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 from million of texts, an LLM creates a multidimensional topology, a complex array of hills and valleys. Into this landscape a human prompt sets in motion a narrative snowball, which rolls according to the model’s internal physics, gatheri ..read more

(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 songs that begin with the catchiest riff in the track, so as to maximize quick streams and thus revenue; similarly, when radio airplay was the primary way to push the sales of singles, it helped if the lyrics of a p ..read more

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 a good short story or film (or U2 song). I also happen to love this passage from Rollo May’s book, which is incredibly relevant to the Humane Ingenuity newsletter. After some much-needed idleness, being rather than doing, I am ..read more

(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 is uniformly gorgeous. Noah lives in Lumberland, in upstate New York, and his photos across the seasons — of a single tree or river bend — are evocative and engrossing. I want to buy a print of one of these photographs, but I can’t, for reasons you can probably i ..read more

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 Labs that provides a scholarly version of the scrollingtelling that has become common in more mainstream media since the New York Times published “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” Interactiv ..read more

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 our complacency, to open ourselves once again to new ways of seeing. Seeing as an underexplored, strange experience animates the art of James Turrell. Our family made one of our pilgrimages to Mass MoCA to see the new Turrell exhibit “Into the Light,” which I recommend if you can make the journey ..read more

(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 elements. At the same time, viewers can diverge at any time from the guided script to explore the map on their own. It’s a good model and a clever use of IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework ..read more

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 on the ceiling, yes please.) Like the colors he used in the strips, all of this was bright and optimistic, and, of course, only half of the story. Within these frames, Radebaugh could not tackle, say, the complexities and drawbacks that ..read more

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 human decision-making. These essential words are the lede of a great reflection by Erin Kissane, a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project and CTP’s managing editor. The project is a terrific case study in humane ingenuity, because what seemed like a straightforward data and technology project — tracking COVID cases across the United States — was in fact primarily animated by skills from the humanities and deeply imbued with a hum ..read more

In a wonderful new article, film and television scholar Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and ultimately rather helpful “inventory of deformative practices” to uncover hidden layers of meaning in media. These practices use the malleability of digital formats to convert traditional media, like films, into new forms that provide insight into their art. Or put less academically: What can we learn about staid video culture from TikTok and GIFs, or the stranger, more elastic memes enabled by contemporary video editing software? Mittell c ..read more