For their South Bay book launch of The AI Con, Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna joined us in conversation with Rhonda Holberton, Digital Media Arts & Chair of the Department of Art & Art History at SJSU. In THE AI CON: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We […]
The phantasmagorias of space to which the flaneur devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is addicted. Gambling converts time into a narcotic (Benjamin 1999: 12). The disruption that Benjamin identified in the gambling halls finds unexpected resonance in today’s computational interfaces. The rise of “prompt engineering” as […]
The Library of Congress launched the By the People crowdsourced transcription program in 2018. Since then, we have invited anyone to volunteer by transcribing Library of Congress digital collections through our online platform, Concordia. Completed transcriptions go back into Library of Congress digital collections on loc.gov to make them keyword searchable and improve accessibility. We […]
The journey to conceptualizing this special issue started in a summer seminar organized by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Since 2004, through its postdoctoral fellowship program, CLIR has recruited, trained, and established cohorts of talented researchers steeped in the materials and methods of their disciplines for work in libraries and cultural organizations. […]
Over the past year, I have been working on a textual analysis project exploring Japanese understandings of Judaism, Israel, and Zionism during the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō periods (1912-1926) as a part of a fellowship at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Institute for Advanced Israel Studies. In fact, I am writing this article […]
There’s a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can […]
Simon Daisley is an independent researcher of Kalmyk Buddhism and a digital heritage practitioner based in New Zealand. Through a personal interest in Buddhism, particularly in the history of Buddhism in the Russian Empire and among the Kalmyk people, Daisley has been researching Kalmyk Buddhist monasteries (khuruls), especially those that were destroyed in the Soviet […]
Noise is an indispensable tool for creative coding. We use it to generate all kinds of organic effects like clouds, landscapes and contours. Or to move and distort objects with a more lifelike behaviour. On the surface, noise appears to be simple to use but, there are so many layers to it. This post takes […]
Nightingale authors come from varied disciplines; I’ve seen articles by visualization scientists, sociologists, public health experts, applied ethicists, geographers, etc. This report and its accompanying infographics reflect a Venn diagram of many of those disciplines. The arrival of the trial of Mr. Derek Chauvin this month — in the city where I teach and write […]
In my first class in computer science, I was taught that an algorithm is simply a way of expressing formal rules given to a computer. Computers like rules. They follow them. Turns out that bureaucracy and legal systems like rules too. The big difference is that, in the world of computing, we call those who […]
