In the healthy exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, Twitter’s unhealthy metrics of engagement should have been discarded as well.
In the healthy exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, Twitter’s unhealthy metrics of engagement should have been discarded as well.
Our kids just got home from college and we asked them to add anything to the shopping list that they needed and that wasn’t in the house
The 2022 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Whiteboard Writing goes to
An interview with Christine McVie from 1987, from our Archives and Special Collections
In my digital history class we used new AI tools to see how easy it would be to forge historical documents, e.g., to create fake photographs of D-Day, and the results were scary.
Last night we started this year’s winemaking with some very nice-looking Pinot Noir and Syrah grapes from the Columbia River Gorge.
An interesting study that uses a trained model to analyze Instagram posts from popular tourist sites in England, finding that “tourist photographs taken in western countries tend to avoid the presence of people” and “attempt to construct idealised images”
Checking out the beta over at post.news, where I am, unsurprisingly, @dancohen. (Thx @katzish/@karaswisher for the heads up.) Strikes me as having similar goals to @pressfwd, but for a general, rather than scholarly, audience.
“I am under the table in case you have extra food”
One-stop shopping in 2022: Amazon
One-stop shopping in 1973: that one block of LA serving all of your chess, fur coat, and tropical fish needs
fracti
For years now my “tweets” (if you are reading this on Twitter) have been syndicated from social.dancohen.org, which uses the excellent micro.blog. (Also mirrored on Mastodon.) Easy peasy lemon squeezy, c’mon over y’all.
writer: “AI, turn this outline into an essay”
~10-page essay appears~
reader: “AI, turn this essay into an outline”
“My children contributed nothing to this project and were not for them, I would certainly have finished it several years earlier. They are not even particularly interested…Nevertheless, I love them a lot more than this book, and I regret nothing.”—@lmullen in his acknowledgements
After a hiatus, I’m back with a new edition of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity: “Humane Ingenuity 45: 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
Fall, the best season
Sometimes Belle falls asleep while standing up with her head resting on my leg
One of the most important books of the year is Margaret Burnham’s By Hands Now Known, a profound accounting of anti-Black killings in the mid-century South. I’m proud that @NortheasternLib has developed and made accessible the companion digital archive
Thrilled about @NortheasternLib’s new grant from the @SloanFoundation to study and develop effective practices for collaboration and communication by researchers distributed across multiple locations, a pressing issue as we emerge from the pandemic.
Just another manic Monday
When you think about it, squirrels are always free soloing
Finished bottling our 2021 vintage. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir rosé, Syrah, Zinfandel. Love the rosé’s color. The Syrah, new for us this year from grapes from the Columbia River Gorge, seems from early sampling to be a winner, but we won’t know until 2024.
Really excited to be teaching again this fall after a long hiatus from the classroom. I’m still dean-ing and vice provost-ing, but I’m looking forward to having those special interactions you can only have with a room full of interesting and interested students.
Convocation @Northeastern, welcoming the great class of 2026!
Look at Belle when we told her that our kids were now off at college
