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!

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

Today, we are pleased to release The Public Interest Corpus Principles and Goals. This release builds on the recap of our final planning workshop and anticipates release of our final deliverable later this month.

www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-lang... The complicated relationship between LLMs and the oral tradition.

I have now tested this with Claude 4.5 Opus and it's as good as Gemini 3 Pro, nearly perfect transcriptions. And I've gotten a lot of email that they also work well on non-English-language transcriptions & have heard from some libraries/archives that AI has finally reached a state of usefulness here

We’re happy to announce the release of the 3rd white paper in our Legal Pathways to OA series. The public access requirement works because the grantee must give the federal government a nonexclusive license to use the work. Do institutions have the rights to give the government their license?

"There’s a whole generation that grew up entirely digitally but is now developing a different kind of interest in analog. She is hosting analog color darkroom workshops at gOlab, which are always fully booked out with young students, and she is in demand for lectures at art schools."

New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New post on an important project for building archives of contemporary social movements being undertaken by Fondazione Feltrinelli jeffreyschnapp.com/2025/11/12/a...

Building datasets to train smaller, task-focused models used to be incredibly time-consuming. Very excited to see SAM3 massively lower that barrier. Describe the class you want to detect and get annotated datasets automatically! Try it yourself: huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...!

Que reste-t-il des textes médiévaux ? Pourquoi certains survivent et d’autres s’effacent ? 👉 Une séance de séminaire dédiée aux enjeux de la transmission textuelle dans le cadre du projet ERC LostMA avec @jbcamps.bsky.social Rendez-vous demain à partir de 14h Inscription 🔽

The Public Interest Corpus has completed the last of three planning workshops. A diverse group of stakeholders sharpened our implementation plan by contributing expert insights on users, uses, and managing legal risk, data development and access, multi-stakeholder governance, and sustainability.

I curated some readings for class on "data tensions" and the list felt worth sharing. Come on a tour of datasets, books, the web, and AI with me... We'll start with this piece on the Google Books project: the hopes, dreams, disasters, and aftermath of building a public library on the internet. 1/n

I am delighted to share that I am a member of the Scientific Committee for the research project ∀ISION_E. The project's call for abstracts on "extended intelligences" in the field of drawing and architecture is open until November 14. www.visioneuid.com/call-for-vis...

Transformer LMs get pretty far by acting like ngram models, so why do they learn syntax? A new paper by sunnytqin.bsky.social, me, and @dmelis.bsky.social illuminates grammar learning in a whirlwind tour of generalization, grokking, training dynamics, memorization, and random variation. #mlsky #nlp

Join us in Charleston on November 4 for our preconference, "How Can Libraries and Publishers Collaborate to Make Backlist Monographs Open Access?, which is free to attend through the support of the California Digital Library, the De Gruyter eBound Foundation, and University of Michigan Library.

In principle, open access means that anyone, anywhere, can read and reuse scholarly work. In practice, many works labeled as “open” are constrained by restrictions that limit how they can be used. These constraints dilute the value of openness and conflict with its foundational definitions.

Computationally, whitespace gets little attention—it’s usually standardized or stripped. But in poetry, whitespace matters! Yet actually *preserving* that poetic whitespace is v tough. Its slipperiness points to bigger issues w/ text processing & LLMs. New paper ⬜️ aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that. So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more. Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort! bit.ly/ach-anthology

New issue of my newsletter: "The Index and the Vector" — Converting ambiguity into precision can help a broader audience discover and learn from collections newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New issue of my newsletter: “The Library’s New Entryway” — An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

highly recommend!

Bartz v. Anthropic has had a couple of major developments. Though the lawsuit was initially brought to address the legality of using copyrighted materials for training AI, the suit now focuses on Anthropic’s storage—without training use—of copies of books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi.

Anthropic’s copyright settlement is historic, but it’s also not what many authors and publishers think. Check out our latest on what’s inside the proposed settlement:

I have updated my in-depth analysis of Bartz v Anthropic to reflect this important and overlooked aspect of the proposed settlement: “In what may be a rude surprise for authors, partial or full payments for many books may go to publishers rather than authors.” newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/land...

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961 Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

New issue of my newsletter: “AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled"—A new framework provides a way for cultural heritage institutions to take advantage of the tech with fewer misgivings, and to serve students, scholars, and the public better newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/ai-a...

A new translation of @espejolento.bsky.social‬'s lesson! doi.org/10.46430/phe... We’re grateful to Javier Cisneros Brito + Alberto Santiago Martínez for their translation. Thank you to @betovargas.github.io‬ + Marisol Andrade Muñoz for their reviews, and to @giuliataurino.bsky.social for editing.

What does a "function" mean? What does it look like on a Wikimedia project? It might be something that checks leap years, tests for prime numbers, or decodes a cipher. These are small, clear examples that you can experiment with easily on Wikifunctions. 🧵⬇️ (1/3)

Everyone’s dropping VLM-based OCR models lately… But are they actually better than traditional OCR engines, which output XML for historical docs? I built OCR Time Machine to test it! 📄 Upload image + ALTO/PAGE XML ⚖️ Compare outputs side by side 🔗 huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky rdcu.be/etk07 The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

A new translation of @espejolento.bsky.social‬’s lesson: doi.org/10.46430/phe... We’re grateful to Javier Cisneros Brito + Alberto Santiago Martínez for their translation. Thank you to @betovargas.github.io + Marisol Andrade Muñoz for their reviews, and to @giuliataurino.bsky.social for editing.

Finally documented the Beyond Words dataset from the @librarycongress.bsky.social labs / @bcgl.bsky.social for the BigLAM @hf.co org! - 3.5K annotated historical newspaper pages - Bounding boxes + category labels - Photos, ads, headlines, cartoons & more

Can you train a performant language model using only openly licensed text? We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2

Many libraries now use automated tools to measure diversity in their collections. We examined how these tools work and whether library workers find them useful. A complex case study of libraries navigating automation, DEI, & shrinking public funding. Our new FAccT paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.14890

I am excited to announce our latest work 🎉 "Cultural Evaluations of Vision-Language Models Have a Lot to Learn from Cultural Theory". We review recent works on culture in VLMs and argue for deeper grounding in cultural theory to enable more inclusive evaluations. Paper 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22793

"Ardam was confronting a different, somewhat sensitive question about navigating a person’s digital history. When Sontag donated her laptop to the archive, did she realize how much she was giving away?" on archiving digital ephemera and culture -- www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +

“When Information is Networked” — My tribute to Clifford Lynch, who sadly passed away last week. Cliff saw before anyone else how digital technology would enable new forms of research and learning, and completely transform the production and dissemination of knowledge

Remapping the canon: a global history of photobooks by women photographers from the Getty Library. www.getty.edu/exhibitions/...