letterpress tech)

At the launch of @Huskiana, @Northeastern’s new letterpress lab, the brainchild of @ryancordell. So cool.

Does anyone know how to reset the PRAM on a coffee machine?

Google hasn’t paid much attention to Google Books for years, and it’s really starting to show.

There are no scarier words in the English language than “I have just registered my kid for driver’s ed”

I just love this evocative book in @zetamathian’s office. It’s the 2nd volume of NASA’s Orbital Flight Handbook, for “mission sequencing problems” like when your spaceship’s re-entry angle is…slightly off 😬

1000s of African Americans were murdered as the civil rights movement arose—a brutal continuation of decades of lynching. On What’s New, I talk w/ Margaret Burnham, who is solving these cold cases & seeking justice

Read a story aloud and have it illustrated on the fly with art from @metmuseum (uses the Met’s 300K CC0-licensed images, their brand new subject index, and a bit of AI)

Registration is now open to everyone (not just members of the Association of Research Libraries or the Coalition for Networked Information) for the Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop we are hosting at the end of March: dsg.neu.edu/cni_works…

Like all responsible dog owners, we already have a hundred nicknames for our new pup, including Houndo Calrissian

I mentioned this talk when I saw it in December, and the video is now available: an incredibly blunt and knowledgeable criticism from someone who knows a lot about the underlying technology: David Rosenthal, “Blockchain: What’s Not To Like?”

Sure, those two guys made it across Antarctica, but many of us survived the journey to get our mail today

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the latest What’s New podcast on tactile reading, it’s really worth a listen, and the associated “Touch This Page” exhibit opens soon in our library with archival and 3D-printed examples.

On the latest What’s New podcast, I talk with @SariAltschuler about the fascinating origin and impact of tactile writing systems for the visually impaired, like Braille and Boston Line Type. I learned so much from Sari and you will too: “Touch This Page”

#LunarEclipse

We have another opening @ClubSnell: Global Campus Outreach & Online Learning Librarian — come join us in a vibrant and friendly library that is exploring the frontiers of research and learning.

Delighted that we will be hosting a conference on 3/25-26, sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information and the Association of Research Libraries, on how to set up and advance digital scholarship at universities. Registration is now open: dsg.neu.edu/cni_works…

Meanwhile, “In a truly landmark development, the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act makes permanent the federal government’s commitment to Open Data and an ‘open by default’ policy for all non-sensitive government data.”

We may have mistakenly adopted a kangaroo instead of a hound

Ever have that nagging feeling you’re being watched?

Next Wednesday evening, January 16, I’ll be a panelist at “Conversation in Civic Innovation: Libraries as Drivers of Civic Engagement,” at District Hall in Boston. Free and open to the public, but registration recommended (there will be a large audience).

The first What’s New podcast of 2019 is with Dan O’Brien, author of the new book The Urban Commons: How Data and Technology Can Rebuild Our Communities. Using smart city data, Dan has developed some fascinating ideas about the life of our cities. Tune in!

911 is for emergencies, but many cities now have 311 for citizens to report issues and request services. On the latest What’s New, Dan O’Brien analyzed millions of 311 calls to see how people relate to each other and their government, and build communities.

Coming later this month to @ClubSnell: “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read,” an exhibit on ability, access, and tactile writing systems like braille, followed by a symposium starting on April 4, which you can now register for: touchthispage.eventbrite.com

Say hello to Belle, a hound we just adopted from a rescue.

Not-to-be-missed exhibit: “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City,” currently at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA—a deep exploration of gender and power. The showstoppers are the incredible royal gowns, but it also has truly astonishing books and scrolls.