Distant Reader Blog

The Dial was a Transcendentalist literary journal initially published in 1841 and continued intermittently for approximately 85 years.

Yesterday I published a curated study carrel named On Government, and it was my first "guided reading."

I assert the use of LLM technology is especially useful -- an accurate time-saver -- when it is applied one's own content.

Below are a few thoughts on the topic of artificial intelligence in libraries.

One of the coolest things generative-AI does for me to automatic zero-shot classification.

This is a plug for a blog posting describing Reader Libraries.

tl;dnr - Reader Lite and Reader Luminaries are implementations of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) tools.

tl;dnr This suite of software is akin to a back-of-the-book index but on steroids.

While here, basking inside the grandeur of the Sainte-Geneviève Library (Paris), I have finished curating four Distant Reader study carrels: Emma by Jane Austen The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer Moby Dick by Herman Melville Walden by Henry David Thoreau…

I wonder, "What does Plato have to say about knowledge, and to what degree is knowledge an absolute?"

If LLMs were not created with copyrighted materials, or, if LLMs were created with copyrighted materials, but access to the LLMs was limited only to authorized persons, then do you think the library community would be more amenable to their use?

For a good time, I thought would use distant reading computing techniques to define the word "intelligence", specifically, "artificial intelligence".