In HI12 I mentioned Ben Shneiderman’s talk on automation and agency, and he kindly sent me the full draft of the article he is writing on this topic. New to me was the Sheridan-Verplank Scale of Autonomy, which, come on, sounds like something straight out of Blade Runner:
In all seriousness, as Ben notes, scales like these reinforce an unhelpful mindset in which there is a unidirectional spectrum between human and machine agency, and a sense that progress moves from human control to AI running everything.
If you look around you can now see these charts everywhere, and they are dominating many of our conversations about emerging technology. Here, for instance, is the SAE standardized levels for automated vehicles:
Note especially the dark blue line zigzagging on the right side—that’s the gradual transfer of agency from human to machine.
Our goal should be to add dimensions, context, and complexity to these unidimensional scales. The best outcomes will be ones that enable humans to do new and better things with the assistance of—not the replacement by—autonomous machines.
Henrik Spohler takes photographs of the midpoints of global commerce. (Container terminal, Rotterdam Harbor, The Netherlands, 2013. Henrik Spohler, Audiovisual Library of the European Commission, CC BY-NC-ND. Via Europeana‘s new exhibition of “Social and Employment Realities” in the contemporary world.)
In HI13, I discussed Ian Milligan’s survey of historians’ research practices, and their near-universal reliance on the smartphone camera. Alexis Madrigal has a good follow-up piece in The Atlantic about this.
In this space I should have expanded on why the practice of mass archival photography might change what we historians write, not just how we do our work; Alexis helpfully captures some of this:
There’s some precedent for how history has been changed by increasing digital accessibility. Wellerstein groups photo-taking in the archives under a broader set of changes that he terms “high volume” research methods. “The practices will change what kind of questions you’ll ask,” he said. Take a highly regarded book, Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years. In it, Rosenberg tracks how three newspapers in New York covered cholera. “He spent years working on that,” Wellerstein said. “You can call up every source he used in that book in one afternoon using ProQuest,” one of several databases of newspapers.
That does not invalidate the book, which Wellerstein described as “great,” but someone working on the same topic now would have the option to expand the field of inquiry. “You might look nationally, internationally, look over a vast amount of time, correlate cholera with something else,” he said. “Would you get better history? I don’t know. You’d get different history though.”
As is often the case, a good starting point for thinking along these lines is Roy Rosenzweig’s now-classic essay, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” which forecast a future of either very few primary sources, or so many that we would have difficulty managing it all. (Twenty years later, we’ve ended up with the latter.)
Humane Ingenuity subscriber John Howard, the University Librarian at University College Dublin, responded to HI13 with their setup for better archival smartphone photos (for both staff and visiting researchers), including the ScanTent:
Portable tent + LED lighting + platform for your smartphone. I need one of these.
On the latest What’s New podcast, I talk with Iris Berent about her forthcoming book The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature. Those who liked Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow will really enjoy Iris’s book (and our conversation), since it exposes other core elements of thinking, shows how innate many concepts are, and reveals why we have such trouble thinking about our own minds. There are now many fascinating studies of infants that imply that babies know much more than previously believed, and this possibility of considerable innate knowledge can be difficult to accept, since we think of ideas as ethereal and acquired over time rather than physical and DNA-like. Can month-old babies figure out physics or ethics, and if so, how? Tune in.
Laura Ben Hayoun’s photography highlights the presence of gig workers in public spaces. (December 2016. Paris. Bike delivery person. Laura Ben Hayoun, Audiovisual Library of the European Commission, CC BY-NC-ND. Also from Europeana’s “Social and Employment Realities” exhibition.)
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 month by month, season by season.
Several months ago, it was the canonical image of autumn; now, it is a crisp winter scene.
Like several bodies of water in the Boston area, the lake was given a new name in the late nineteenth century to more attractively brand the ice that was commercially harvested from its frozen top in the winter. (For the curious, it went from faith to mammon: Baptism Pond to Crystal Lake.) That ice was put on railroad cars and boats and sent to remote, hotter locations, covered and preserved in the natural insulation of sawdust. Massachusetts ice thus ended up in refreshing tropical drinks. (You can listen to this story on an episode of 99% Invisible.)
So I send a chilled and tasty beverage to all of the global subscribers to Humane Ingenuity. May you have a good 2020, and may the 2020s bring us happier days.
The Best of Both Worlds
Last week on social media I linked to an important survey by Ian Milligan that turned out to be interesting bit of professional anthropology, and that for the purposes of this newsletter reveals how new technology can enter our lives, change it fairly rapidly without reflection, and then polarize us into antagonistic camps.
Ian surveyed historians in Canada about their research practices in archives and special collections, and discovered that what historians mostly now do is stand over documents taking photographs with their phone. Many, many photographs. The 250 historians he surveyed snapped a quarter-million photographs in their recent archival trips. Almost everyone in his survey has adopted this new rapid-shoot practice, and 40% took over 2,000 photos while doing their research.
What has happened over the last decade is a massive and under-discussed shift: historians now spend less time in the reading rooms of archives and special collections reading; the time they spend there is mostly dedicated to the quick personal digitization of materials that they will examine when they return home.
I noted this without any spin, but of course on social media I was accused of being nostalgic or worse. I also received many messages starkly in favor of the new practice and some starkly against it — with little sentiment in between. Similarly, I heard about many archives where this practice is not allowed (and the hate directed at those institutions), and some others where it is encouraged, and many others where it is tolerated.
For what it’s worth, I actually think that the new practice is neither better or worse than the old practice, but it is vastly different. My main concern is that we haven’t fully thought through what the change means, or the effect it has on the actors involved — it simply, and perhaps unsurprisingly, just happenedwith the proliferation of phone cameras, in the same way that we have experienced other rapid technological changes without much consideration. (Thus the common lament of so many end-of-the-2010s pieces about smartphones and digital media and technology upending social conventions in unexpected ways.)
So historians-as-amateur-digitizers is a case study of new technology changing our practices without much forethought about what it might mean — in this case for historical research — or what externalities it might entail. And more importantly, we haven’t thought much about how to mitigate the negative aspects of this practice, or accelerate the benefits it provides.
We should pause to consider:
Intellectually, how does the new practice change the history that is written (or no longer written), the topics selected and pursued (or no longer selected and pursued), and our relationship to the documentary evidence and its use to support our theories? What happens when instead of reading a small set of documents, taking notes, thinking about what you’ve found, and then interactively requesting other, related documents over a longer period of time, you first gather all of the documents you think you need and then process them en masse later?
Labor-wise and financially, for the researcher, it means less time away from home, and a lower total cost for travel. That can be a net positive; it might also lead to decreased funding for travel, a downward spiral, as funding agencies get wind of what’s really done at cultural heritage sites. The practice might very well democratize the practice of history, a net good. For archivists, the practice means more retrievals of boxes and folders in a much shorter period of time, and probably some concerns about the careful handling of primary source materials. Despite some protests I heard online, I do think it is reshaping the interactions between researchers and archival staff, and how each views the other, and probably not in a net-positive way.
I could go on; these points and many others were identified and described well by those looking at Ian’s survey. In short, the work that needs to be done is not just to fully recognize and account for a major shift in historical research practice; it is to figure out how to optimize what’s going on so that history is both democratic and thoughtful, and so that it maintains a healthy and productive relationship between researchers and archivists. In general, we need to do a better job getting ahead of these technology-based shifts, rather than criticizing them or lauding them after the shifts have occurred.
Without being nostalgic, I think the social and personal aspects of longer interactions in archives, between archival staff and researchers and between fellow researchers, can be helpful. And without being futuristic, I think the new photo-and-leave practice has some helpful effects on researcher work-life balance and the ability of those without big research grants to do full-fledged analyses.
But back to the driving theme of this newsletter: What can we do to promote both the advantageous social aspects of the old methods and the advantageous digital aspects of the new methods? Asking that question leads to other useful questions: How can we encourage other types of researcher communities that inevitably surround certain special collections? How can we foster better communications between historians and archivists? How can we improve amateur photos without disrupting the environment of the reading room? How can we share scans more widely, rather than having them reside in personal photo collections? And as someone who oversees a library and archive, are there new services we should provide?
Tools to Make Research Better
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has tried to address these issues since the 1990s, and RRCHNM and the RRCHNM diaspora continue to explore what can be done to create our own tools and methods that keep in mind traditional strengths while using novel techniques. Tropy, the open source tool for storing and curating research photographs, spearheaded by Sean Takats, is one critical piece of this potential future infrastructure. Omeka, led by Sharon Leon, for displaying those collections online, is another.
And adding another piece to the puzzle, last week Tom Scheinfeldt and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut’s Greenhouse Studios launched Sourcery, an app to enable any researcher to request the remote photographing of archival materials. (Sourcery is a great name.) Maybe the pieces are starting to come together.
(Full disclosure: Tom, Sharon, Sean, and I all worked together at RRCHNM, and manage a not-for-profit entity that coordinates these projects. But I link to these projects because you should know about them and they are good, not because I’m biased. Ok, I might be slightly biased, but it is my newsletter.)
Fairer Use
On the first What’s New podcast of 2020, I talk to Jessica Silbey about her forthcoming book, Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age. Jessica powerfully challenges the idea that copyright is still working “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” as the famous phrase from the U.S. Constitution puts it. Instead, she thinks that the coming decade requires a reassessment of IP law that looks at the broader social impact of copyright. Her notion of “fairer use” — not “fair use,” but a wider concept that takes into account multiple stakeholders, and that will allow for new kinds of artistic and scientific advancement — is worth listening to. Please do tune in.
Ben Shneiderman, one of the pioneers in human-computer interaction and user interfaces, gave a fascinating, thought-provoking, and very HI-ish talk on human-centered artificial intelligence. I will likely write something much longer on his presentation, but for now I want to highlight a point that harmonizes with the note on which I started this newsletter: seeking ways to turn the volume up to 11 on both the human and tech amps.
Ben asked the audience to reconsider the common notion that there’s a one-dimensional tug of war between human control and computer automation. For instance, we see the evolution of cars as being about the gradual transfer of control from humans to computers along a linear spectrum, which will end in fully autonomous vehicles.
This is wrong, Ben explained, and it puts us in the unhelpful mindset of complete opposition between human and artificial intelligence. Instead, we should create tools in the coming decades that involve high levels of automation and high levels of human control. Upon reflection, we can actually imagine a two-dimensional space for technology, where one axis is the level of human control vs. the computer, and another axis is the level of automation:
Ben’s thrust here pushes away from technologies such as self-driving cars without steering wheels, humanoid robots, or algorithms that replace humans and our vocations. Instead, by looking at the upper right corner, he seeks systems that greatly expand our creative potential while maintaining our full agency: as Ben put it, let’s “amplify, augment, enhance, and empower people” through artificial intelligence and automation.
This newsletter has been cataloging examples that fit into that theory, and Ben had many others from a variety of domains and disciplines. An obvious example in widespread use today is the new software-assisted digital camera apps that use machine learning to improve nighttime photos—but allow you do the composition and choose the moment to click the button.
Again, more on this in future HIs. For now, if you would like to see additional good examples of high automation + high control, from a machine-assisted interface for professional translators to Mercedes-Benz’s new parallel parking system, Ben referenced Jeffrey Heer’s recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Agency plus automation: Designing artificial intelligence into interactive systems.”)
Welcome to the Dystopia
From the Black Mirror universe of Inhumane Ingenuity, some seeds for great dystopian science fiction (if they weren’t already true and here):
Jason Griffey highlighted that there are already threewebapps that use AI-based text generators to create essays for students from their thesis statements, and other AI-based services that suggest relevant articles for references and footnotes. As several people simultaneously chimed in, throw in an AI-based grading tool and we can remove students and teachers completely from the educational system.
Cliff Lynch revealed that there are agencies and institutions that are archiving encrypted internet streams and files right now, so that when quantum computing unlocks today’s encryption, they can go back and decrypt all of the older traffic and files. So what you’re doing right now, using encryption, may only be temporarily safe from prying eyes.
Cliff also lamented that we are at risk of being unable to preserve an entire generation of cultural production because of the shift to streaming services without physical versions—libraries can’t save Netflix films and shows, for instance, as they are not available on media like DVDs.
And the final item in Cliff’s trio of worries: the digitization of archives and special collections, once seen as an unmitigated good, may lead to facial recognition advances and uses (such as surveillance) that we may regret.
Kate Eichhorn, author of the book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media, noted that when her daughter was 13, she signed up for a LinkedIn account (!), because she heard that LinkedIn was search-engine optimized so that it would appear first in the search results for her name. She didn’t want her other social media accounts, or tags of her from her friends’ social media accounts, coloring the Google results for future admissions officers or employers. In her CNI keynote, Kate said that as a media scholar she didn’t think it was helpful to have a moral panic over how social media is shaping the experience of today’s youth, but in listening to how kids feel anxious and constrained by an omnipresent digital superego, I wondered if, for once, it is justified to have a moral panic over new media and kids: social media does seem qualitatively and quantitatively different than prior subjects of panics over teen consumption, such as comic books, heavy metal, or video games.
Some Happier Case Studies
Starting in 2010, Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási began collecting old, discarded photographs they found on the streets of Budapest. Then they invited the public to submit personal and family photos. Fortepan (named after a twentieth-century Hungarian brand of film) now hosts over 100,000 of these photos from the last century. I always loved seeing this kind of longitudinal social documentation when I was at the Digital Public Library of America.
The spirit spread: The University of Northern Iowa took inspiration from Fortepan and created a similar site for Iowans, with thousands of personal photos stretching back to the American Civil War. Then they did something wonderful to return the digitized photographs to the physical world: UNI took some of the photos and plastered them on the very buildings in which the shots were taken many decades earlier.
A century ago, astronomy photographs used to be taken on large glass plates, and rare events in the night sky, such as novae, might have been captured in ways that would help astronomers today. University of Chicago librarians are now digitizing and extracting astronomical data from hundreds of thousands of these glass plates, and then using computational methods to align them precisely with contemporary scans of the sky. (Yes, there’s an API that will take your photo of the stars and provide the exact celestial coordinates.)
This is all terrific, but there is a cautionary (and somewhat amusing) tale lurking on the side. We academics always like to think that people will remember us for our enthralling teaching, breakthrough discoveries, or creative ideas. Maybe we will have the good fortune to have a famous theory, or a celestial body, named after us. But our fate can just as easily be that of Donald Menzel, who was director of the Harvard Observatory in the 1950s and 60s. To save money, he stopped the production and preservation of glass plates for some years, and so now there is a missing section in the historical astronomical record. It is called, with a librarian’s tsk-tsk, the “Menzel Gap.” Ouch.
The Council of Library and Information Resources launched its first podcast, Material Memory:
Material Memory explores the effects of our changing environment—from digital technologies to the climate crisis—on our ability to access the record of our shared humanity, and the critical role that libraries, archives, museums, and other public institutions play in keeping cultural memory alive.
The National Gallery of Denmark has a nicely designed new website that makes all of their digitized artworks openly available, and about two-thirds downloadable under a public domain declaration. The rest is under copyright but can still be downloaded at a generously high resolution and can be used for non-commercial purposes, like this newsletter. Hence: Henning Damgård-Sørensen’s “Maleri VI, 2004,” above. They also have an API and multiple ways to search the collection, including by color. So go on and add a rotating series of paintings to your website that match its palette exactly.
Middle-Aged Software
The novelist John Green recently reviewed the iOS Notes app on his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, and what I loved about it was how it focused less on the app itself and more about what he has done with it over the decade he has been using it. He has grown older and so has the app—as his sideburns grayed, Notes lost its leathery skeuomorphism—and Green has built up a stable, useful relationship with the software, mostly opening it to scribble down interesting lines that occur to him, or that are spoken to him, to use later on in his writing.
The review got me thinking about technology over time. We always think of technology as new, but inevitably some of the technology we use ages along with us, becomes old, and we rarely reflect on what that means, and especially what it might entail for how we imagine and develop the next generation of technology.
These newsletters you have been reading have been written for the most part in Markdown in BBEdit, my preferred text editor since the 1990s. We’ve known each other for a while now. In software-years, BBEdit is, like me, middle-aged. I have a half-joking mental model about the age of software, which is roughly human-years divided by two:
0-10 years old: newborn and youthful software—still finding its way in the world and trying out new features, constantly seeking coolness, a bit clueless and sometimes wild
10-20 years old: early adult software—hitting full stride with a surer sense of what it is, but still with occasional bouts of obnoxiousness and anxiety
20-35 years old: middle-aged software—still active if perhaps a little tired, stable and productive and no longer so interested in big changes, generally uncool but doesn’t give a damn what you think anymore
35-50 years old: “golden years” software—etched with the lessons of time and decades of use, contains much encoded wisdom, can project a “these kids today!” vibe even without intending to
Despite the tongue in cheek, this is, I hope, a not unuseful rubric, especially when you think of software that falls into these categories:
0-10 years old: TikTok, Snapchat
10-20 years old: Facebook, Twitter, iOS, WordPress
20-35 years old: Microsoft Office, Photoshop, the web browser
35-50 years old: Emacs, vi, email
Software that makes it to middle age and beyond has a certain hard-won utility, and an audience that has found a way to profitably and consistently make use of it, despite the constant beckoning of younger software. We’ve worked out accommodations with any frailties within the code or interface, and have invested time in the software-human relationship that is rewarded in some way.
It is worth reflecting on what makes software survive and age gracefully, as I tried to do last year in a reassessment of that good ol’ geriatric, email. This should not be an exercise in nostalgia; it should be a careful analysis about what makes older software tick, and makes us in turn stick with it. I suspect that some of the elements we will discover in this review are human-centered principles that it would be good to revive and strengthen.
In 2010, the Chronicle of Higher Educationasked two dozen scholars “What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?” I wrote that Facebook would end up having more users than the population of China, and that giant social networks, with their madding crowds, would provoke a reaction:
Just as the global expansion of fast food begat the slow-food movement, the next decade will see a “slow information” counterrevolution focused on restoring individual thought and creativity.
On this week’s What’s New podcast, the topic is a difficult but incredibly important one: how growing inequality is having a troubling effect on the mental health of the disadvantaged and marginalized. Alisa Lincoln lays out the many issues that contribute to poor mental health outcomes, and she suggests some potential interventions that aren’t app-based, but that instead focus on social context and (especially) education. I hope you’ll tune in.
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 university adminstrator has many to-dos that crescendo in November; I will not trouble HIers with most of these, although I’ve also been on a special detail this fall co-chairing an initiative to highlight and expand our efforts to combine technical/data skills with human skills, about which I will write in this space in due time. It’s very much in the spirit of Humane Ingenuity.
“Desakyha,” Artist unknown, Cornell Ragamala Paintings Collection.
Ragamala is a unique form of Indian painting that flourished in the regional courts of the Indic world from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The term translates as a garland, mala, of ragas, meaning melodic types or tonal frameworks. Ragamala painting combines iconography, musical codes, and poetry to indicate the time of day or season appropriate to the raga and its mood.
Follow-up on GPT-2
Point: HIer Hillary Corbett noted one potentially problematic use for GPT-2 in the academy: In the constant push for more publications (encouraged, I should note, by increasingly quantified assessment of faculty research activity in many countries), researchers could use GPT-2 to generate plausible articles from fairly modest seed text. Hillary took a few lines from a chapter she wrote and got generally acceptable completion text. (Associated thought: the Sokol Hoax as an artisanal pre-GPT-2 scholarly communication deep fake.)
Again, my interest in GPT-2 has less to do with the technology than with the powerful human propensity to respond to, and often uncritically accept, expressions that fit into genres. We are genre-seeking creatures, and GPT-2 highlights a cultural version of our basic urge to fit things into categories (and also, alas, to stereotype).
I could have just as easily focused on music. For instance, earlier this year, Endel became the first AI-based generative music system to sign a deal with major record label. Like GPT-2, Endel takes music seeds and grows new music based on conforming genre norms. Since music, perhaps more than any other form of human expression, relies on repetition and slight modifications from prior art, musical genres can have an even more powerful attraction to the listener than textual genres to the reader. (Just think about music today: the reggaeton beat has powered a dozen huge hits in the last few years.)
I’ll leave the last word on GPT-2 and its ilk to Janelle Shane (with appreciation from this Victorianist for the conclusion):
One of the disadvantages of having a neural net that can string together a grammatical sentence is that its sentences now can begin to be terrible in a more-human sense, rather than merely incomprehensible. It ventures into the realm of the awful simile, or the mindnumbingly repetitive, and it makes a decent stab at the 19th century style of bombastic wordiness.
The Nature and Locus of Research
One of the big issues in academia right now is the shift of much of the research in areas this newsletter has covered, such as machine learning, to the private sector. There are many reasons for this, but the main ones are that the biggest data sets and the most advanced technology are now at companies like Facebook and Google, and also these companies pay researchers far more than we can in regular faculty or postdoc positions.
This has made it increasingly hard to find and retain faculty to teach the next generation of students in many topics that are in high demand. What I want to focus on here, however, is its troubling effect on the nature of research. Corporations have always had research centers, of course, from which incredible innovations have arisen; just think about Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. Since the Second World War, there has always been a place for someone like Claude Shannon to ride through corporate hallways on a unicycle thinking about information theory, and to lay the groundwork for our modern world.
But these corporate research spaces have become much more mercenary and application-oriented in the last decade. Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, perhaps the archetype of the academic who left academia because (as he once put it) he had to go where the data was, is always sure to highlight that he doesn’t want to replicate Bell Labs’ or Xerox PARC’s slightly clueless abstraction, even if great things eventually emerged from those institutions. He wants Google research to lead to new businesses and more uses of Google’s search engine (even if indirectly).
Which is totally fine. But by drawing researchers fully out of the academy, we lose not only teachers and mentors, but a style of thinking and research that is different in important ways. An example: Last week on the What’s New podcast I interviewed Ennio Mingolla, a scholar of human and computer vision. Ennio is brilliant, and undoubtedly would be a highly valued researcher in, say, an autonomous vehicle startup. Yet he retains academia’s more expansive approach to thinking and research, in a way that is likely to be much more helpful, over time, to understanding vision.
On the podcast, Ennio and I discussed philosophy and art—knowledge from the distant past and from non-digital realms—just as much as the latest computational approaches to “seeing.” We touched on empiricism, Leonardo da Vinci’s discoveries in sketching and painting, and William James—not because we’re fancy academics but because those topics present essential and varied theoretical approaches to the subject of vision. Freed from the right now and the near future, we can explore the ideas of those from the past who had also thought deeply about seeing, and how those concepts very well may present a helpful framing for contemporary work in the field.
Ennio is an expert in figure-ground separation, the human ability to make out an object from the scene behind it. This is a critical survival and social skill (noticing a lion in the tall grass, paying attention to faces in a crowd), and extraordinarily complicated. It’s also directly related to what self-driving cars need (noticing a pedestrian in the crosswalk, paying attention to other objects in the terrain ahead). By considering vision not as a GPU-intensive task involving pixels and frames from a digital camera or LIDAR, but as a complex set of systems and skills networked in the brain, Ennio and his Computational Vision Labare developing a much richer (and I believe more accurate) understanding of how we see. This may take decades; it has taken decades to understand even some basic visual skills such as how we sense that something is approaching us quickly (which, as Ennio notes, is a process that is nothing like what you think it is, and is both faster and slower than a computer).
Universities also have scaffolding for research that most companies don’t. Institutional review boards, for instance, try to ensure that research doesn’t hurt people or have unintended consequences. IRBs can be annoying friction—ask any academic researcher—but given what has happened in our world with the use of personal data over the last few years, maybe we need those brakes more than ever.
There used to be an imperfect but useful pathway for research to move from the academy to the corporate world through tech transfer. That pathway has been disrupted by the tech/data/salary gap and the fact that it’s hard to find a way to share tech/data/salary between corporations and the academy. On the data front, initiatives like Social Science One, which was established to share large data sets between entities like Facebook and academic researchers, are floundering as Facebook and other giant companies hunker down in the face of criticism about privacy and their social effects. Sharing faculty between academia and corporations (in roles like affiliated, non-tenure track faculty) can be tricky to get right. Facebook, for example, only allows employees to spend 20% of their time at a university in such a role, and you can imagine which side has priority in the case of any important matter.
We need to find some new models that allow for the permeability of academia, for new kinds of partnerships, while retaining what makes thoughtful, deep academic research so critical over time. From a dean’s perspective this is of some urgency, but from a social and scholarly perspective, I think it hasn’t been addressed nearly enough, and will greatly affect the kinds of research and the style of research that is done in the future. And also, in the long run, limit the knowledge we produce and value.
“Todi,” Artist unknown, Cornell Ragamala Paintings Collection.
The Enchantment of Archaeology Through Computers
HIer Shawn Graham, mentioned in HI8, kindly sent me a full draft of his forthcoming book, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but plan to do so over the winter break. A taste of what Shawn explores in the book:
What is more rational than a computer, reducing all phenomena down to tractable ones and zeros? What is more magical than a computer, that we tie our identities to the particular hardware or software machines we use?…Archaeology, as conventionally practiced, uses computation to effect a distancing from the world; perhaps not intentionally but practically. Its rituals (the plotting of points on a map; the carefully controlled vocabularies to encode the messiness of the world into a database and thence a report, and so on) relieves us of the task of feeling the past, of telling the tales that enable us to envision actual lives lived. The power of the computer relieves us of the burden of having to be human.
An enchanted digital archaeology remembers that when we are using computers, the computer is not a passive tool. It is an active agent in its own right (in the same way that an environment can be seen to be active)…In that emergent dynamic, in that co-creation with a non-human but active agent, we might find the enchantment, the magic of archaeology that is currently lacking in archaeology.
Citizen DJ
Finally, it was neat to see that the Library of Congress has given Brian Foo a residency for 2020. Brian was behind the very creative Data-Driven DJ project, and he will be building something called “Citizen DJ” at the LC—“an application enabling anyone with a web browser to create hip hop music with public domain audio and video materials from the Library’s collections.”
Carlotta Corpron (1901-1987) was an artist and photographer who used light to create abstract works from which figures would sometimes emerge. (“Strange Creature of Light,” 1948, via the International Center for Photography.)
This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been. For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.
If you are new to GPT-2, the best way to see it in action is on Adam King’s “Talk to Transformer” website, which just implemented the full-sized GPT-2 model, and allows you to prompt it with any text you wish. I put in the first two sentences of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (in bold) and the computer spat out the rest:
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. They were also well known for their hospitality and philanthropy, especially for their charitable donations of meat and milk to the poor. The Dashwoods were not, in fact, known to have any money, but had an excellent credit with all classes, and were well looked upon by their neighbors. The Dashwoods were a most benevolent family. Their land was large, and their possessions were in good order, and the house well kept. They had four children, namely, John, Sarah, John and Mary. These four children were all educated, and all well known for their benevolence and philanthropy, so that their name is familiar in…
You get the picture. If a bit dull, it’s still rather impressive, and certainly a major advance over prior text generators of this sort. (Austen would have had a field day picking up this thread and writing about two Johns fighting over their common name and potential spouses.) The web is now filled with examples using GPT-2, including the New Yorker‘s computational autocomplete of paragraphs in its article on predictive text (how meta).
The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.
OpenAI worried earlier in this year that GPT-2 might become a troubling anarchy loosed upon the world, and while we surely would like to avoid that, it’s not what I want to focus on in this issue of the newsletter. (If you are concerned about GPT-2 and devious trickery, please note that other AI researchers are working on countervailing tools to identify “fake” text, by using GPT-2’s strength—its statistical reliance on the common words that follow other words—against it in a nifty jiu-jitsu move.)
I’m actually less interested in whether GPT-2 has achieved some kind of evil genius, and more interested in what is really happening in the interaction between its generated texts and the reader. Before we worry about GPT-2’s level of intelligence, we should remember what occurs during the act of reading, and why we appreciate fiction in the first place. And that has much more to do with the activity in our own minds than the mind of the author, however real or fake.
We bring to bear on any text all of our prior experience and emotions, as well as everything we have read and thought. We complete a text, no matter how coherent it is; we fill in any blanks with what we believe should be there, or through our imagination. We ourselves are a preprocessed, mammoth, unique corpus, a special composite lens that colors what our senses encounter.
From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.
My thanks to the HI subscribers who responded to my question about whether I should include some discussion of our library renovation in this space. The unanimous sentiment was yes, so I’ll drop some bits in here from time to time. (I have also discovered that two members of this list are also directors of large university libraries that are beginning renovations; helpful to compare notes!)
One complicated topic for us, and undoubtedly others, has been flexible space for focused study, collaboration, and creative production. Because the square footage of libraries is finite (with the obvious exception of Borgesian libraries), you often need to design spaces for multiple uses, especially in a library that (like ours) is open 24/7 and thus goes through different cycles of use as day turns into night and back again.
I have looked at a number of flex spaces in libraries, and I’m not sure that we have solved for this problem. Many approaches seem a bit immature, with an overreliance on movable furniture. Some of the more interesting conversations I’ve had with architects recently have focused not on physical elements like furniture but on more ethereal elements like shifting acoustic design and phased lighting. If you know of a space—in a library or anywhere else—that has worked well for different uses, I’d love to see it.
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 geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)
In this issue, I want to open a conversation about a technology of our age that hasn’t quite worked out the way we all had hoped—and by we, I mean those of us who care about the composition and transmission of ideas, which I believe includes everyone on this list.
Twenty years ago, literary critic Sven Birkerts reviewed the new technology of ebooks and e-readers for the short-lived internet magazine Feed. They sent him a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook, and he duly turned them on and settled into his comfy chair. What followed, however, was anything but comfy:
If there is a hell on earth for people with certain technological antipathies, then I was roasting there last Saturday afternoon when I found myself trapped in some demonic Ourobouros circuit system wherein the snake was not only devouring its own tail, but was also sucking from me the faith that anything would ever make sense again.
Reader, it was not a positive review. But surely, the two decades that separate the present day from Birkerts’ 1999 e-reader fiasco have provided us with vastly improved technology and a much healthier ecosystem for digital books?
Alas, we all know the answer to that. Ten years after Birkerts’ Feed review of existing e-readers, Amazon released the Kindle, which was more polished than the Rocket eBook and SoftBook (both of which met the ignominious end of being purchased in a fire sale by the parent company of TV Guide), and ten years after that, we are where we are: the Kindle’s hardware and software are serviceable but not delightful, and the ebook market is a mess that is dominated by that very same company. As Dan Frommer put it in “How Amazon blew it with the Kindle”:
It’s not that the Kindle is bad — it’s not bad, it’s fine. And it’s not that on paper, it’s a failure or flop — Amazon thoroughly dominates the ebook and reader markets, however niche they have become… It’s that the Kindle isn’t nearly the product or platform it could have been, and hasn’t profoundly furthered the concept of reading or books. It’s boring and has no soul. And readers — and books — deserve better.
Amen. Contrast this with other technologies in wide use today, from the laptop to the smartphone, where there were early, clear visions of what they might be and how they might function, ideals toward which companies like Apple kept refining their products. Think about the Dynabook aspirational concept from 1972 or the Knowledge Navigator from 1987. Meanwhile, ebooks and e-readers have more or less ignored potentially helpful book futurism.
There have been countless good examples, exciting visions, of what might have been. For instance, in 2007 the French publisher Editis created a video showing a rather nice end-to-end system in which a reader goes into a local bookstore, gets advice on what to read from the proprietor, pulls a print book off the shelf, holds a reading device above the book (the device looks a lot like the forthcoming book-like, foldable, dual-screen Neo from Microsoft), which then transfers a nice digital version of the book, in color, to his e-reader.
Ebooks and print books, living in perfect harmony, while maintaining a diversified and easy-to-understand ecosystem of culture. Instead what we have is a discordant hodgepodge of various technologies, business models, and confused readers who often can’t get that end-to-end system to work for them.
I was in a presentation by someone from Apple in 2011 that forecast the exact moment when ebook sales would surpass print book sales (I believe it was sometime in 2016 according to his Keynote slides); that, of course, never happened. Ebooks ended up plateauing at about a third of the market. (As I have written elsewhere, ebooks have made more serious inroads in academic, rather than public, libraries.)
It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem. Certainly a good portion of the explanation has to do with the still-delightful artifact of the print book and our physical interactions with it. As Birkerts identified twenty years ago:
With the e-books, focus is removed to the section isolated on the screen and perhaps to the few residues remaining from the pages immediately preceding. The Alzheimer’s effect, one might call it. Or more benignly, the cannabis effect. Which is why Alice in Wonderland, that ur-text of the mind-expanded ’60s, makes such a perfect demo-model. For Alice too, proceeds by erasing the past at every moment, subsuming it entirely in every new adventure that develops. It has the logic of a dream – it is a dream – and so does this peculiarly linear reading mode, more than one would wish.
No context, then, and no sense of depth. I suddenly understood how important – psychologically – is our feeling of entering and working our way through a book. Reading as journey, reading as palpable accomplishment – let’s not underestimate these. The sensation of depth is secured, in some part at least, by the turning of real pages: the motion, slight though it is, helps to create immersion in a way that thumb clicks never can. When my wife tells me, “I’m in the middle of the new Barbara Kingsolver,” she means it literally as well as figuratively.
But I think there are other reasons that the technology of the ebook never lived up to grander expectations, reasons that have less to do with the reader’s interaction with the ebook—let’s call that the demand side—and more to do with the supply side, the way that ebooks are provided to readers through markets and platforms. This is often the opposite of delightful.
That rough underbelly has been exposed recently with the brouhaha about Macmillan preventing libraries from purchasing new ebooks for the first eight weeks after their release, with the exception of a single copy for each library system. (I suspect that this single copy, which perhaps seemed to Macmillan as a considerate bone-throw to the libraries, actually made it feel worse to librarians, for reasons I will leave to behavioral economists and the poor schmuck at the New York Public Library who has to explain to a patron why NYPL apparently bought a single copy of a popular new ebook in a city of millions.)
From the supply side, and especially from the perspective of libraries, the ebook marketplace is simply ridiculous. As briefly as I can put it, here’s how my library goes about purchasing an ebook:
First, we need to look at the various ebook vendors to see who can provide access to the desired book. Then we need to weigh access and rights models, which vary wildly, as well as price, which can also vary wildly, all while thinking about our long-term budget/access/preservation matrix.
But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (<$1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).
As I hope you can tell, this way lies madness. Just from a library workflow and budgetary perspective, this is insanely difficult to get right or even to make a decision in the first place, never mind the different ebook interfaces, download mechanisms, storage, DRM locks, and other elements that the library patron interacts with once the library has made the purchase/rental/subscription. Because of the devilish complexity of the supply side of the ebook market, we recently participated in a pilot with a software company to develop a NASA-grade dashboard for making ebook decisions. Should I, as the university librarian, spend $1, $5, or $40, should I buy a small number of favored books outright, or subscribe to a much wider range of books but not really own them, or or or.
Thankfully I have a crack staff, including Janet, who handles this complexity, but I ask you to think about this: how does the maddeningly discordant ebook market and its business models skew our collection—what we choose to acquire and provide access to? And forget Macmillan’s eight weeks: what does this byzantine system mean for the availability, discoverability, and preservation of ebooks in 10, 50, or 100 years?
We should be able to do better. That’s why it’s good to see the Digital Public Library of America (where I used to be executive director) establishing a nonprofit, library-run ebook marketplace, with more consistent supply-side terms and technical mechanisms. Other solutions need to be proposed and tried. Please. We can’t have a decent future for ebooks unless we start imagining alternatives.
Onto a sunnier library topic: We are beginning a renovation of our main library at Northeastern University, Snell Library, and have been talking with architects (some of them very well-known), and I’ve found the discussions utterly invigorating. I would like to find some way to blog or newsletter about the process we will go through over the next few years, and to think aloud about the (re)design and (future) function of the library. I’m not sure if that should occur in this space or elsewhere, although the thought of launching another outlet fills me with dread. Let me know if this topic would interest you, and if I should include it here.
On the latest What’s New podcast from the Northeastern University Library, my guest is Louise Skinnari, one of the physicists who works on the Large Hadron Collider. She takes us inside CERN and the LHC, explains the elementary particles and what they have found by smashing them at the speed of light, and yours truly says “wow” a lot. Because there’s so much wow there: the search for the Higgs boson, the fact that the LHC produces 40 terabytes of data per second, the elusiveness of dark matter. Louise is brilliant and is helping to upgrade the LHC with a new sensor that sounds like it’s straight out of Star Trek: the Compact Muon Solenoid. She is also investigating the nature of the top quark, which has some unusual and magical properties. Tune in and subscribe to the podcast!
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, is to get weird with it. There is a lot of heavy thinking right now about the distinctions between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, but sometimes we just need to lighten up, to remember that human beings are oddballs and so we can’t help but use technology in ways that cannot be anticipated. And this weirdness, this propensity to play with technology, and to twist it to human, and humane, ends, should be taken seriously.
In 1993, the artist Spencer Finch, fresh out of RISD, started playing around with a Mac, a VCR, and a Radio Shack’s haul of other technology, including a directional radio wave transmitter, and he came up with “Blue (One Second Brainwave Transmitted to the Start Rigel).” When I first saw it in 2007 at Mass MoCA, it made me smile.
Finch’s gloriously weird conceit in “Blue” is that he would sit in a comfy chair watching a continuous loop of the ocean wave in the opening credits of the TV show “Hawaii Five-0,” and his brain waves from that stimulus would be picked up by a headset, which would be processed by the Mac, amplified, and sent out the window to Rigel, the bluest star in the night’s sky. In addition to the whimsical and smart conceit, “Blue” also had the best deadpan wall text I’ve ever seen in a museum: “Finch’s wave is expected to arrive at its destination in the year 2956.”
In a recent post on “Gonzo Data Science,” Andrew Piper of the .txtLAB at McGill University prompts us to do just this: get weirder with emerging technologies:
I wish data science, and its outposts in the humanities, would get more experimental. By this I mean more scientifically rigorous (let’s test some hypotheses!), but also weirder, as in the Jimi Hendrix kind of experimentation…There’s just not enough creativity behind the endeavour. I don’t mean the “I discovered a new algorithm” kind of creativity. I mean the “I created a new imaginary world that shows us something important about who we are” kind.
Andrew notes that this doesn’t need to be Hunter S. Thompson-level gonzo, but definitely more playful and wide-ranging than current practice, to explore boundaries and possibilities. Let’s get in that lab and start mixing some things up.
Over the last year, Lori Emerson of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder has published two very good articles on the history and use of the Lab, which houses dozens of old computers and media devices, and allows for such playful experimentation. As she recounts in “Excavating, Archiving, Making Media Inscriptions // In and Beyond the Media Archaeology Lab,” Lori began her academic career studying poetry, but then moved into “trying to understand the inner workings of obsolete computers.” In this article, she successfully unpacks why that is less of a jump than one might expect, and what she has learned about how human expression is connected to platforms for writing and reading—and how much can be gained by toying with these platforms.
She also includes some great examples of humans creatively weirding out on digital media, going back decades. This example from the new media artist Norman White, working on a pre-web network called the Electronic Art Exchange Program, in 1985, particularly caught my eye:
White’s “Hearsay,” on the other hand, was an event based on the children’s game of “telephone” whereby a message is whispered from person to person and arrives back at its origin, usually hilariously garbled. [Poet Robert] Zend’s text was sent around the world in 24 hours, roughly following the sun, via I.P. Sharpe Associates network. Each of the eight participating centers was charged with translating the message into a different language before sending it on. The final version, translated into English, arrived in Toronto as a fascinating example of a literary experiment with semantic and media noise:
THE DANCERS HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO DANCE, AND BURNING TORCHES WERE PLACED ON THE WALLS.
THE NOISY PARTY BECAME QUIET.
A ROASTING PIG TURNED OVER ON AN OPEN FLAME…
(Note the similarity of this final output with some recent AI-generated fiction using GPT-2; I’ll return to that in a future HI.)
While I am attempting to illustrate the remarkable scope of the MAL’s collection, I am also trying to show how anomalies in the collection quietly show how media history, especially the history of computing, is anything but a neat progression of devices simply improving upon and building upon what came before; instead, we can understand the waxing and waning of devices more in terms of a phylogenetic tree whereby devices change over time, split into separate branches, hybridize, or are terminated. Importantly, none of these actions (altering, splitting, hybridizing, or terminating) implies a process of technological improvement and thus, rather than stand as a paean to a notion of linear technological history and progress, the MAL acts as a platform for undoing and then reimagining what media history is or could be by way of these anomalies.
Yes! Lori then goes deep on the Canon Cat, a weird and wonderful computer from Jef Raskin, whom I covered in HI2.
Mark Sample was the playful Spencer Finch of Twitter bots, back when Twitter was fun. He made 50 bots of all shapes and sizes, but now has soured on the whole enterprise and has written a postmortem, “Things Are Broken More Than Once and Won’t Be Fixed,” about the demise of one of his more creative bots, @shark_girls. The female sharks in question are two great white sharks, Mary Lee and Katharine, actual sharks with GPS devices on them, paired with non-actual shark musings to accompany their ocean wanderings. (My assumption is that “Mary Lee and Katharine” are also not their actual shark names.)
I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to give these sharks personalities and generate creative tweets that seemed to come directly from the sharks. So that’s what I did. I narrativized the raw data from these two great white sharks, Mary Lee and Katharine. Mary Lee tweets poetry, and shows where she was in the ocean when she “wrote” it. Katharine tweets prose, as if from a travel journal, and likewise includes a time, date, and location stamp.
That is, until Twitter and Google put the kibosh on @shark_girls.
From new technology to that endlessly fascinating, multifaceted older technology of the book: Sarah Werner has started a great new newsletter that I think many of you would like: Early Printed Fun. Fun indeed—and also thoughtful about the medium of the codex and its incredible variety.
This week’s What’s New podcast from the Northeastern University Library covers the use of sensing devices to aid in behavioral therapy. I talk with researcher Matthew Goodwin of the Computational Behavioral Science Laboratory about his studies of children with severe autism. Matthew is trying to create unobtrusive sensors, backed by machine learning analytics, to provide advance warning to caregivers of these children when they are heading into difficult emotional periods, such as harmful behavior toward themselves or others, so the caregivers can guide the children into safer physical and mental spaces.
This is a complex topic, and Matthew’s lab is trying to be sensitive not to overdo it with technological solutions or invasions of privacy. But as he highlights, there are no effective treatments for severe autism, and it is enormously stressful for parents and guardians to monitor children for dangerous episodes, so caregivers are hugely appreciative for this kind of behavioral advance warning system. (Listen|Subscribe)
Last week in HI6 I discussed the Digital Library Federation’s annual forum, but sent out the newsletter before the panel that I was on. That panel, “The Story Disrupted: Memory Institutions and Born-Digital Collecting,” was based on a great new article by Carol Mandel that covers the long history of collecting and preserving “talking things”—artifacts that capture and represent human history and culture—and how that important process has been completed upended by digital media.
I commented on this disruption from multiple perspectives as a historian, librarian, and college administrator, and how each of those roles entails a different approach to born-digital collecting, determining what kinds of artifacts we should collect (historian), how we should collect those “talking things” (librarian/archivist), and how to manage, staff, and pay for this work (administrator).
My fellow panelists included Chela Weber, Trevor Owens, and Siobhan Hagan, who all had helpful insights. Siobhan talked about the movement in public libraries (including hers in DC) to have Memory Labs, in which the public can digitize and preserve their own artifacts.
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 the leaves changing with the arrival of fall, it’s a good time to stroll around the pond, which we did last weekend.
Those who haven’t taken the walking path around Walden Pond before are generally surprised by several things: 1) it’s rather small; 2) train tracks run right next to the walking path on one side of the pond; and especially 3) Thoreau’s cabin is not that far off the road, and within trivial walking distance of the center of Concord. If Thoreau were alive today, he could, on a whim, go grab some nice warm coffee and a book at a really good book store, and be back in the woods in time to light a fire for dinner.
Those amenities, of course, did not exist in the middle of the nineteenth century when Thoreau took his leave from society, but still, he was only a short stroll from other houses in the area and a mere mile and a half from his family home. New visitors to Walden realize that his off-the-grid life was a little more like grid adjacent.
It struck me on this recent visit, however, that Thoreau’s perhaps not-so-radical move presents something of a model for us as we struggle with our current media environment. Maybe moving just a bit off to the side, removed but not totally ascetic, is a helpful way to approach our troubled relationship with digital media and technology.
Indeed, the “Republic of Newsletters” is just a bit off to the side, existing in niche digital eddies rather than vast digital rivers, using the old-fashioned wonder of email and even the web, but not being so world wide. Sometimes to find your humanity you must step outside of the mass of society and its current, unchallenged habits. But don’t go too far. You should still be able to get a warm cup of coffee and a good book.
The Federation
I’m writing to you from Tampa, where the heat and humidity makes me want to dive into the bracing chill of Walden Pond. The Digital Library Federation is having its annual forum here, and while DLF sounds like it could be a cool Star Trek thing, in actuality its spirit is closer to Thoreau than one might imagine.
The hundreds of practitioners who attend DLF every year—librarians, archivists, museum professionals, software developers, and researchers—have increasingly taken on the responsibility of thinking about how to be deliberate and considerate with our use of digital media and technology—the practice of humane ingenuity. The kinds of questions that are asked here are ones we could easily tailor to other areas of our lives: What are the kinds of human expression we should highlight and preserve, and how can we ensure diverse voices in that record? How can we present images in ways that are sensitive to how different kinds of viewers might see them and use them? How can digital tools help rather than hinder our explorations of our shared culture?
The Federation is now 25 years old. Twenty five years ago there were virtually no digital libraries; now there are countless ones, and some, like the Digital Public Library of America, have tens of millions of items from thousands of cultural heritage organizations. The next 25 years seems to be less about a rapid build-out and more about the hard work of conscientious maintenance and correcting the problems now clearly inherent in poorly designed digital platforms. And there are some exciting new methods emerging to take advantage of new computational techniques, but DLFers are dedicated to implementing them in ways that prevent social problems from emerging in the first place.
Josh and I also wistfully remembered the great potential of the NYC Space/Time Directory at NYPL, pieces of which could perhaps be revived and implemented in other contexts…
Amy Rudersdorf of AVP and Juliet Hardesty of Indiana University presented some exciting work on MGMs—metadata generation mechanisms (also part of the DLF Cinematic Universe). MGMs can include machine learning services as well as human expertise, and critically, they can be strung together in a flexible way so that you can achieve the best accuracy from the right combination of tools and human assessment. Rather than using one mechanism, or choosing between computational and human methods, MGMs such as natural language processing, facial recognition, automated transcription, OCR, and human inputs can all be employed in a single connected thread. The project Amy and Juliet outlined, the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP), seems like a thoughtful and promising implementation of AI/ML to make difficult-to-index forms of human expression—such as a concert or a street protest—more widely discoverable. I will be following this project closely.
Some applications where machine learning have lead to breakthroughs that are highly relevant to memory organizations include translation from one language to another; transcription from printed or handwritten text to computer representation (sometimes called optical character recognition); conversion of spoken words to text; classification of images by their content (for example, finding images containing dogs, or enumerating all the objects that the software can recognize within an image); and, as a specific and important special case of image identification, human facial recognition. Advances in all of these areas are being driven and guided by the government or commercial sectors, which are infinitely better funded than cultural memory; for example, many nation-states and major corporations are intensively interested in facial recognition. The key strategy for the cultural memory sector will be to exploit these advantages, adapting and tuning the technologies around the margins for its own needs.
That last bit feels a bit more haunted this week with what’s going on in Hong Kong. Do read Clifford’s piece, and think about how we can return basic research in areas like facial recognition to entities that have missions divergent from those of governments and large companies.
Northern Illinois University has an incredible collection of 55,000 dime novels, that cheap and popular form of fiction that flourished in the United States in the late nineteenth century. As disposable forms of literature, many dime novels didn’t survive, and those that did are poorly catalogued, since it would require a librarian to read through each of these novels from cover to cover to grasp their full content and subject matter.
NIU is exploring using text mining and machine learning to generate good-enough subject headings and search tools for their collection, and an article from earlier this year outlines the process. (Alas, the article is gated; for those outside of academia, you can try Unpaywall to locate an open access version.) Matthew Short’s “Text Mining and Subject Analysis for Fiction; or, Using Machine Learning and Information Extraction to Assign Subject Headings to Dime Novels” is written in a laudably plainspoken way, and reaches some conclusions about a middle way between automated processes and human expertise:
The middle ground between fully-automated keyword extraction and full-level subject analysis might simply be to supply catalogers with a list of keywords to aid them in their work. From such a list, catalogers may be able to infer what those words suggest about the novel.
Yes! There’s a lot of work to be done on this kind of machine learning + human expert collaboration. Matthew has some good examples of how to aggregate unusual keywords into different top-level dime-novel genres, like seafaring, Westerns, and romance.
Next week I’ll be at the Digital Library Federation’s annual forum and will try to newsletter from there. There’s a session on “Implementing Machine-Aided Indexing in a Large Digital Library System” that should provide further grist for this mill.
As those same correspondents also discerned, some of the apparent contradiction seems to be due to the disconnect between student self-reporting and actual library indicators; much of what Alia points to for evidence are surveys of what students say they want, while I tried to highlight the unsettling hard data that book circulations in research libraries are declining precipitously and ceaselessly, with students andfaculty checking out far fewer books than they used to. (There may not even be that much of a disconnect on books, as you can see in one of the surveys Alia highlights from 2015.)
Anyway, Alia’s piece is worth the read and I do not include it here for extended criticism. She makes many good points, and the allocation of space within libraries is a complicated issue that all librarians have been wrestling with, as I tried to note in my own piece. Alia and I actually agree on much, including, as Alia writes, the significant need for “a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project” and that “many students say they like relying on librarians to help them track down hard-to-find texts or navigate scholarly journal databases.” Yes!
Where I do want to lodge an objection, however, is with the notion that I’ve been pushing back against in this newsletter: the too frequent, and easy to fall into, trope of a binary opposition between traditional forms of knowledge and contemporary technology. Or as Roy Rosenzweig and I put it in Digital History, the stark polarization of technoskepticism versus cyberenthusiasm is extremely unhelpful, and we should instead seek a middle way in which we maximize the advantages of technology and minimize its drawbacks. This requires a commingling of old and new that is less about glitz and more about how the old and new can best contribute, together, to our human understanding and expression.
Because so many of us care so much about the library as an institution, it has become an especially convenient space to project, in a binary way, the “normal” or “traditional” versus the “futuristic.” Most universities aren’t building glitzy new libraries, but are instead trying as best they can to allocate limited space for multiple purposes. The solutions to those complex equations will vary by community, and even in self-reported student surveys of what students want out of their library (and our library surveys thousands of students every two years to assess the needs and desires Alia covers), there’s a wide diversity of opinion.
Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that all students want roughly the same thing, or define “normal” for all libraries; some students want and in fact need tech, while others want quiet space for reading, and many of them move from quiet spaces to tech spaces during the course of a single day. Our library has a room for 3D printers and an AR/VR lab; combined, that “glitz” takes up about 1000 square feet in a library that has well over 100,000 square feet of study space.
The library can and should accommodate multiple forms of knowledge-seeking—and better yet, and most critically for the continued vibrancy of the institution, forge connections between the old and new.
(More on this theme: Last week I was on The Agenda on TV Ontario to talk about my piece in The Atlanticand to discuss those complicated questions about the state of reading and the use of books. Christine McWebb and Randy Boyagoda joined me on the program and had many good comments about how and when to encourage students to engage with books. Watch: “The Lost Art of Reading.”)
On this week’s What’s New podcast from the Northeastern University Library, my guest is Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at the D’Amore McKim School of Business, and author of the recently published book The Humachine: Humankind, Machines, and the Future of Enterprise. The conversation covers the impact of automation and AI on factories and businesses, and how greater efficiency from those increasingly computer-driven enterprises is causing huge problems for workers and small businesses. Tune in.
