Our new library robot is more Star Trek than Black Mirror
Our new library robot is more Star Trek than Black Mirror
I like the new graphics we have up in our library showing visualizations of how our lives have changed over the last year. (These are by @Northeastern students studying data viz.)
In case you’re wondering what the gestation period is for a laptop, mine has a baby bump after 12 months of Zoom.
New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 37: Data and the Humanities” — Thinking about @COVID19Tracking as a humanities, rather than data, project; humane artwork created by software; the origins and use of a post office dataset; a cat notation system
Library Redensification Plan is my indie rock band name
Good morning
Every year, Passover offers an eternal lesson: Never eat matzo over your keyboard
Great: The Louvre collections are now online! Also great: all metadata/descriptions are (effectively) CC-BY. A little less great: re-use is limited to medium-format photos for private or educational purposes, and (of course) to artists whose IP has expired
Well this is great news: @ukglo is returning to revitalize the Flickr Commons, which she created and launched in 2008, and which has shared millions of photographs from libraries, archives, and museums.
We may have taken the “next big thing looks like a toy” shtick a bit too far
Winemaking update: We are only a month away from our first bottling, and in preparation we got this gorgeous Italian tappatrice a colonna (standing corker).
Vertical browser tabs, where have you been all my life
New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster” — “Singin’ in the Rain” as you’ve never seen it before (by @jmittell); the computational analysis of K-pop dance moves; a platform for the scanning of archives; the pandemic year in review.
The LFT, or Library Fungible Token (pronounced “Lifty”), is an object, like a book, that through the immutable laws of physics can only be possessed by one person at a time.
On the latest What’s New podcast, I talk to @JimMc_Grath, one of the curators of A Journal of the Plague Year, which has been collecting thousands of stories and digital artifacts over the past 12 mos. What has been, and should be, saved from the pandemic.
In addition to being showered with awards, I hope that the work of @COVID19Tracking is archived well, including the behind-the-scenes staff communications, documents, and tech. As a historian of science, it’s clear to me that the project will be (and should be) studied in depth.
We are down to just two: the stove and the microwave.
How many clocks or devices that display the time do you have left that need to be manually changed for daylight savings?
I’m on the quad…or am I?
I feel seen
Really nice springtime vibe on campus today @Northeastern
Perfect together: @dpla + @wikimedia: “In our first year, [DPLA] uploaded over 1.25 million media files to Wikimedia Commons, making it the single largest bulk upload to Wikimedia Commons ever.” Great flow from libraries/archives/museums->widespread use.
Today’s hike
New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 35: Bounded and Boundless” — A collection of unusual books; NFTs and the long (and fruitless) quest for uniqueness; more on data sonification; the Women Writers Project; the history of podcasts from 1893-1911
Incredible update to Zotero (beta): fantastic built-in PDF reader with many annotation features; better notes; a new tabbed interface so you can have multiple items open at the same time; full support for embedded images. Team @Zotero killing it, as usual.
