Category: Archives

Fiume o morte!

I was pointed to a great documentary Fiume o morte! (Fiume or death) which is free to watch on Vimeo. The documentary tells the story of the occupation of Rijeka, known in Italian as Fiume, by the fascist Italian poet D’Annunzio and a small army of Italian soldiers in 1919. Despite opposition from the Italian government, the occupation of the city on the Adriatic coast of Croatia attracted thousands of Italian youth. The documentary tells the story though a creative mix of recreation, historical evidence, humour and reflection. Multiple amateur locals play D’Annunzio and much of the narration is in Fiumano, the dialect of Italian still spoken by some in Rijeka.

Watch it!

Archive Zaro

Ralph Padilla, a DH (graduate) student that I work with, gave a talk today about a neat project of his own, Archive Zaro. The project is archiving video games from the Philippines. It has just launched.

This archive is part of an ongoing academic project on game preservation and digital heritage. It explores how stories, creative processes, and design histories of Filipino video games can be documented and studied without relying on commercial hosting or proprietary platforms. Each entry serves as both a cultural record and a research artifact, contributing to the broader understanding of how local game development reflects art, labor, and identity.

Visualizations on Covers from Cerîde-i Adliye, a Turkish Law Journal (1924–26)

Cover art with a visualizaton beneath a building.

In the The Public Domain Review I came across a collection of Covers from Cerîde-i Adliye, a Turkish Law Journal (1924–26). The covers include some extraordinary visualizations. Check it out.

There is an essay on Measure of Justice: Covering the Cerîde-i Adliye Covers that discusses the covers and an exhibition of them.

The research exhibition “Speak to the Eyes: Visualizing Information from the Ottoman Era to the Republic” curated by Ömer Durmaz studies information visualization with a specific focus on the Late Ottoman and the Early Turkish Republic periods while also taking into account the history of informational design in the West.

AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job

The Atlantic has a thoughtful article titled, AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job. The article points out that player pianos automated the playing of pianos in the early 1900s and could even play things humans didn’t have enough fingers for, but that didn’t put piano players out of work.

How could humans possibly compete? Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.

The article goes on to talk about how live music is still appreciated even though many musicians can’t play as well as what you can get on recorded (or automated) music. People like to see, hear, and interact with other people.

It also mentions how people fought back. Above you see an image from an ad in 1930. Earlier John Philip Sousa coined the phrase “canned music” in 1906 to mock the automated sound. (At the time the cylindrical records came in can shaped containers.) According to the Wikipedia article, he testified to Congress,

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Sounds like some of the concerns we have about AI today, but again, I suspect live music will survive.

The problem is more likely to be arts where there isn’t a live person performing or interacting with you. Does it really matter if illustrations in magazines are made by humans, AIs or hybrids as long as they catch the eye and illustrate the topic? Perhaps the visual arts will shift to live performance art or those online performances like those for YouTube by Bob Ross.

Declaration of Independence – First E-Text

Project Gutenberg and the Declaration of Independence

I came across a blog post about how Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg started in 1971 by typing the Declaration of Independence into the ARPANET and sending it to others. See 50 Years at Project Gutenberg.

Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg’s Practices by Gregory B. Newby is a longer thing on the history of Project Gutenberg’s processes.

Hart passed in 2011. Gregory B. Newby just passed away this October. The Project, however seems to be in good hands with a foundation and board.

Humanitext Antiqua

Here at DH 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, I heard a paper about a neat Japanese projects, Humanitext Antiqua – ヒューマニテクスト. They allow you to identify an ancient philosophy subcorpus (eg. Plato) and then ask questions of that. I was able to get all sorts of interesting results since they have trained their system on Greek and Roman philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero.

Here is a reference to the project:

Naoya Iwata, Ikko Tanaka, Jun Ogawa, ‘Improving Semantic Search Accuracy of Classical Texts through Context- Oriented Translation’, Proceedings of IPSJ SIG Computers and the Humanities Symposium. Download link: https://researchmap.jp/n.iwata/published_papers/48448512

Home | Constellate

The new text and data analysis service from JSTOR and Portico.

Thanks to John I have been exploring Constellate. This comes from ITHAKA that has developed JSTOR. Constellate lets you build a dataset from their collections and then visualize the data (see image above.) They also have a Jupyter lab where you can then run notebooks on your data.

They are now experimenting with AI tools.

Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill | Siva Vaidhyanathan | The Guardian

In many ways, the long 21st century began when Apple launched the Macintosh with its ‘1984’ Super Bowl ad

The Guardian has a story about the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill. The famous 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad by Ridley Scott was aired on January 22nd, 1984 and announced that on January 24th, the Macintosh would be introduced.

What made the Mac so revolutionary? To be honest, the Mac wasn’t really that innovative. Apple had tried to sell a GUI (Graphical User Interface) computer before in the Lisa, but it was too expensive. The Lisa in turn had be developed using ideas from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that were marketed in the Xerox Star of 1981, which was again too expensive to be influential. What the Mac got right was the price making it affordable. And the rest was history.

The author of the Guardian article, Siva Vaidhyanathan, argues that the Mac and later the iPhone hid the realities of their manufacture and innards. This was a common critique of the GUI, that it hid the way the operating system “really” worked, which was shown presumably by MS Dos.

This move to magic through design has blinded us to the real conditions of most people working and living in the world. A gated device is similar to a gated community. Beyond that, the sealed boxes, once they included ubiquitous cameras and location devices and were connected through invisible radio signals, operate as a global surveillance system that Soviet dictators could never have dreamed of. We bought into a world of soft control beyond Orwell’s imagination as well.

Frankly, I think the argument is exaggerated. Consumer products like cars had been hiding their workings under a trunk long before the Macintosh. For that matter the IBM PCs running MS Dos of that time were really not more open. The command line is an interface as much as a graphical one, it is just a different paradigm, a dialogue interface where you order the machine around instead of a desktop where you manipulate files. The argument seems to be one of association – associating the Mac with a broad generalization about capitalism and then hinting that everything after can be blamed on us wanting what Apple offered. What I remember was struggling to learn the commands of an IBM and then being offered a better designed computer. Sometimes better design isn’t a surveillance plot.

PARRY encounters the DOCTOR (RFC439)

V. Cerf set up a dialogue between two of the most famous early chatbots, PARRY encounters the DOCTOR (RFC439) The DOCTOR is the therapist script for Weizenbaum’s ELIZA that is how people usually encounter of ELIZA. PARRY was developed by Kenneth Colby and acts like a paranoid schizophrenic. Putting them into dialogue therefore makes a kind of sense and the result is amusing.

It is also interesting that this is a RFC (Request For Comments), a genre normally reserved for Internet technical documents.

Lit sounds: U of A experts help rescue treasure trove of audio cultural history

A U of A professor is helping to rescue tens of thousands of lost audio and video recordings — on tape, film, vinyl or any other bygone media — across North America.

The Folio has a nice story about the SpokenWeb project that I am part of, Lit sounds: U of A experts help rescue treasure trove of audio cultural history. The article discusses the collaboration and importance of archiving to scholarship.