Ever since Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor extracted the Death Star plans from a digital repository on the planet Scarif in Rogue One, libraries, archives, and museums have played an important role in tentpole science fiction films. From Luke Skywalker’s library of Jedi wisdom books in The Last Jedi, to Blade Runner 2049’s multiple storage … Continue reading Haunted by the Past
The Big Dig and the Nature of Large Engineering Projects
I was fortunate to sit down for a rare interview with Fred Salvucci on the final episode of this season of the What's New podcast. Fred is now at MIT, but he is well-known in the Boston area for conceiving and being the champion of a massive engineering project which came to be known as … Continue reading The Big Dig and the Nature of Large Engineering Projects
Launching the Boston Research Center
I'm delighted that the news is now out about the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's grant to Northeastern University Library to launch the Boston Research Center. The BRC will seek to unify major archival collections related to Boston, hundreds of data sets about the city, digital modes of scholarship, and a wide array of researchers and … Continue reading Launching the Boston Research Center
Help Snell Library Help Others
I am extremely fortunate to work in a library, an institution that is designed to help others and to share knowledge, resources, and expertise. Snell Library is a very busy library. Every year, we have two million visits. On some weekdays we receive well over 10,000 visitors, with thousands of them in the building at one … Continue reading Help Snell Library Help Others
What’s New, Episode 14: Privacy in the Facebook Age
On the latest What's New Podcast from Northeastern University Library, I interview Woody Hartzog, who has a new book just out this week from Harvard University Press entitled Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies. We had a wide-ranging discussion over a half-hour, including whether (and if so, how) Facebook should be regulated … Continue reading What’s New, Episode 14: Privacy in the Facebook Age
Authority and Usage and Emoji
Maybe it's a subconscious effect of my return to the blog, but I've found myself reading more essays recently, and so I found myself returning to the nonfiction work of David Foster Wallace.1 Despite the seeming topical randomness of his essays—John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, the tennis player Tracy Austin, a Maine lobster fest—there is a thematic consistency in … Continue reading Authority and Usage and Emoji
The Post-Coding Generation?
When I was in sixth grade our class got an Apple ][ and I fell in love for the first time. The green phosphorescence of the screen and the way text commands would lead to other text instantly appearing was magical. The true occult realm could be evoked by moving beyond the command line and … Continue reading The Post-Coding Generation?
