For New Year’s Eve, the British Library has a tutorial on how to party like it’s 999

Mark Twain: “A copyright term of an author’s life and 50 yrs will satisfy any reasonable author, b/c it will take care of his children. Let the grandchildren take care of themselves.” Great-grandchildren worry as 1923 books finally enter the public domain.

The U.S. Potash Company commissioned Ansel Adams to make a photographic portrait of their Carlsbad, New Mexico mine, and he slyly gave them a version of Turner’s “Rain, Steam and Speed”

Love this photo of Georgia O’Keeffe taken by Ansel Adams (at the MFA Boston Ansel Adams exhibit)

Spent this week doubling down on going back to the indie web. Finally moved everything to the great Reclaim Hosting, set up FreshRSS there and imported my big OPML file of individual blogs, and looking into adding curated Twitter feeds there too. Happy with Microblog for social.

Indeed, that software interpolation makes the parallels between They Shall Not Grow Old and The Wizard of Oz (20 minutes of black and white before the surge of color) even stronger, as the WWI footage becomes a swirly, colorful dream state that actually turns the war into myth.

.@tcarmody is of course right about the general problem(s) with Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, but even on its own terms, the software interpolation needed to change 14 frames/sec to 24 frames/sec made the WWI footage uncanny and inauthentic.

I didn’t realize that the government shutdown includes the National Endowment for the Humanities, and my heart goes out to our colleagues at the NEH during this holiday season.

Snowboarding on Christmas Eve is the new Chinese food on Christmas

Good tip (and lede)

The full cold moon is out tonight, so bright it’s almost like the sun

My Own Personal Stonehenge is also my favorite Johnny Cash cover song

Today is the day of my own personal Stonehenge, when the sun sets perfectly into a notch between two buildings outside my office window.

Researching fonts for the visually impaired for a show on multisensory reading I’m recording with @SariAltschuler for @podcastwhatsnew. (The podcast will come out in January.) Here’s a 3D-printed sample of Boston Line Type.

Hey all, we’re looking for a Marketing & Events Coordinator in our fine library @ClubSnell @Northeastern. Let us know if this is you!

A project by @dasmiq, newly funded by @NEH_ODH, will compare multiple digitized copies of books to improve OCR and locate handwritten marginalia, which is a very cool twofer.

The jokers in my library’s fabrication lab made me a little something out of wood

David Rosenthal’s summary of where Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (and blockchain technology in general) have ended up is rather brutal: “1) a trustless system that trusts a lot of people you have every reason not to trust…” #cni18f

“Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree: The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.” Didn’t know about much of this 40-year history, including many blockchain precursors and many old critiques (via David Rosenthal at #cni18f)

Alan Jacobs has launched a newsletter, to which I insta-subscribed. I also recommend his latest book, The Year of Our Lord 1943, as a source of thought about societies in need of rebuilding. (If you’re reading this on Twitter and looking for @ayjay, he’s now on @microdotblog.)

Hidden in Cliff Lynch’s opening keynote at #cni18f was the premise of a science fiction book or movie: archives that preserve software for decades will have to air gap that software—it will never be patched and will have massive vulnerabilities if ever exposed to the internet.

You look nice this evening, Boston

“By centralizing your writing, photos, and other web pages at your own domain name, you can control your content but still share it out to other social networks.” @manton on using @microdotblog as your “social media home base” (exactly what I’m doing)

Finals are here, so bubble wrap has returned to our library. (Stress reduction dogs are coming next week.)

You can read my piece and nine other perspectives on this great milestone on the Europeana 10th Anniversary website—go @Europeanaeu! #Europeana10

“The Past, Evenly Distributed: Europeana at 10” — It was an honor to be asked by @Europeanaeu to write a piece on the 10th anniversary of their launch, and to celebrate what they have accomplished and what’s to come. #Europeana10

Idea: pumpkin spice latke

“Why an Age of Machine Learning Needs the Humanities,” by @Ted_Underwood

Meet the Axolotl, or Mexican walking fish. If hurt, it automatically regrows the wounded area, and can even make a new leg or eye. Now meet three young scientists who study the Axolotl on this week’s What’s New podcast: The Regeneration of Body Parts

Thirty years ago I took a course with Elaine Pagels, “Spiritual Autobiography.” Tragically, her husband had just died in a mountaineering accident. Now she has published her own spiritual autobiography, which covers this dark period.

On the latest episode of the What’s New podcast, I talk to three young researchers who are pioneering the regeneration of body parts by the studying a strange and magical salamander. Tune in!

A conference on imaginary maps from Thomas More’s Utopia to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth

We’ve got another opening at the Northeastern University Library: Digital Metadata and Ingest Supervisor — join us!

“At best the Internet Archive has collected 0.39% of the web.” @edsu reminds us, with @bergisjules, that we can’t collect and preserve the complete record of any media, nor should we. “The Ferguson Principles”

My niece Noa Chazan has launched a very cool and fun card game on Kickstarter that has echoes of generative fiction and Twitter bots — Situations: The Story Writing Card Game

My in-laws have had a productive year writing books

We are having turkey tomorrow, but we are also having a large brisket, and I swear by the sous vide method: water bath at 176 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours. Best meat you’ll ever eat.

Next step in going indie with my social media: Goodbye, Instagram, hello indie photo sharing. (With big thanks and help from the great @microdotblog community, and especially @manton and @cleverdevil)

We have two openings @ClubSnell @Northeastern right now, with more to come soon:

Web Developer: neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/…

IDEAS-Help & Info Coordinator: neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/…

Join our collaborative, creative library!

Speaking of books, for some reason I felt that I should read Yuval Noah Harari’s new book (somewhat diagnostically, to see what happens when a historian tries to become a futurist). I have no comment.

Looking forward to reading Jason Farman’s new book Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World.

Congrats to Hillary Chute, a colleague here @Northeastern, for having her book Why Comics? selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2018 by the New York Times. Hillary was on What’s New when the book was released: whatsnewpodcast.org/episode9/

On the latest episode of @podcastwhatsnew: “Bridging the Academic-Public Divide Through Podcasts” — audio of my keynote at the @sound_edu conference @Harvard

As part of my ongoing separation from centralized social media, you can now follow me on Mastodon @dan@social.dancohen.org. Unlike Twitter (where some may be reading this), I’ll receive replies to that handle, thanks to the ActivityPub API and Microblog.

This year I’m buying all of my holiday gifts from the 1981 Sears Wish Book

I accept the challenge

Hey all, we’re looking for a WordPress/Web Developer to join our friendly, collaborative library @ClubSnell @Northeastern and work on cutting-edge applications and digital scholarship: neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/…

BONUS: If you listen after the credits, Gov. Dukakis recounts how he met his wife Kitty while running the Boston Marathon on a lark, in Keds, during high school. (You won’t believe what place he came in.) whatsnewpodcast.org/election-…

On today’s special Election Day episode of the What’s New podcast, I’m joined by Michael Dukakis, three-term governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, to talk about the state of politics and America—and where we go from here.

My favorite vote button in @amhistorymuseum’s extensive collection (found via @dpla)

My candid conversation with three-term governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis drops tomorrow @podcastwhatsnew. Subscribe now for some good Election Day listening!

I know I am being sonically manipulated, but yes, I will buy more groceries when Earth, Wind & Fire is playing.

New on my blog: “Bridging the Academic-Public Divide Through Podcasts”—my keynote at the Sound Education conference at Harvard, on educational and academic podcasts. I focused on how podcasts can make academic work more engaging, relatable, and relevant.

There’s been a lot of concern about “deep fakes,” using machine learning to fabricate video & audio in ways that look & sound convincingly real. A related issue: can we prevent the historical record from being subtly changed without our knowledge?

Speaking of podcasts, a reminder that I’ll have three-term governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis on @podcastwhatsnew on Election Day. Subscribe now to get the download early on Tuesday.

I believe the Sound Education conference at Harvard, for educational audio producers & listeners, is still accepting registrations. I’m giving a keynote Friday on how podcasts can bridge the academic-public divide. If you love or make podcasts, join us!

As part of our Neighborhood Matters series @ClubSnell, we’re screening a documentary today on the 3 months in 1972 when the inmates peacefully & productively ran Massachusetts’ maximum security prison after the guards went on strike. Free/open to all.

Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab has finished digitizing 360 years of American case law, and starting today is providing access to 6.4 million legal cases via an API and bulk download

Borges jokes are my coping mechanism

They have every car imaginable