Tag: 03.01.17

The Library As Community-Maker

“A healthy library, like a healthy habitat, is diverse and dynamic. Like species in a rainforest or fishes on a reef, the books on the shelves shift and change, with time and season, so that every week there is something new to discover. A healthy library invites the eye and mind to wander round. This book habitat does not happen on its own – it is created by librarians.”

Could Artificial Intelligence Recreate Artists (Or Be Artists)?

Take the project to see if machines could recreate Gaudi’s aesthetic. “They have fed the machine not just hundreds of images of Gaudi’s work, but also contextual images – images of Barcelona, where Gaudi’s most famous work can be found, and other historical and cultural information. The idea is to actually recreate Gaudi’s intelligence, not just his signature style – to create an artificial Gaudi who was inspired the way Gaudi was. In theory, any artist’s brain could be recompiled in this way, and you could consult a virtual Leonardo da Vinci not just about how to draw and paint but about how to invent new flying machines.”

How Self-Segregation Is Warping Our Cultural Debates

“We’re making decisions that are rational and even pleasurable from an individual point of view, but when everyone in society behaves this way — to cement in their own security, their own mobility — social mobility as a whole goes down, inequality goes up, many measures of segregation go up. And ultimately a bill for this comes due.”

Study: Twenty Percent Of Readers Still Hear An Author’s Voice After They’ve Finished A Book

The voices of some of literature’s more memorable characters have a way of staying with you, long after their stories are over. Many readers — every reader? — could’ve told you that. For some people, though, this idea is a little more literal. According to a new (and truly delightful) psychology study — published in the March edition of the journal Cognition and Consciousness — about a fifth of readers “hear” the voices of fictional characters in their heads, long after they’ve closed the books.

Has Contemporary Music Become Hip? There’s Evidence That It Is

“One reason why,” says Deborah Borda,” the L.A. Philharmonic’s president and CEO, “is that contemporary music is not nearly as doctrinaire as it used to be. As great as they were, the years of Milton Babbitt, Elliot Carter, and Roger Sessions are over. It’s a different ethos now that crosses borders and is more accessible. I don’t mind saying that a new work is accessible. We want people to come. I also think,” she adds reflectively, “judging by the period we’re entering, there are going to be a lot more pieces with a distinctly political message.”

New Statistical Analysis Of Shakespeare’s Work Reveals New Understanding

Computers and human readers can identify Shakespeare’s writing through “plus-words”—such as “gentle”, “answer”, “beseech”, “tonight”—which he uses frequently. This method becomes less accurate, though, when writers ape one another’s style as they often did in Elizabethan theatre-land. Early modern playwrights were a close-knit bunch and 16th-century audiences do not appear to have placed a high premium on novelty.