Latest News from David Weinberger

Japanese art painted with Excel

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:01:18 EDT

According to PSFK, which bases the report on an article in the Japaense-language PC Online, for the past ten years Tatsuo Horiuchi has been drawing traditional Japanese prints using Excel spreadsheets. Here’s a screen capture of what Horiuchi’s work looks like in process: Why does he do this? Because Excel comes bundled for free with [...]

The New Yorker Caption Contest is making me an embittered, broken man

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:03:31 EDT

My offering has once again been passed over by the cruel gods that rule the New Yorker Caption contest. The cartoon shows Noah’s ark filled with giraffes. Noah is talking to what seems to be a young woman. (I describe it because I can’t find a unique url for it.) The selected entries are: “I [...]

[misc] The loneliness of the long distance ISBN

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:29:37 EDT

NOTE a couple of hours later: OCLC has discovered a problem with the analysis. So please ignore the following post until further notice. Apologies from the management. Ever since the 1960s, publishers have used ISBN numbers as identifiers of editions of books. Since the world needs unique ways to refer to unique books, you would [...]

Lobby for FaceBook, Yahoo, NewsCorp and Elsevier opposes the White House Open Access order, among others

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:32:24 EDT

Peter Suber points out that FaceBook, Yahoo, Elsevier and Yahoo have joined the NetChoice.org lobby that has issued a clarion call against open access that blurs the line between lies and gibberish. Peter blows the statements apart, leaving nothing but clean air and a whiff of ozone. NetChoice.org is publicizing its monthly “iAWFUL” (Internet advocates [...]

[meshcon] Ryan Carson of Treehouse

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:13:25 EDT

Ryan Carson [twitter:RyanCarson] of Treehouse at the Mesh Conference is keynoting the Mesh Conference. He begins his introduction of himself by saying he is a father, which I appreciate. Treehouse is an “online education company that teaches technology. We hope we can remove the need to go to university to do technology.” NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting [...]

Lucky me

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:38:43 EDT

I had a lovely time at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information yesterday afternoon. About twenty of us talked for two hours about library innovation. It reminded me: how much I like hanging out with librarians; how eager people are to invent, collaborate, and play; how lucky I am to work in an open [...]

WW II vets welcomed by airport passengers

Sun, 12 May 2013 11:36:42 EDT

I was in National Airport in DC yesterday and came upon this scene. The vets are being welcomed by passengers waiting for planes and by people who came especially for the event. It’s a trip sponsored by the Honor Flight Network, a non-profit that brings vets to DC for free to see the memorials and [...]

Hangin’ with Secretary Kerry

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:28:11 EDT

Back when the Digital Public Library of America was gearing up, I got invited to participate in a day of brainstorming about what could be done to make the US. State Department Diplomatic Reception Rooms more accessible to the public. About twenty of us spent the day talking in the Rooms themselves, and we also [...]

Cheating Keynote\’s dumb sizing limitation

Wed, 08 May 2013 17:55:07 EDT

Keynote presentation software has what seems to be a needless limitation on how large you can scale an object using their animation capabilities: you can take it up to 200% and no larger. A few years ago I poked around in the xml save files and manually increased the scaling on an object to 1000%, [...]

I’m tired of your attitude

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:18:34 EDT

I remember well the first time I heard the word “attitude” used to mean “negative attitude.” It was shortly after John Lennon had been killed. I was in a mall and the poster shop was selling some crappy Lennon memorial posters at jacked up prices. I was devoted to Lennon, and muttered something about it [...]

When a new hard drive won’t accept a Mac OS

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:52:24 EDT

In my continuing series “How to Be an Idiot,” here’s what not to do when installing a new hard drive into your MacBook Pro. I started off right. I had everything prepared: a new 500gB hybrid drive, a fresh Time Machine backup, and an 8gB USB stick with the Mac Mountain Lion installer on it. [...]

Why we stayed inside

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:03:44 EDT

Dave Winer addresses a perception I hadn’t realized was common: Boston stayed inside a week ago Friday because we were afraid to go outside. Nope. I’ll speak for myself, but I actually have good reason to think that I’m talking for many others. I stayed inside because the mayor and governor told me that they [...]

[eim][misc] Too big to categorize

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:22:29 EDT

Amanda Filipacchi has a great post at the New York Times about the problem with classifying American female novelists as American female novelists. That’s been going on at Wikipedia, with the result that the category American novelist was becoming filled predominantly with male novelists. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the dumb sexism that [...]

Game of Friends

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:51:52 EDT

Hat tip to Reddit.

New Zealand knows how to pass a same sex marriage law!

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:46:55 EDT

It’s apparently “Pokarekare Ana,” a popular Maori love song. (Hat tip to DailyKos)

Subverting ads

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:07:25 EDT

I’m a sucker for ads that comment on the dishonesty of ads. For example, I laughed at this one from Newcastle Brown Ale: I also really liked this one as well: I do have a duck-rabbit disagreement with Piper Hoffman’s reading of it at BlogHer. I took the ad as a direct comment on the [...]

[2b2k] What we can learn from what we don’t know

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:48:51 EDT

I wrote a piece in the early afternoon yesterday about what we can learn from watching how we fill in the blanks when we don’t know stuff…in this case, when we don’t know much about Suspect #1 and #2. It’s about the narratives that shape our unserstanding. For example, it turns out that I only [...]

[misc] StackLife goes live – visually browse millions of books

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:20:01 EDT

I’m very proud to announce that the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (which I co-direct) has launched what we think is a useful and appealing way to browse books at scale. This is timed to coincide with the launch today of the Digital Public Library of America. (Congrats, DPLA!!!) StackLife (nee ShelfLife) shows you a visualization [...]

Marathon

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:09:33 EDT

Everything happens by ones. Each step Each cobble Each mile Each leg crossing a line. Then in a moment we close our eyes and remember how the sea’s front edge paws at its shore. April 16, 2013 Please remember that according to the official Rules of Blogging, on the Web we must forgive one another’s [...]

[misc][2b2k] Making Twitter better for disasters

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:13:08 EDT

I had both CNN and Twitter on yesterday all afternoon, looking for news about the Boston Marathon bombings. I have not done a rigorous analysis (nor will I, nor have I ever), but it felt to me that Twitter put forward more and more varied claims about the situation, and reacted faster to misstatements. CNN [...]

In place of a blog post, please stare into this pretty picture

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:18:28 EDT

From MOillusions.com I’d be blogging more, but I keep writing stuff and then realizing it’s wrong. I’d like to believe that that simply means I’m in a creative period, but it’s far more likely than I’m just wronger than usual, or possibly righter in recognizing my usual level of wrongness. So, please just stare into [...]

[berkman] Derek Khanna on connecting the dots

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:08:23 EDT

Derek Khanna is giving a Berkman talk on trying to connect the dots so that policy-makers “get it.” “How do we even frame discussions about the economy and innovation?” Copyright law hasn’t been re-assessed in at least 15 yrs, he says. He begins with his bakcstory: He’s from Mass. Worked for Romney and Scott Brown. [...]

Elsevier acquires Mendeley + all the data about what you read, share, and highlight

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:23:22 EDT

I liked the Mendeley guys. Their product is terrific — read your scientific articles, annotate them, be guided by the reading behaviors of millions of other people. I’d met with them several times over the years about whether our LibraryCloud project (still very active but undergoing revisions) could get access to the incredibly rich metadata [...]

The medium is the message is the transmitter is the receiver

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 09:16:43 EDT

Al Jazeera asked me to contribute a one-minute video for an episode of Listening Post about how McLuhan looks in the Age of the Internet. They ultimately rejected it. I can see why; it’s pretty geeky. Also, it’s not very interesting. So, what the heck, here it is:

[berkman] Anil Dash on “The Web We Lost”

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:45:31 EDT

Anil Dash is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk, titled “The Web We Lost.” He begins by pointing out that the title of his talk implies a commonality that at least once was. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling [...]

Podcast about the DPLA’s status and its relation to public libraries

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:51:37 EDT

The latest podcast in the Digital Campus series focuses solely on the current state of the Digital Public Library of America. The discussion includes Dan Cohen who has just accepted the position of Executive Director of the DPLA, which is just wonderful news. Not only does he have a rare combination of skills and experiences [...]

[2b2k] Back when not every question had an answer

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:05:20 EDT

Let me remind you young whippersnappers what looking for knowledge was like before the Internet (or “hiphop” as I believe you call it). Cast your mind back to 1982, when your Mommy and Daddy weren’t even gleams in each other’s eyes. I had just bought my first computer, a KayPro II. I began using WordStar [...]

[annotation][2b2k] Critique^it

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:23:53 EDT

Ashley Bradford of Critique-It describes his company’s way of keeping review and feedback engaging. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. To what extent can and should we allow classroom [...]

[annotation][2b2k]Opencast-Matterhorn

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:04:36 EDT

Andy Wasklewicz and Jeff Austin from Entwine [twitter:entwinemedia] describe a multi-institutional project to build a platform-agnostic tool for enriching video through note-taking, structured annotations, and sharing. It uses HTML 5, and allows for structured tagging, time-based annotation, and more.

[annotation][2b2k] Mediathread

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:46:12 EDT

Jonah Bossewich and Mark Philipsonfrom Columbia University talk about Mediathread, an open source project that makes it easy to annotate various digital sources. It’s used in many courses at Columbi, as well as around the world. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not [...]

[annotation][2b2k] Phil Desenne on Harvard annotation tools

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:26:12 EDT

Phil Desenne begins with a brief history of annotation tools at Harvard. There are a lot, for annotating from everything to texts to scrolls to music scores to video. Most of them are collaborative tools. The collaborative tool has gone from Adobe AIR to Harvard iSites, to open source HTML 5. “It’s been a wonderful [...]

[annotation][2b2k] Paolo Ciccarese on the Domeo annotation platform

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:47:52 EDT

Paolo Ciccarese begins by reminding us just how vast the scientific literature is. We can’t possibly read everything we should. But “science is social” so we rely on each other, and build on each other’s work. “Everything we do now is connected.” NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. [...]

[annotation][2b2k] Neel Smith: Scholarly annotation + Homer

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:25:50 EDT

Neel Smith of Holy Cross is talking about the Homer Multitext project, a “long term project to represent the transmission of the Iliad in digital form.” NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You [...]

[annotations][2b2k] Rob Sanderson on annotating digitized medieval manuscripts

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:05:05 EDT

Rob Sanderson [twitter:@azaroth42] of Los Alamos is talking about annotating Medieval manuscripts. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. He says many Medieval manuscripts are being digitized. The Mellon Foundation [...]

[annotation][2b2k] Philip Desenne

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:44:34 EDT

I’m at a workshop on annotation at Harvard. Philip Desenne is giving one of the keynotes. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. We’re here to talk about the Web [...]

[berkman] Dan Gillmor on Living off the Privacy Grid

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:32:00 EDT

Dan Gillmor is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk about his Permission Taken project. Dan, who has been very influential on my understanding of tech and has become a treasured friend, is going to talk about what we can do to live in an open Internet. He begins by pointing to Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked [two hugely important books]. He says that the intersection of convenience and freedom is narrowing. He goes through a “parade of horribles” [which I cannot keep up with]. He pauses on Loic Le Meur’s [twitter:loic] tweet: “A friend working for Facebook: ‘we’re like electricity.’” If that’s the case, Dan says, we should maybe even think about regulation, although he’s not a big fan of regulation. He goes through a long list of what apps ask permission to do on your mobile. His example is Skype. It’s a long list. Bruce Schneier says when it comes to security, we’re heading toward feudalism. Also, he says, Skype won’t deny it has a backdoor. “You should assume they do,” he says. The lock-in is getting tighter and tighter.

Why homosexuality looks like a decision

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:00:20 EDT

Note that in the following, I’m figuring out something that is probably obvious to everyone except me. The other day I found myself expostulating, “How can anyone think people choose which sex they’re attracted to???” (Yes, with three question marks. I was expostulating.) I followed this with the well-worn, “If they think homosexuality is a [...]

The pleasure of minor illness

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:40:12 EDT

I am a delicate little flower. If my body temperature goes up 1%, I lose the ability to understand anything more complex than the Spartacus* series on Starz. I enter a recovery state that can only properly be called “wallowing.” I have something a bit flu-like. It hit full force on Thursday afternoon. (To the [...]

What The New Yorker doesn’t say about Aaron

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:35:27 EDT

I read first Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker article on Aaron Swartz too quickly. But it doesn’t skim well. I found that encouraging. I finally sat down to read it thoroughly a couple of days ago, and liked it very much. It’s beautifully written. More important, she does not have an hypothesis to bolster or an [...]

[2b2k] Events are not the facts

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:43:18 EDT

The Tunisian newspaper Tunis Afrique Presse ran a story on the four priorities announced by that country’s new prime minister. It’s a straightforward story, and it is told in a factual, straightforward way. But now I want to understand it. I know that some of the people involved in the revolution were disappointed that the [...]

[2b2k] The increasing opacity of facts

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:38:18 EDT

First a disclaimer: Facts matter. The world is one way and another. It is entirely possible to be wrong. Not all statements are true. The statement “That is true for your but not for me” is almost always nonsensical. Ok? Can we proceed? In an argument, facts — or, more precisely, statements that assert facts [...]

Are brands people, my friends?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:53:06 EST

The always thoughtful Terry Heaton [twitter:TerryHeaton] has posted a provocative thesis, which is expressed in the post’s title: “How Brands Can Behave as People (And Why They Should).” Terry writes: Futurist Stowe Boyd believes that we’ve entered a stage of “social business” in which “brands will try to look and feel as much like people [...]

[2b2k] Cliff Lynch on preserving the ever-expanding scholarly record

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:06:03 EST

Cliff Lynch is giving talk this morning to the extended Harvard Library community on information stewardship. Cliff leads the Coalition for Networked Information, a project of the Association of Research Libraries, that is “concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life.” Cliff is helping the Harvard [...]

Othello and The Sopranos: Two comedies

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:12:30 EST

I’ve been listening to the wonderful Emma Smith lectures/podcasts about Shakespeare. Wow, is the world better because we can take for granted that there is a supply of such wonders that a full lifetime could not experience them, all available for free. But what I meant to say is she makes the point that Othello [...]

Changing where you work is changing your job

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:44:50 EST

CNN.com has posted my op-ed about why where you work is not about the quality of your life so much as about the substance of it. Judging from some of the reaction, I should emphasize that if the only way to save Yahoo were to require everyone to come to work every day, that would [...]

[misc] The Wars on Terrorism, Al Qaeda, Cancer, and Dessert

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 10:00:15 EST

Steve Coll has a good piece in the New Yorker about the importance of Al Qaeda as a brand: …as long as there are bands of violent Islamic radicals anywhere in the world who find it attractive to call themselves Al Qaeda, a formal state of war may exist between Al Qaeda and America. The [...]

[2b2k] Why it’s ok to get your news through people who share your beliefs

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:01:35 EST

I was steeling myself a couple of days ago to say something in a talk that believe but don’t want to: We shouldn’t feel guilty about relying on sources with whom we agree to contextualize breaking news. It’s ok. It’s even rational. For example, if the Supreme Court hands down a ruling I don’t understand, [...]

How many birds are killed by cats? How many people subscribe to the Boston Globe online?

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:41:56 EST

How many birds do domestic cats in the United States kill every year? You win if your answer is within an order of magnitude in either direction. However, you don’t actually win anything. The answer comes from the journal Nature Communications as reported here To reveal the answer, select the black box. (This assumes you [...]

What’s not ok even with the door closed

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:41:06 EST

Sarah Parmenter has posted about just how ugly it gets for women in tech. She recounts a horrifying story about how as a speaker at a tech conference she was methodically assaulted online. I want to believe that this was a rare and random act, but apparently it happens more than we know because it’s [...]

DPLA does metadata right

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 09:08:34 EST

The Digital Public Library of America‘s policy on metadata was discussed during the recent board of directors call, and the DPLA is, in my opinion, getting it exactly and admirably right. (See Infodocket for links.) The metadata that the DPLA aggregates will be openly available and in the public domain. But just so there won’t [...]