New issue of my newsletter: “A Framework for Books and AI in the Public Interest” — How libraries could create a thoughtful and ethical interface between their shelves and artificial intelligence newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-fr...

We're pleased to share the final report of the Public Interest Corpus project. The report is the product of more than a year of work supported by the Mellon Foundation, in which we asked how research libraries can make books data available for AI training in ways that serve the public interest:

🧵 We tend to think the internet is permanent, but VANISHING CULTURE—the new 📚 from Internet Archive—starts with a simple reality: our digital record is far more fragile than we think 🕳️ 📖 Read for free: archive.org/details/vani... 🛒 Purchase in print: www.betterworldbooks.com/product/deta... ⬇️

Revisiting Frida Kahlo’s month-long stay with the artist and bookbinder Mary Reynolds in Paris sheds new light on the Surrealist movement as a whole, writes Rachel Cohen

Explore 1,000,000 Digitized Artworks from Across the UK: Paintings, Sculptures, Street Art & More

"What 'Orpheus in the Underworld' most clarifies is the depth of Adorno’s early investment in a particular conception of surrealism." Todd Cronan reviews "Orpheus in the Underworld": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theodor-adorno-orpheus-underworld-music-criticism-sibelius-stravinsky

"It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light."—Gabriel García Márquez. www.newyorker.com/magazine/197... www.loc.gov/item/93842348/

On the Calculation of Meaning, or Doing Words without Things | Critical Inquiry: Vol 52, No 3 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

"What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining?"—on chimeras, Duchamp and Umberto Eco's Opera aperta. architecturaldesign-ad.com/shop/p/vol-962 www.sciarc.edu/events/event...

Thrilled to collaborate with @grigorievna1812.bsky.social and contribute to assembling the open digital corpus of historical Greek, the largest compiled to date, for this project under the leadership of @dasmiq.bsky.social.

How a team of curators at National Gallery of Canada brought more women artists into galleries through a Getty-funded research project: gty.art/3NM9VLx

"How long have I been in this place? I cannot say. In the darkness, time has lost meaning. The only days I remember are 'Days of Heaven' (Terrence Malick, 1978), the only nights, 'Nights of Cabiria' (Fellini, 1957)."

Now available from LUISS University Press: a revised, updated, Italian version of my cultural history of coffee consumption with a focus on interwar stovetop coffee makers like the Bialetti Moka Express. luissuniversitypress.it/pubblicazion...

We are excited to announce our next seminar: David A. Smith @dasmiq.bsky.social (Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston) "Artificial Intelligence as an Archival Science" on Friday 20th March 2026, 11am CET. Details here 👉 almanach.inria.fr/seminars-en....

A 30-Minute Introduction to Japanese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japanese Whisky, It’s Underrated, But Very High Quality

As AI mania has swept the world, it has led to some surprising realignment of values, particularly among those who support openness and access to knowledge. This is the first post in a series about the choices that knowledge institutions face as AI reshapes how their collections are used.

A writer’s writer. medium.com/@lfloridi/on...

The Dialogues of Plato - A New Translation by David Horan - Platonic Foundation www.platonicfoundation.org/translation/

Here is a report of some exploratory work transforming a traditional Greek textbook (Crosby and Schaeffer) into something truly digital. sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...

Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/

"[...] se non si impara a scegliere si rischia di rimanere davanti ai libri come Funes di fronte alle proprie infinite percezioni: quando tutto appare degno di essere ricordato, nulla più è degno, e si desidererebbe dimenticare." ilmanifesto.it/umberto-eco-... eventi.unibo.it/conference-u...

New essay: “A Museum’s Sublime Hallucinations” — Sometimes you need the fake to show you what’s real (a love letter to the Museum of Jurassic Technology) newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-mu...

In a new book, “Now I Surrender,” Álvaro Enrigue uses absurdity to tell a fuller truth about historical events, Boris Kachka writes.

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

How can AI help institutions make millions of historic photographs more accessible and interesting to public users? 📸 This program is co-hosted by BPL Digital Services and the Leventhal Map & Education Center. Register for the event here: buff.ly/WAXM9hk or tune in via YouTube at buff.ly/7Oco3jU

‘The collection goes some way to demonstrating the breadth of Yourcenar’s mind; and some way, too, to demonstrating her particular gift for summoning the past out of itself’.’ Tim Smith-Laing reviews a new edition of essays on Michelangelo, Dürer, Piranesi, and more, by Marguerite Yourcenar

The self-taught painter Henri Rousseau had a tremendous sense of self-belief, despite being ridiculed in his lifetime. A landmark exhibition confirms him as a singularly modern artist, writes Susan Moore

New essay: “Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions?” — Not with chatbots as we know them, but perhaps with what comes next newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/can-...

📄 New paper: Pre-Editorial Normalization for Automatically Transcribed Medieval Manuscripts in Old French and Latin Thibault Clérice, @rachelbawden.bsky.social , Anthony Glaise, Ariane Pinche, @dasmiq.bsky.social (2026) arxiv.org/abs/2602.13905 We introduce Pre-Editorial Normalization (PEN). 🧵⬇️

Le parole dell'antichità.

[Job 📣] Are you curious about #AI applications in the #humanities? My Print and Probability research group (@print-and-prob.bsky.social) is hiring a postdoc! Come help us develop computational methods for identifying clandestine early modern printers! cmu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CMU/job/Pitt...

🏛️ What rights must libraries have online? 🏛️ Join the us for PROTECT OUR FUTURE MEMORY, a webinar introducing a global movement for digital access & preservation. Hosted by the Internet Archive & partners. 📆 Tues, Jan 27 🕙 10 AM PT 📍 Online 🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/1968807647... #libraries

On distant writing, encounters, narrative counterfactuals, and humanity's inexhaustible semantic capital.

Seems like it's worth posting this one again.

I'm thrilled to report that the Perseus Digital Library has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Read more about our plans here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...). .

Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Greatest Botanical Illustrator of All Time

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!