Category: Editors’ Choice

For many humanities researchers, managing the structured data collected or produced as part of their research projects is a technical challenge. In the past, the services of external service providers have been heavily relied upon for this purpose, resulting not only in high costs but also in a large number of isolated data silos scattered […]

I’m very excited to be the new Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB. For the next few months I get to play around with metadata and images, think about online access, experiment with different technologies, and build things to help people to explore the State Library’s collections. In other words, I get to be in […]

After the launch of ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom in Silicon Valley in late 2022, it was mere months before OpenAI turned to selling the software as an automation product for businesses. (It was first called Team, then Enterprise.) And it wasn’t long after that before it became clear that the jobs managers were […]

Sentiment analysis, particularly with the advent of large language models, is reshaping our understanding of narrative. Emotional arcs in both fictional and non-fictional narratives surface latent structures that challenge traditional notions of plot and character. One reason is that feature extraction correlates with passages often selected for close reading, suggesting the role of emotion in […]

All four cases circle a central question around who controls digital content. We are no longer in an era where content is just content that humans read, and so in an age where AI and large-scale reuse are possible, who controls digital content is a question that needs to be answered. OCLC’s fight over library […]

This is the third part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that’s being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.  Creative Commons has been widely praised for fostering a culture of […]

Is AI saving the world or breaking it? As the era-defining technology leapfrogs from what-if to what-next, it can be hard for us humans to know what to make of it all. You might be hopeful and excited, or existentially concerned, or both. AI can track Antarctic icebergs 10,000 times faster than humans and optimize […]

It’s been five months since Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself wrote to argue that we should not think of Large Language Models (LLMs) as “intelligent, autonomous agents” paving the way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but as cultural and social technologies. In the interim, these models have certainly improved on various metrics. […]