Corruption gets its own platform
Online markets are turning war—and other policies—into wagers.
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Still Water
A small victory over big data
Last December the town of Lewiston, Maine, pushed back on a proposed data center with some help from New Media faculty informed enough to cut through the hype. Still Water co-director Joline Blais was the guest for the December 24th episode of the WTBA podcast, “The Trojan Horse of AI: Data Centers and Community Impact.”
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Ken Jacobs and Preserving the Immaterial
This week we lost a figure known as “the dean of American avant-garde film.” Ken Jacobs was renowned for his ability to turn the humblest materia prima of cinema, including 16mm projectors and dusty reels of found footage, into optical sorcery. In so doing, he also turned time-honored assumptions about media preservation on their head.
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Ptolemaic Thinking in the Age of AI
Of all the AI buzzwords out there, the word “model” would seem free of hyperbole compared to “superintelligent” or the “singularity.” Yet this innocuous-seeming word can mean two contradictory things, and AI companies are deliberately muddling the line between them. A recent Harvard/MIT study of simulating planetary orbits illustrates the contrast between what scientists consider
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New app helps students compare the environmental cost of AI and everyday tech
How many AI videos equal watching a Netflix movie? A tool launched last week by the Still Water lab lets students compare the hidden costs of digital habits across both AI and non-AI activities.
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Should you let AI manage your collection?
This April’s teleconference from UMaine’s Digital Curation program looks at the practical and ethical issues of integrating AI into archival workflows—and how human crowdsourcing can fill in the gaps.
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Mel Bochner and the bridge from words to worlds
When he died last Wednesday, artist Mel Bochner left a body of work that’s gained in relevance in a half century defined by information—even more so in the age of AI. The artist’s death holds special meaning for me because he was a mentor when I was in graduate school at the Yale School of
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AI as miniature archive
What happens to ground truth when finding a factoid or photo no longer means consulting an archive but generating one from scratch? That’s the question that drives “Honey, AI Shrunk the Archive,” an essay I wrote for the forthcoming anthology New Directions in Digital Textual Studies.
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Pooling ideas for an AI ethics policy
Diversity without cacophony Group discussions on controversial subjects can open students to more viewpoints, but they can also result in the usual suspects—sometimes the most thoughtful students, but often just the loudmouths—dominating the conversation. So I was intrigued when Greg Nelson and Rotem Landesman, my collaborators on a course that examines in-depth the impact of
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Award-winning director screens film for permaculture class
What’s the connection among happiness, women’s empowerment, and sustainable living? This week a UMaine course in permaculture hosted a lively discussion on this question with the director of an award-winning documentary.
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