Dan Cohen - Vice Provost, Dean, and Professor at Northeastern University
Hello fine reader of my blog! This is a brief note to highlight that as of a couple of years ago I stopped cross-posting from my newsletter to this blog, so if you would like to receive new blog, ahem, newsletter posts, please resubscribe in your favorite feed reader using https://newsletter.dancohen.org/rss, or you can subscribe [ ]
As we await the next generation of engineered writing, of tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs), it is worth pondering whether they will ever create truly great and unique prose, rather than the plausible-sounding mimicry they are currently known for. By preprocessing countless words and the statistical relationships between them [ ]
( The Library of the Distant Future, as envisioned by Midjourney, when I was let into the beta in March 2022.) Before one can become a Cassandra or Pollyanna about the uses or abuses of impressive text-to-image AI tools like DALL•E and Midjourney, it is worth stepping back and reflecting about the fundamental nature of this new technology. What is it [ ]
(Sara Gothard, Library of Babel, 2017, in the Jamaica Plain branch of the Boston Public Library, part of their recently digitized art collection.) We have become familiar with how technology, media, commerce, and forms of human expression are deeply intertwined. Streaming music services and apps like TikTok, and the models behind them, encourage the production of shorter [ ]
Whenever I check out a library book that has been underlined or annotated, I think about the two anonymous students who aggressively marked up Widener Library s copy of Rollo May s Man s Search for Himself: I hope these two students did in fact meet at some point, although they may have been separated by decades. It would make for [ ]
(Noah Kalina, Lumberland / 20180716) Noah Kalina is a gifted photographer who has a commercial practice and also works as an artist. He is probably best known for his Everyday project, in which he has been taking a photograph of himself each day for the last two decades. I am more interested in his nature photography, which [ ]
Here are sixteen sketches of a 3D printer by Leonardo da Vinci, as envisioned by AI using those words as a prompt: By Rivers Have Wings and John David Pressman, using a CLIP-guided diffusion. Multimedia essays from the Plant Humanities Lab were recently posted and are worth a look. These pieces use Juncture, a new open-source tool developed by JSTOR [ ]
I m back from a summer hiatus — perhaps not into the carefree fall I (and you) had hoped for. But with students streaming once again into my library, the beginning of this academic year still has that rejuvenating anticipation of new experiences and encounters — a prompt for all of us to shake out of [ ]
(Alice Baber, Noble Numbers, 1964-1965, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.) The Leventhal Map Education Center has a new tool called Moviemaps that allows you to pair an explanatory video with a map (or maps) in a separate window, and that can contain hidden triggers within the video that zoom and pan the adjacent map to highlight certain [ ]
Sixty years ago, illustrator Arthur Radebaugh drew scenes from the future — that is, our present — including, quite presciently, remote education and work, self-driving cars, and an “electronic home library.” His Sunday strip that ran in newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, was called “Closer Than We Think.” (Recliners + the scrolling text of a book [ ]