On my way to Karlsruhe for the celebration of the freshly minted Dr Russa Biswas Congrats on your big day Russa!

Then tomorrow a NFDI4Culture workshop with the team from Mainz.

Next week some ICONCLASS production work, and then the KI Konferenz at the Landesmuseum.

Looking forward to a busy week!

A student is writing her thesis on this wonderful handwritten copy of Heinrich Khunrath's 'Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae' (1595). Anyone knows of any similar examples? #BookHistodons #rarebooks #Bookhistory

In 1959, police were called to a segregated library when a Black 9-year-old boy trying to check out books refused to leave, after being told the library was not for Black people.

The boy, Ronald McNair, went on to became an astronaut. The library is also now named after him

An important discussion from NLNet Labs if you make Open Source software.

NLnet Labs is closely following a legislative proposal by the European Commission affecting almost all hardware and software on the European market. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) intends to ensure cybersecurity of products with digital elements by laying down requirements and obligations for manufacturers.

I think that *what* this does is less interesting than *how* it does it:

https://archive.social/

Also, how long has the Harvard Library Innovation Lab been sitting on this domain!

Apple is quietly tagging #podcast episodes by #wikidata topic

https://wearebumper.com/blog/2022/11/15/apple-episode-topics/?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2022-11-15

On 1 & 2 December, there is a hybrid conference being organized by the Badisches Landesmuseum and the Allard Pierson museum.

Cultures of Artificial Intelligence in Museums

The conference will focus on a critical survey of the current field of action of Artificial Intelligence in museums and its future development.

Which cultures of Artificial Intelligence have already developed? How are machine learning and deep learning being used in cultural productions and institutions? Can critical reflections lead to a better understanding of which forms of algorithmic culture are developing and what implications the use of these technologies entails? What new possibilities for action are conceivable through the use of artificial intelligence and can new approaches to culture be created with it? Is it already possible to identify which methods are particularly promising, practical or forward-looking?

Under the three keywords Reflect, Empower and Next Intelligence, the conference aims to provide an overview of Artificial Intelligence in museums, to offer spaces for thought and exchange, and to create the necessary transparency for decisions about which algorithmic culture is being driven by the use of Artificial Intelligence procedures.

To celebrate 1K followers here, something I have been wanting to figure out for a long time: a slippy #Mapbox map with an overlaid #D3 #SVG map synced to it: https://svelte.dev/repl/2578120142f44b32962d67049e975a16?version=3.53.1

This means: Mapbox base layers and controls + all the D3 geo goodness like great circles, geoCircles and curved line interpolations!

Of course, built with #Svelte

I learnt over the weekend that the reMarkable writing pad is far more open than I thought. You can SSH in to it, mount the filesystem, install software on it - it even has a built-in webserver. (it is Linux after all)

This is far more open than Kindle devices, and especially the new (pending) Kindle Scribe When I saw the announcement of this, I thought that I would wait for that, but now I realise even though the Kindle ecosystem integration is a big plus, I might actually get more joy out of a reMarkable after all.

Does anyone else have a reMarkable and would like to share some thoughts on the pros and cons?

The #fediverse is one of the most hopeful aspects of the internet, since it tries to bring it back to its decentralized, federated roots. In my opinion, there is no other way to guarantee free communication.

However, it is not without its challenges. Looking ahead, it's easy to identify some of them:

1. Centralization is an emergent phenomenon. We can see this happening with the distribution of instance sizes, and the clear “rich get richer” dynamics that take place. This is not due to bad actors, it is simply how people tend to behave.

2. Commercialization is yet to hit this platform, but if it becomes popular, it will undoubtedly happen. Instances that serve ads, promote content, etc, will appear at some point.

3. Related to point 2, it is possible that Google and/or Microsoft will seize the opportunity to try once more to move into the social media domain, and make services that connect to the #fediverse. This will be sold as an adoption of the federation, and hence progress. But to see how that goes, we need only to remember what happened with google chat and the open Jabber protocol — they abandoned it as soon as their service became popular enough. Bait and switch.

4. Legal intimidation of smaller instances is a real menace. The push to force Facebook/Twitter/etc to be liable for what users post will backfire, and render every instance admin responsible for what every single user posts. Note that it does not matter one bit if the content is actually problematic — a single cease and desist letter from a lawyer will terrify most admins out there.

These are not problems without solution, but it's unclear how things will unfold.

Hello Fediverse!

I'm sharing a thing that I hope can be the beginning for many conversations, and represents for me a statement that is the result of many years of conversation:

https://slocanstatement.org/

I call it the #SlocanStatement, and I'm sharing it here first, in public, in the spirit of the Fediverse.

I hope you'll read it, share it if you think it's a valuable statement, and comment and revise it towards building consensus across the Fediverse.

New blog entry: #SPARQL queries of git repository data https://www.bobdc.com/blog/sparqlgit/

RIP Greg Bear, and thank you for the amazing reads.

I LOVED reading his books, especially Blood Music and Darwin's Radio

Think it would be a good candidate for some holiday season re-reads this year.

Did you know your Google Assistent can play soothing sounds to help you sleep or concentrate?

For example: Say "Ok Google" and "Play Thunderstorm sounds".

Here is a list of the options:

• Relaxing sounds
• Nature sounds
• Water sounds
• Running water sounds
• Babbling brook sounds
• Oscillating fan sounds
• Fireplace sounds
• Forest sounds
• Country night sounds
• Ocean sounds
• Rain sounds
• River sounds
• Thunderstorm sounds
• White noise

What is the use of Humanities you say?

Here is the full quote:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Alcuin c.735–804, English scholar and theologian

From Oxford Essential Quotations (4 ed.)

A stark reminder from one of the original ex-Twitter designers on product design choices that were made

In complex, mature products (or societies) things are often messy, complicated or counter-intuitive because they grew - and survived. They might not be "the best" or "simple" when you encounter them with fresh eyes, but they are like that for a reason.

And as a community of geeks wanting to build a better Fediverse, it would be a good idea to read the above and bear it in mind.

@atomicpoet @djswagerman hilariously, my goal with Condé was to try to drive adoption of Mastodon/the fediverse. After years trying from the tech side, I'd given up, but concluded that the only thing that was going to move the needle was pushing for a large non-tech community to get really into it and drive the wedge.

Gave up two months ago and left Conde feeling hopeless that this was ever going to happen. 😂

Thanks, Elno!

Mastodon has changed how I think. Twitter now seems like a server that doesn't want to federate with anyone else, and that everyone else has blacklisted. I'm in awe of how much sense that makes.

I'm looking for libraries, archives and museums that offer IIIF endpoints (and possibly some kind of API to programmatically find the manifest URLs). The manifests will be added to this repository: https://github.com/tomdeneire/pictor @museum

I didn’t realize that the Dutch fought for their bike lanes. There’s a lot of history within this that I’m currently naive about but excited to learn!

Here’s the article I’m starting with — How the Dutch got Their Cycle Paths: https://www.pps.org/article/how-the-dutch-got-their-cycle-paths

#bikes #urbanism