Minitex: MDL Releases New Online Exhibit: Quotable Minnesota. “The Minnesota Digital Library published a new online exhibit titled ‘Quotable Minnesota.’ This exhibit features several quotes from Minnesota’s artists, authors, musicians, leaders, and more. Their inspiring words are illustrated by some of our favorite images from MDL collections.”
TechCrunch: Copper is building ‘the Instagram for book lovers’. “The founder and CEO of Copper, Allison Trowbridge wanted to build a social network that revolves around books, connecting authors and fans through in-app discussions and live events. As an author herself, she also wanted to help writers find new income streams, whether that’s through ticketed virtual events, or just generating enough conversation around a book that more people buy it.”
Library of Congress: Library of Congress Acquires Papers of Award-Winning Playwright Neil Simon. “The Library of Congress has acquired the manuscripts and papers of playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century.”
Huntington Herald-Dispatch: Decades after his death, Marshall students archive forgotten Huntington writer’s work . “”Students at Marshall University got a chance this semester to embrace Appalachian literature, while also making sure a Huntington writer will not be forgotten again. Michael Martin and Krys Smith, sophomores at Marshall, said they signed up for professor Stefan Schoberlein’s Appalachian literature class this spring expecting to read books and take quizzes, but the professor had other plans in mind after he heard of writer Tom Kromer on NPR.”
Times of Malta: Literary foundation launches directory of Maltese writers. “HELA – the hub for excellence in the literary arts – recently launched its new website… which includes a directory of Maltese writers. This depository currently includes information about 40 writers, but the website aims to continue growing to shed light on local writers in Malta and abroad.”
Motherboard: Google’s AI-Powered ‘Inclusive Warnings’ Feature Is Very Broken. “Starting this month—21 years after Microsoft turned off Clippy because people hated it so much—Google is rolling out a new feature called ‘assistive writing’ that butts into your prose to make style and tone notes on word choice, concision, and inclusive language…. this feature is showing up for end users in Google Docs, one of the company’s most widely-used products, and it’s annoying as hell.”
New York Times: A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?. “GPT-3 belongs to a category of deep learning known as a large language model, a complex neural net that has been trained on a titanic data set of text: in GPT-3’s case, roughly 700 gigabytes of data drawn from across the web, including Wikipedia, supplemented with a large collection of text from digitized books. GPT-3 is the most celebrated of the large language models, and the most publicly available, but Google, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and DeepMind have all developed their own L.L.M.s in recent years.”
New York Times: Substack’s Growth Spurt Brings Growing Pains. “The publishing platform’s founders want Substack to be an ‘alternate universe on the internet.’ But it faces copycat rivals, an exodus by writers and a need to move beyond newsletters.”
Camden New Journal: Education pioneer Beryl Gilroy’s archive to be made public. “UNPUBLISHED manuscripts by an inspirational headteacher are to be made public in a new archive obtained by the British Library. Beryl Gilroy, who ran Beckford School in the 1970s, was one of the first black headteachers in this country. But she was also celebrated for a large body of fiction and non-fiction about women, children and migration.”
University of St. Thomas: 13-Year Research Collaboration Explores Untapped Hemingway. “In the fall of 2009, four University of St. Thomas English students, their professor, and a librarian met in a far corner of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library to begin what would become a 13-year collaboration creating an annotated bibliography on the life and art of the most celebrated American author of the 20th century: Ernest Hemingway…. Hundreds of articles, books, blogs and reviews appear annually on Hemingway, and now, they’re searchable across the globe via St. Thomas’ recently launched annotated bibliography on the author.”
VentureBeat: You.com launches an AI-powered writing tool powered by OpenAI. “Just a few months ago, Bryan McCann and Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, launched You.com, a search engine that leverages AI to understand search queries, rank the results, and parse the queries into different languages (including programming languages)…. In its quest to recalibrate expectations around search engines, You.com is today launching a search app built in collaboration with OpenAI that generates snippets — or even documents — of text when given a prompt.” I played with it briefly. It’s interesting, but note that You.com says it is “free for a limited time”.
UX Collective: The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing. “I’ve been watching how writers use questions lately, and thought: Hmmm, it’d be cool to see only the questions in a piece of prose. I probably started down this line of thinking because last fall I created a little web tool that removes everything but the punctuation from a piece of writing. That tool wound up being a pretty intriguing type of literary x-ray: I discovered, for example, that I use a ton of parentheticals (and way too many m-dashes). Since I already had the code for that, it wasn’t too hard for me to program a version focuses on questions instead.”
TechCrunch: Substack introduces a new iOS app for reading, Android launch coming soon. “Online subscription newsletter platform Substack announced today that it’s launching an iOS app for reading. In a blog post about the announcement, the company said the new ‘Substack Reader’ app brings all of your Substack subscriptions into one place where you can read content from writers you follow.”
Harry Ransom Center: More Than 60,000 Digitized Items From LGBTQ Pioneers Launch Online. “The Ransom Center houses the papers of British author Radclyffe Hall, author of the 1928 lesbian landmark novel, ‘The Well of Loneliness,’ and partner, artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge. The archive includes notebooks, draft typescripts, correspondence, photographs and scrapbooks that document Hall’s career as a writer, Troubridge’s work as a sculptor and translator, and their personal and creative partnership.”
University of Notre Dame: Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance Launches New Website. “The new website includes an archive of recorded events featuring transnational writers and scholars from Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Colombia, Chile and the United States whose work bears witness to truth and history and to the global struggle for freedom.”
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