The Curious Engineer

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Humane Ingenuity

newsletter.dancohen.org

* * * A newsletter by Dan Cohen on technology that helps rather than hurts human understanding, and human understanding that helps us create better technology. (Read past issues of the newsletter)

AI / MLEssays / personalTech news / industry

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
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84 from 4 Sep 2019 to 6 Oct 2026
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2026 16

  1. The Slow Formation of Durable Software
  2. Reader Responses, Summer 2026
  3. Scholarship Will Soon Be Much Harder to Save
  4. A Major New Grant for a Library-Led Approach to AI and Books
  5. How Can We Minimize the Environmental Impact of Our AI Use?
  6. The Breath of the Author
  7. Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship
  8. The Kids Are All Right
  9. A Framework for Books and AI in the Public Interest
  10. The Role of a New Machine
  11. Vibe Analysis
  12. A Museum's Sublime Hallucinations
  13. Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions?
  14. Where Should Scholars Draw the Line on AI?
  15. A Hero's Iconography
  16. Far From Reassuring

2025 16

  1. The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition
  2. The Index and the Vector
  3. The Library’s New Entryway
  4. The Reboot of Digital Humanities Now
  5. Will a Landmark AI Settlement Make Authors Feel Whole?
  6. What AI Tells Us About Art October 17, 2022 A discussion of text-to-image AI tools like DALL•E and Midjourney, with cameos by Herman Melville and Dolly Parton
  7. The Stones of Newton
  8. Can Engineered Writing Ever Be Great? February 27, 2023 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?
  9. AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled
  10. AI Is Coming for Scholarship Next July 10, 2023 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.
  11. When Information is Networked: A Tribute to Clifford Lynch
  12. Reading and Writing August 14, 2023 My letter to students about using AI bots to write
  13. Asking Good Questions Is Harder Than Giving Great Answers
  14. Style and Personality December 21, 2023 On the small but important difference between these two expressive notions
  15. The Unresolved Tension Between AI and Learning
  16. The Power Broker at 50 January 15, 2024 Why Robert Caro’s monumental book remains vital for understanding how power is acquired, used, and preserved

2024 8

  1. Books, AI, and the Public Good: A New Grant
  2. Apple's Vision + The Cost of Forever February 27, 2024 Revisiting the original design documents for the Macintosh computer to understand why we’re in a love/hate relationship with Apple, and a comparison of how much it costs to save a book and a web page forever
  3. Synths and Sensibility
  4. Is Science Becoming Conceptual Art? April 1, 2024 A combination of new technologies may represent a new era for science, but one in which the lone scientist may no longer need her lab mates. Is that a good thing?
  5. No Happy Medium for Books
  6. Books are Big AI's Achilles' Heel May 13, 2024 AI companies may have the money and the data centers, but they are badly in need of what humble libraries have in abundance
  7. Break Expectations
  8. AI Comes for Music June 27, 2024 As the record labels sue AI companies for generating derivative songs, let us ask: What makes a song original and human anyway?

2022 2

  1. Humane Ingenuity 25: Out of Body Experiences July 15, 2020 If you need a break, have been at home for a very long time, or are sick of the view out of your window, you can try Window Swap, which shows a video clip of...
  2. Humane Ingenuity 26: Considerate Over Clever August 4, 2020 Next month in Barcelona at the PH21 Gallery there will be an exhibit of photography documenting the aching feeling of being alone in normally crowded urban...

2021 11

  1. Humane Ingenuity 27: Reopening Time September 15, 2020 Sorry that it's been over a month since I last wrote. I've been working overtime with my colleagues to reopen a large library that adheres to Covid safety...
  2. Humane Ingenuity 28: Cornucopia of Cleverness October 12, 2020 It's stressful out there; maybe some of you could use a little levity right now. My old colleagues at the Digital Public Library of America, along with our...
  3. Humane Ingenuity 29: Noticing the Neighborhood November 1, 2020 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...
  4. Humane Ingenuity 30: Escape Disappointment With Your Machines November 30, 2020 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...
  5. Humane Ingenuity 31: An Adaptive Painting December 24, 2020 Pattern recognition, as it was practiced before computers: (Via William J. Paisley, "The Museum Computer and the Analysis of Artistic Content," in Computers...
  6. Humane Ingenuity 32: Faint and Loud Signals January 14, 2021 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...
  7. Humane Ingenuity 33: Bring Back the Color January 29, 2021 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...
  8. Humane Ingenuity 34: Making Data Physical February 12, 2021 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...
  9. Humane Ingenuity 35: Bounded and Boundless March 4, 2021 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...
  10. Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster March 17, 2021 In a wonderful new article, film and television scholar Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and...
  11. Humane Ingenuity 37: Data and the Humanities April 7, 2021 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...

2020 19

  1. Humane Ingenuity 38: The Vigoda Verification May 5, 2021 Sixty years ago, illustrator Arthur Radebaugh drew scenes from the future — that is, our present — including, quite presciently, remote education and work,...
  2. Humane Ingenuity 39: A Circle of Keytars May 25, 2021 (Alice Baber, Noble Numbers, 1964-1965, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.) The Leventhal Map & Education Center has a new tool called...
  3. Humane Ingenuity 40: In Sight September 9, 2021 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...
  4. Humane Ingenuity 41: Zen and the Art of Winemaking October 22, 2021 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...
  5. Humane Ingenuity 42: Not So NFT November 22, 2021 (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...
  6. Humane Ingenuity 43: Your Own Personal Paul McCartney January 24, 2022 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...
  7. Bookwork and Cloud Labs March 16, 2022 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
  8. Humane Ingenuity 5: Libraries Contain Multitudes October 8, 2019 Welcome back to Humane Ingenuity, a continuing exploration of technology that helps rather than hurts human understanding, and human understanding that helps...
  9. Humane Ingenuity 6: Walden Eddies + the DLF Cinematic Universe October 15, 2019 I am very fortunate to live a short drive from Walden Pond, of Henry David Thoreau fame. With the hordes of summer tourists finally thinning out, and with...
  10. Humane Ingenuity 7: Getting Weird with Technology to Find Our Humanity October 22, 2019 One of the best ways that we can react to new technology, to sense its contours and capabilities, and also, perhaps slyly, to assert our superiority over it,...
  11. Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It's Complicated November 5, 2019 René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the...
  12. Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You November 12, 2019 Carlotta Corpron (1901-1987) was an artist and photographer who used light to create abstract works from which figures would sometimes emerge. ("Strange...
  13. Humane Ingenuity 10: The Nature and Locus of Research November 25, 2019 It's getting to be that time of the semester when extracurricular activities, like writing this newsletter, become rather difficult. My day job as a...
  14. Humane Ingenuity 11: Middle-Aged Software December 4, 2019 The National Gallery of Denmark has a nicely designed new website that makes all of their digitized artworks openly available, and about two-thirds...
  15. Humane Ingenuity 12: Automation and Agency December 12, 2019 In this issue of HI: dispatches from the frontiers I traversed at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked information. Automation and Agency Ben...
  16. Humane Ingenuity 13: The Best of Both Worlds January 14, 2020 Happy New Year, and welcome to 2020! My constant reminder of the passage of time is a small lake near where we live, which transforms itself delightfully...
  17. Humane Ingenuity 14: Adding Dimensions January 28, 2020 The Library of Necessary Books. An art installation in Singapore where visitors can leave their favorite books. (Via Seb Chan's newsletter.) In HI12 I...
  18. Humane Ingenuity 15: Close but Not Quite February 3, 2020 The Picture Description Bot, by Elad Alfassa, runs random Wikimedia Commons images through Microsoft’s Computer Vision API, and then posts the best-guess...
  19. Humane Ingenuity 16: Imagining New Museums February 12, 2020 David Fletcher is a video game artist in London who on the side creates hyper-realistic 3D photogrammetry models of cultural heritage sites and works of art,...

2019 12

  1. Humane Ingenuity 17: All THAT and More February 26, 2020 A rather nice letterpress QR code from Northeastern University's traditional print technology lab, Huskiana Press. (Via Ryan Cordell, who is the founder and...
  2. Humane Ingenuity 18: Closing Time March 18, 2020 Metamorphic library table-steps, by Thomas Sheraton, c. 1795. (CC0-licensed image from the Smithsonian Institution's new open access collection, which I'll...
  3. Humane Ingenuity 19: Credit Where Credit Is Due March 25, 2020 Viola Canady, Cathedral Window Quilt, Anacostia Community Museum. CC0 photograph from the Smithsonian Institution's new open access collection. In January...
  4. Humane Ingenuity 20: Physical Distancing, Social Cohesion April 7, 2020 Drawing of the set for John Taverner's opera Thérèse, designed by Alan Barlow, 1979, via the Victoria and Albert Museum's opera exhibit. What would you save...
  5. Humane Ingenuity 21: Functional and Eternal April 19, 2020 Tomb relief of the official Ptahshepses, also called Impy, Egyptian, Old Kingdom, Dynasty 6, 2323–2150 BCE. Carved limestone. Harvard Art Museums. During...
  6. Humane Ingenuity 22: More Creative Reuses May 1, 2020 Yes, people are re-enacting and re-creating artworks in their homes during the quarantine. No, this is not a new pastime—people have been doing this for...
  7. Humane Ingenuity 23: Reframing Time and Saving Culture May 18, 2020 Carrie Ferrin, the first female bicyclist in Nobles County, Minnesota. Photograph by E. F. Buchan, c. 1880. (From the Nobles County Historical Society, via...
  8. Humane Ingenuity 24: Witness and Withness June 29, 2020 Over the past month, our library has been discussing ways to address—and more concretely take action to oppose—racism in the aftermath of the murder of...
  9. The Big Reveal September 4, 2019 An increasing array of cutting-edge, often computationally intensive methods can now reveal formerly hidden texts, images, and material culture from...
  10. The Soul of a New Machine + Auditing Algorithms September 10, 2019 Today Apple will release new iPhones and other gizmos and services, and as they do every year, the tech pundits will ask: "Does this live up to the...
  11. Humane Ingenuity #3: AI in the Archives September 17, 2019 Welcome back to Humane Ingenuity. It’s been gratifying to see this newsletter quickly pick up an audience, and to get some initial feedback from readers like...
  12. Humane Ingenuity #4: Modeling Humane Features + Teaching a Robot to Crack a Whip September 25, 2019 [3D-printed zoetrope from The National Science and Media Museum's Wonderlab, via Sheryl Jenkins] Modeling Humane Features If it wasn't a famous catchphrase...