Reading and Writing
My letter to students about using AI bots to write
AI Is Coming for Scholarship Next
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.
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?
What AI Tells Us About Art
A discussion of text-to-image AI tools like DALL•E and Midjourney, with cameos by Herman Melville and Dolly Parton
Bookwork and Cloud Labs
On the relationship between new genres of writing and new technologies for publication; what putting the laboratory in the cloud might mean for access and science
Humane Ingenuity 43: Your Own Personal Paul McCartney
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...
Humane Ingenuity 42: Not So NFT
(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...
Humane Ingenuity 41: Zen and the Art of Winemaking
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...
Humane Ingenuity 40: In Sight
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...
Humane Ingenuity 39: A Circle of Keytars
(Alice Baber, Noble Numbers, 1964-1965, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.) The Leventhal Map & Education Center has a new tool called...
Humane Ingenuity 38: The Vigoda Verification
Sixty years ago, illustrator Arthur Radebaugh drew scenes from the future — that is, our present — including, quite presciently, remote education and work,...
Humane Ingenuity 37: Data and the Humanities
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the many datasets we’ve wrestled with this year, it’s that all the data — every single point — is the result of...
Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster
In a wonderful new article, film and television scholar Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and...
Humane Ingenuity 35: Bounded and Boundless
The Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design has digitized their collection of books created by artists. It is an exhibit of the infinite...
Humane Ingenuity 34: Making Data Physical
Although we regularly use and rely on numbers, human beings are simply not very good at understanding them. Most of us can effortlessly feel the shading of a...
Humane Ingenuity 33: Bring Back the Color
A visualization of the colors of the objects in our lives over the last two centuries: Cath Sleeman took the digitized images of household and commercial...
Humane Ingenuity 32: Faint and Loud Signals
If for some reason you could use some relaxation right now, I recommend heading over to Faint Signals, an interactive work of art that was one of the clever...
Humane Ingenuity 31: An Adaptive Painting
Pattern recognition, as it was practiced before computers: (Via William J. Paisley, "The Museum Computer and the Analysis of Artistic Content," in Computers...
Humane Ingenuity 30: Escape Disappointment With Your Machines
The Vienna Museum has just put online 47,000 objects and 75,000 images, with the vast majority of them available to freely download and reuse. Kudos to Evi...
Humane Ingenuity 29: Noticing the Neighborhood
Like you, I've been spending a lot of time near home this year. Without the stimuli and novelty of travel, I've tried to be more aware of my well-trodden...