Briefly Noted for September 9, 2025

This week in my DMD 2010: History of Digital Culture class, I've been teaching the history and theory of digital information. To illustrate the concept, I like to use the ubiquitous "power" symbol, which is now part of MoMA's collection. The symbol's origin in the binary logic of "1" (on) and "0" (off) is a concrete illustration of the abstract theory of digital information and a reminder that even the most complex digital experiences are built on this simple binary foundation.

The Imperial War Museums (IWM), Capgemini, and Google are using generative AI to transcribe, translate, and analyze over 20,000 hours of the IWM's oral history collection, making thousands of first-hand accounts of 20th-century conflict accessible to the public for the first time. The AI-powered system not only creates searchable transcripts—a task that would have taken an estimated 22 years to complete manually—but also extracts metadata and generates summaries.

In "The Humanities Should Be Harder," Matt Yglesias contends that the declining prestige of and enrollment in the humanities is a result of our courses becoming too easy. Yglesias contrasts humanities departments, which he says have sometimes lowered standards to attract students, with STEM departments, which use difficult "weed-out" courses to build prestige. The solution, he argues, is not to pander, but to increase rigor: assign more work, grade more harshly, and restore the value of a humanities degree by making it a credential that is genuinely hard-won. I'm not sure I buy it, but it's a thought-provoking take.

Finally, in a recent post titled simply "Learning," my friend and colleague Kathleen Fitzpatrick documents her project to move her digital life—from her blog to her code repositories—onto a server in her own house. Driven by a desire to control not just her data but also the "metal on which it's hosted," she details the significant learning curve involved, particularly in the realm of home networking. Kathleen, I admire your ambition and bravery.