Dan Cohen

Follow @dancohen on Micro.blog.

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.

→ 4:43 PM, Jun 16

“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.

→ 4:37 PM, Jun 16

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

→ 8:59 AM, Jun 13

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!

→ 1:20 PM, Jun 12

X-Dog: Red Avenger

→ 8:41 PM, Jun 11

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.)

→ 11:29 AM, Jun 10

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.

→ 5:39 PM, Jun 8

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

→ 3:13 PM, Jun 7

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.

→ 4:55 PM, Jun 6

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.

→ 9:32 AM, Jun 6

John Wihbey's Recommendations to Journalists for Countering Misinformation

Some good concrete suggestions from @wihbey for countering misinformation in the media if you are a journalist:

1) Find sources within the communities that are susceptible to misinformation but who don’t buy into the misinformation, and quote them in your article.

2) List a conspiracy theory that is gaining traction next to other conspiracy theories that have clearly been discredited or that are more obviously absurd.

3) People often only see the headline of an article, e.g., on social media, so make sure the headline doesn’t muddy the truth.

Much more in John’s important new book, The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World.

→ 9:44 AM, Jun 5

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”

→ 8:24 PM, Jun 4

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.

→ 9:48 AM, Jun 4

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.)

→ 4:25 PM, Jun 3

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

→ 11:46 AM, Jun 3

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

→ 10:44 AM, Jun 3

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

→ 8:45 PM, Jun 1

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.

→ 12:36 PM, Jun 1

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.

→ 7:48 PM, May 30

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”

→ 12:00 PM, May 29

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”

→ 4:42 PM, May 28

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”

→ 8:50 AM, May 26

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.

→ 9:00 AM, May 25

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

→ 9:15 PM, May 23

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

→ 3:53 PM, May 21