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In my digital history class we used new AI tools to see how easy it would be to forge historical documents, e.g., to create fake photographs of D-Day, and the results were scary.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

Seems like this was just last week, but it was 17 years ago. In the actual last week, we dropped our kids off at college.

It’s over a half-century old, but Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death remains the most brutal criticism of the metaverse I’ve read.

It’s been a long week, here’s Belle stretching out in the last sunbeam

I did enjoy my trip, {{airlineName}}!

Dig if you will this printer

This door inspired me to write a song, would you like to hear it

Tired: UFO research

Wired: Bigfoot research

(@ Lake Quinault, Olympic National Park)

Oregon Coast Trail gets an A+

Tillamook Rock Lighthouse lit up by the sunset

You look nice today, Oregon

Visited the vineyard where the grapes we make wine from are grown. Peter, who is 80 and still handling all the details of the vineyard, generously showed us around and chatted about winemaking. At the end, the clouds lifted and Mt. Hood revealed itself.

um, no

I love my children, but I must report to the authorities that according to their senior yearbook they are

You look nice today, New Hampshire

I should not have diced this onion

Femme fatale

Undergraduate commencement @Northeastern begins at Fenway Park

Honored to meet Donna Shalala, honorary degree recipient @Northeastern commencement

Rockin’ end to @Northeastern grad commencement at Fenway Park

Commencement for graduate students @Northeastern

Getting ready for my favorite new tradition @Northeastern—commencement at Fenway Park

This year in Boston, spring will take place between the hours of seven and eight pm on Wednesday

“I see you are trying to watch the game but I require attention”

Intense three-runner battle at mile 20 #BostonMarathon

Not sure I’ve ever seen as big a lead pack at mile 20 at the #BostonMarathon

Just minted the afikomen as an NFT

Just hid the afikomen on the blockchain

Does anyone know if Midjourney is related to, or uses, DALL•E 2? I’m currently writing something about the former, and since the latter seems incredibly similar, I’m wondering if they are connected.

Cooper, @Northeastern’s helpful campus dog, just gave me his business card

Ok, which portmanteau are we going with for the convergence of Purim and St. Patrick’s Day? Thanksgivukkah was fine for the Thanksgiving/Hanukkah convergence, but St. Purim’s Day seems…awkward.

New issue of my newsletter: “Humane Ingenuity 44: Bookwork and Cloud Labs” — @whitneytrettien’s new book Cut/Copy/Paste and parallels between 17th-century bookwork and today’s digital writing; science labs in the cloud; a tale of two William Blake ledgers

We’re hiring one or more faculty members in digital humanities here @Northeastern—join us!

One of the great dividing lines in the history of technology is between Things With Clocks That Update Themselves for Daylight Savings and Things With Clocks You Have to Manually Change.

Ah, Boston in springtime

The metaverse was actually created by The Cars in “Moving in Stereo”

Our library robot has turned on romantic mode for Valentine’s Day

“What made it clear that these two men were highly educated was the fact that they did not aim for the head.”

I survived the Blizzard of ‘78. I knew the Blizzard of ‘78. The Blizzard of ‘78 was a friend of mine. Blizzard of ‘22, you’re no Blizzard of ‘78.

First issue of my newsletter for 2022: “Humane Ingenuity 43: Your Own Personal Paul McCartney” — What we can learn from a robot that paints badly; @noahkalina helpfully responds to my skepticism about NFTs; two readers aggressively annotate a library book

My family is launching our own cryptocurrency, bitcohen, so we can store our grievances on the blechchain

Was feeling pessimistic about 2022 until I heard that my kids’ school is staging a roller derby version of Much Ado About Nothing

Our 2021 grapes have all been pressed. On to malolactic fermentation.

.@dferriero transformed the National Archives during his 12 years as Archivist of the United States—huge kudos to him as he retires. In his first strategic plan (2009) he committed to broad access through digitization; now 150 million records are online.

Our first time making a Syrah. Grapes look amazing, especially considering they survived 110° heat in Oregon last summer.