New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 49: Style and Personality” — on the small but important difference between these two expressive notions. Also: refreshing the design of a library.

Once again Thankgiving is the start of our winemaking. This year we are making Syrah, Pinot Noir, a Malbec/Syrah blend, a Pinot Noir rosé, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc. Grapes look nice!

Guilty as charged

A sweet story about a son finding something special in a book his late mother gave him 20 years ago: “It Happened Through a Book”

Northeastern University is celebrating its 125th year, and it was an honor to speak about our library at Convocation this evening

The Northeastern University Library is hiring a Text Mining Specialist — I think this is a really interesting position in our growing, innovative library. Please apply if this sounds like you!

This essay by Dan Bouk, which asks “Is it possible to train students to use something like ChatGPT in a manner that is appropriate? Or right? Or ethical? Or, most fundamentally, good?” is appropriate, right, ethical, and good.

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Humane Ingenuity 48: Reading and Writing” — With the new school year coming, my letter to students about using AI bots to write; an update on a lawsuit I wrote about earlier this year in The Atlantic; professorial blogs.

AI models are now ingesting scholarly content in an attempt to dispel their hallucinations. But another possibility looms: that AI will instead drag down scholarship into its muddy realm. A new essay on my newsletter: “AI Is Coming for Scholarship Next”

Bottled this year’s rosés over the weekend. Made from pinot noir grapes using a Rhône yeast. We also did malolactic fermentation. Love the color. Will open the first bottle on the 4th of July!

Northeastern undergraduate commencement, Fenway Park

Glorious weather at Fenway Park for @Northeastern commencement, grad students this morning

We have an exciting opening for a new Associate Director of our Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library—join us!

I will be making brief remarks at the beginning of the conference on the state of generative AI, and the panels that follow are going to be great.

A little last minute, but you can tune into @Northeastern’s @NUlabTMN spring conference on a critical topic, “Generative AI: Creative Potentials and Ethical Responsibilities,” in 30 minutes, at 9:45am EDT, all are welcome just register at this link

Love the monogram of Jane Lumley (1537-1578), Renaissance scholar and translator blogs.bl.uk/digitised…

According to the Washington Post, my website, dancohen.org, ranks #181,339 out of 15 million websites that were crawled to create the training set for many AI text tools. 120K words from my blog/newsletter are evidently swimming around in those chatbots.

I wrote this piece for @TheAtlantic not to argue the finer points of copyright law, but to highlight that books exist in an ecosystem that should balance the needs of writers and readers, of publishers and libraries

Some commentary on my Atlantic article on the fight between libraries and publishers over ebooks, from @ayjay

For The Atlantic, I wrote about last week’s ruling in an important case that may shape the future of reading—and likely diminish the role of libraries in that future

Windshield was crystalline art this morning

New issue of my newsletter is out: “Can Engineered Writing Ever Be Great?” — Will tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) ever be able to create truly great and unique prose, rather than plausible-sounding mimicry?

Early sample of our 2021 Syrah was so good that we decided to get another 200 lbs of grapes from the same small vineyard in Oregon for a late winter crush this weekend.

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In the healthy exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, Twitter’s unhealthy metrics of engagement should have been discarded as well.