Heads up! Our Editor-at-Large sign up and user registration process has changed. Read about our new system here.
Editors' Choice: Digitization ≠ Repatriation
By: Sarah Emily Bond
This week over at Hyperallergic, I wrote about new exhibits at the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum which both engage with the cultural heritage of ancient and medieval Ethiopia. An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and…
Read More
Editors' Choice: Meaning chains with word embeddings
By: Ben Schmidt
Matthew Lincoln recently put up a Twitter bot that walks through chains of historical artwork by vector space similarity. https://twitter.com/matthewdlincoln/status/1003690836150792192. The idea comes from a Google project looking at paths that traverse similar paintings. This reminds that I'd meaning for a while to do something similar with words in an embedding space. Word embeddings and image…
Read More
Editors' Choice: reconstitute the world
By: Bethany Nowviskie
[The following is the text of a talk I gave (with changes) as “Reconstitute the World: Machine-Reading Archives of Mass Extinction,” in two different contexts last week. First, I opened the summer lecture series at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, where I’m privileged to be a faculty member and supporter. Next, I closed…
Read More
Editors' Choice: Mechanical Kubler - Visual Paths Through Time
By: Matthew Lincoln
I finally got the chance to push through a little idea about walking through visual time with a new Twitter bot I’m calling @MechaKubler. Inspired by Google Cultural Institute’s “X Degrees of Separation”, I was curious to see if it was possible to recreate that app by hand using a more focused collection of works,…
Read More