Today’s hike
Today’s hike
The evolution of museum wall labels:
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New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 27: Reopening Time”—Uzbek textile tech/art; can lit profs/students tell real writing by famous authors from fake GPT text?; printing leaves; archive of Covid Craigslist posts; 1st mobile phone in a music video
Just found this mysterious junction box in our old house. I think it’s for the 1930 Graybar telephone system that runs through the house but I’m not sure. A+ for the font and the importance of properly timing your chimes
ominous word usage trend
By some cosmic synchronicity, @ayjay’s new book Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind just arrived, on this day when we reopened the library.
I’m a firm believer that every library reopening brings a little light back into our world. We’re reopening this morning. Feels pretty good.
Today’s hike is very on-brand for 2020
For the curious, here’s @Northeastern’s very efficient high-volume testing center, where students will be tested every three days and faculty and staff twice a week.
nice try, murder hornets
Guess who went into the office all day today for the first time in months, and guess who stayed home
OPENING SCENE: Interior shot of a empty library. The late summer sun blazes through the window. CAMERA PANS RIGHT: A slow scan of the newspaper section. The dates on the yellowing papers are all from early March. JUMP CUT TO A CLOSE-UP:
How are reliable info/stats sites like @COVID19tracking going to handle national and state testing numbers once universities like mine launch their testing programs, which will test the same (big) population repeatedly each week? Will skew raw #s way up, and % positive way down.
A+ design and typography on this manhole cover
This weekend’s reading 📚
Stéfan Sinclair was brilliant and did so much groundbreaking work in digital humanities, but most of all, he was simply a really kind person and a wonderful collaborator with so many of us. What a profound tragedy to hear that he has passed away.
2020
New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 26: Considerate Over Clever”—Photography exhibit about empty urban spaces; crowdsourcing begins on an alternative weekly; questioning the questions developers get in job interviews; 19th century virtual reality
As required by Massachusetts law, this is an official notification to the general public that my children have just received their driver’s licenses. You have been warned, Boston.
Just a reminder that we are filling several positions in the Northeastern University Library, and I’d especially like to call your attention to the Semantic Data Specialist role.
Nice historical artifact we discovered while sorting through some of our books: a 1949 edition of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, with Yiddish newspapers holding together the spine. A physical representation of an intellectual community.
I would like a Dogme 95 sports channel
I’ve been going over my notes on digital history from 2003-2005, including some of these early Google search results, and it’s incredible how many of the top sites are by amateur enthusiasts, run off their AOL accounts or with a tilde and their name after some ISP’s domain name.