In the last few years, a famously private collection of antiquities has become more public. Sophie Barling visits the Torlonia Foundation’s conservation lab and the Villa Albani to see the marbles at…

Carlo Ginzburg’s work centered and subverted the very idea of insignificance.

Newspapers represent one of the richest available primary sources for historical research — capturing not just major events, but births…

Curator Wolf Burchard talks to Edward Behrens about how an exhibition of colossal carpets at the Met in New York celebrates a unique chapter in art history

The Institutional Data Initiative at the Harvard Law School Library expands the ~1M-book Institutional Books dataset with paragraph-level text analysis and 22M extracted images, enabling new forms of ...

Established in 1852 by three brothers, the Alinari firm produced many of the oldest photographs of Italy. Sophie Barling visits its vast archive in Florence

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text

Narrating the history of the Boston Common, with trees as the main characters

June 16th, the day of commemoration of author James Joyce, calls for a certain shade of blue. Not just any blue, but that blue. The iconic cover of Ulysses. This Bloomsday, we follow the color rather than the character and discover it has a story of its own, a hue as intentional and exacting as Joyce himself.

How libraries could create a thoughtful and ethical interface between their shelves and artificial intelligence

We are releasing today the final report of the Public Interest Corpus project. A stable, citable version is here: The Public Interest Corpus: A Framework for Implementation. Because we want to enco…

In the early spring of 1939, the lives of artists Frida Kahlo and Mary Reyolds unexpectedly intersected during Kahlo’s Paris sojourn.

Revisiting a meeting of the two Surrealists in Paris in 1939 sheds new light on the movement as a whole

No art enthusiast's visit to the United Kingdom would be complete without days at the British Museum, the Tate, the V&A and the National Gallery. The fact that all those respected institutions are in ...

Recent exhibitions reflect a desire for intimacy and art in the age of AI.

Gabriel García Márquez explores the ruins of colonialism and capitalism in this 1976 story about a solitary, undying despot in the “house of power.”

Abstract Inspired by Michael Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth (1990), this article brings computational mechanisms of the first generation of LLMs using the transformer architecture in conversation with l...

*30% off through March 31, 2026 (excludes shipping) Guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? ...

Expert curator Hilary Roberts presents new perspectives on the role of image manipulation in conflict photography over the past 170 years.

The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) brings together institutions dedicated to rescuing of films both as art and as historical documents

How long have I been in this place? I cannot say. In the darkness, time has lost meaning. The only days I remember are Days of Heaven (Terrence Mal...

Japan shouldn’t mix,' says All-Japan: The Catalogue of Everything Japanese. 'After all, the essence of jazz lies in improvisation — a concept largely absent from both traditional Japanese music and Ja...

Five writers and AI researchers discuss the future of literature.

Ambrose Dudley, The Burning of the Library of Alexandria This is the first in a series of essays about the choices that knowledge institutions face as AI reshapes how their collections and resource…

I reproduce here a short piece I wrote for Il Sole 24Ore in 2016, upon the death of Umberto Eco. This time it’s in English

Discover how user research and engineering collaboration shaped JSTOR Seeklight, an AI-driven tool accelerating archival description.

(Cultura) Sono trascorsi i dieci anni di silenzio stampa voluto da Umberto Eco nelle sue disposizioni testamentarie. Lo scopo era evitare celebrazioni enfatiche, interventi narcisistici del genere «Io...

Sometimes you need the fake to show you what's real

In a new book, Álvaro Enrigue uses absurdity to tell a fuller truth.

If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.

Best known for her 1951 novel ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, the writer also applied her gift for summoning the past to essays on Dürer, Michelangelo, Piranesi et al., writes Tim Smith-Laing

The self-taught painter had a trememdous sense of self-belief, despite being ridiculed in his lifetime. A landmark exhibition confirms him as a singularly modern artist

Not with chatbots as we know them, but perhaps with what comes next