iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 2h

You: "OCR is a solved problem" Me:

A screenshot of a page from The New Hampshire gazette, September 23, 1800, with text going in every possible direction, and brackets, and numbers

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 3h

You can make flipbook GIFs 🤩 Play with it here: hadro.github.io/flipbook/#m=...

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 18h

How do you show a whole digitized book in one thumbnail? Modern books have illustrated covers, but in research collections the cover is often a plain library binding. So I made Flipbook: hover over a book from any #IIIF source and flip through its pages. hadro.github.io/flipbook/ #GLAMsky 📚📜

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Happy to report that the 5yo has no problem answering the question, “what is it like to be a bat?” Checkmate, philosophy 101, next problem please 🦇

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If you believe that libraries should be allowed to buy books and lend them out, then you also believe in the First Sale doctrine, for better or for worse

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Fun fact, I am working on a fun work project that has an output sorta like this. Don’t worry, it’s a dataviz, not a national library wet lab

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Counterpart not being on the top 100 shows list is an outrage. All 12 of us Counterpart fans are outraged.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Library friends (📚📜): I'm seeking examples of digitized books where the "cover image"/first image of the work poorly represents the contents — e.g. maybe there's boring cloth binding that shows as the first image, hiding something like Audubon illustrations just a bit deeper inside. Any examples?

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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Europeana Newspapers dataset on @hf.co now has an `alto` config: the raw ALTO XML for all 5.9M pages. The coordinates for every word, line and block, per-word OCR confidence and font info that the flattened text dropped are back. huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/europeana_newspapers

huggingface.co

biglam/europeana_newspapers · Datasets at Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What’s your location-specific delusion? I know I could not win a fight against a chimpanzee, and I doubt I could land a plane, but based on no evidence or experience whatsoever I still feel positive I could pilot an East River ferry safely to port if circumstances called.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A true galaxy brain marketing maneuver: Brooklyn Public Library adding a free ebook PSA onto the end of the Jury Duty orientation video Well played @bklynlibrary.bsky.social! Love the suggestion to visit the nearby Center for Brooklyn History as well.

Promo on a video monitor suggesting jurors should visit the Brooklyn Public Library on their lunch break

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Jim Casey @jimccasey1.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We've made a lot of progress on OCR + HTR, but nothing breaks a layout parser like Cattle Text Recognition (CTR)

Screenshot of a newspaper page from 1908 with little pictures of cows and their brands.

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Mike Thompson-Brusstar @mthompsonbrusstar.com · 22/09/2026

no one who studies the present believes me! the past was full of sickos with their own layout conventions for printed and handwritten material!! it is not trivial to deal with even if "all you want is the text"! which by the way, it shouldn't be!!!

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

If I had a time machine, after I finished all the moral imperative work etc etc., I would go back to 1930s-1950s and figure out how to be a fly on the wall for all the conversations about microfilming library collections to try and grok how it all went down

An essentially impossible to read microfilm image of a 1913 Manhattan and Bronx city directory title page, under exposed to the point of being illegible

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

With new VLM OCR models ushering in an OCR renaissance of sorts, it's time to once again laugh at the fact that many of the challenges for OCR with historical cultural heritage materials are actually challenges of layout recognition & segmentation, which are often harder to solve than the OCR itself

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

“For anyone who needs reminding: The ability to do this is, and has always been, the promise of open data.” This could apply to basically every useful and interesting thing I’ve done in my career!

Screenshot of the post from which the quote above was sourced

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

😻 bestill my local news loving heart, this is a hyperlocal dream!

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Spent the last few days at #ff2026 talking about neat advancements in OCR technology, among other things. Here’s a pic of 2016 me showing the time I used GNU parallels to chain together 10 computers in NYPL Labs over LAN to do mass distributed tesseract jobs. I basically created an OCR botnet.

Josh standing in front of a display screen with command line output on it showing the results of a large scale Tesseract job

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 17/09/2026

Unsolicited recommendation: The @beta.nyc Civic Tech newsletter is a really good news roundup—if you live here and work around the sector you definitely want to look into it. www.beta.nyc/category/new...

beta.nyc

Newsletter - BetaNYC

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I look like I’m delivering a sermon but really I’m talking about the nerdiest possible uses of things like travel guides and city directories

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

There’s a minor subplot in Kurt Vonnegut’s first book, Player Piano, that I’ve been thinking about for almost 30 years. It’s about “automation,” which in 1952 meant robots. And there’s a meta-story about a barber who has serious anxiety about being replaced by a machine.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

For real tho, RIP Hot Bird (Or as I tell my kid, “this chick-fil-a used to be where thousands of Brooklyn 20-somethings went on first OkCupid dates, and it was a repair garage before that, and a horse stables before that”) ny.eater.com/2018/9/14/17...

ny.eater.com

Brooklyn Bar Hot Bird Will Officially Close in December

A 29-story skyscraper is displacing the popular neighborhood bar

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

As someone who has spent most recent evenings living in the world of 1906 Brooklyn via historical city directories, I think there’s a way to walk the line of marveling at the evolving urban landscape without descending into maudlin sentimentality or NIMBYism or whatever

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Stop what you are doing and look at this amazing ad from the 1906 Upington Brooklyn City Directory! Nothing screams "all kinds of legitimate detective work undertaken" more than a floating, radiant, disembodied eye. 📜📚

Black and white 1906 advertisement for Mahoney's National Detective Agency, with a floating eye that appears to be radiating light. The banner behind the eye reads, "All kinds of legitimate detective work undertaken; corporations, bankers, & merchants work a specialty."

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This is my copy of the Iliad I was reading 25 years ago today. I’d woken up early to finish reading Book 16 before class. My dad called my dorm phone, and I made a heavy mark in the margin on the left side to keep my place. He told me “something is happening” and don’t leave your dorm.

Close up shot of a page of the Iliad with a heavy pen mark in the left margin

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Hell yeah, we love to see more local journalism everywhere!

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I did an internship at the Chicago Historical Society when Dr. Bunch was president there, decades ago. He met with all the interns, had a genuine conversation with us that I remember to this day. He was warm, amazing, and brilliant, & made me want to work at GLAM institutions for people like him.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

My spouse’s commute for five years was a ferry ride, Greenpoint to DUMBO. I’ve always been jealous of that commute, NYC was meant to be navigated by waterway.

View of the Williamsburg bridge from Domino Sugar Park with ferries navigating the river.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Speaking of models passing notes to each other and inventing dead-drop tradecraft, it makes me think of The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts. Are there other sci-fi books that use a similar plot element? Not necessarily involving AI at all, I just like that kind of conceit. Recommendations?

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Steven Lucy @slucy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Well that's pretty convincing data.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I want you to think in your mind what a "magnetic physician" could possibly be, and be prepared for it to be so much sillier than whatever you're imagining (From an 1884 NYC city directory I'm transcribing)

Screenshot of a city directory transcription tool I've built, with an entry highlighted, and a hand-drawn circle around "magnetic physician" listed as the occupation for Phebe F. Dusenbury in an 1884 NYC city directory

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Looking at this viz, it’s striking how _few_ non-rectangular blocks there are for a borough that by itself would be the third largest city in the country

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This is a staggering read, and this image from the video is sadly not satire

A screenshot from a video in the quoted tweet that says “forward Brookyln” [sic]

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Different kid, same playlist — that year we were top 0.1% global listeners to Jolene

A screenshot of Spotify wrapped showing that we were among the top 0.1% pf global listeners to the song Jolene

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The year my kid was born Dolly was on in our house on constant rotation because we, like countless other parents, found that her angel voice calmed our crying kid, and we were apparently among the top 2% of Dolly listeners that year.

A screenshot of Spotify wrapped showing that Dolly Parton was our top artist, and we were in the top 2% of Dolly listeners

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This was made in part as an explainer for the Revolution Crossroads collaboration between Library of Congress and The Smithsonian, and IMO it’s as good an explanation of “named entity recognition” as I think can be done in 90 seconds

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Local journalism once again putting in the work to dig into this fascinating story of unclear recordation

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I propose starting a broad cultural movement around the phrase “Dolly Lives,” merging elements of “Kuato Lives” from Total Recall, “Elvis is still alive” conspiracy theory, and the weird sheep cloning stuff from the 90s that named the first cloned sheep “Dolly” Who’s in?

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Shabazz Stuart @shabazzstuart.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

If three NYers were shot up by strangers that got away it would be on CNN and NYT/WSJ above fold. If three subway riders died after being pushed on 🚇tracks by strangers it would be on CNN and NYT/WSJ above fold. Three NYers were killed by hit-run drivers and nary a peep?

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I made a version of my Brewery Directories Explorer post because I wanted to try out the Leaflet pub function for AT Proto -- I will post future updates here so consider subscribing if you're interested in this kind of LLM OCR/NER work

hadro.leaflet.pub

Building a Data Explorer for Historical Brewery Directories

Using an LLM OCR and NER pipeline to make 19th century directories morn accessible

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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 20/08/2026

I'm sorry but "a huge number of NYC cabs now are remaindered EVs running grey market software written by some dude in a garage" is the most cyberpunk thing I've ever heard

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I've been trying to do a better job of documenting my personal projects and evening explorations, so in July I wrote up a little bit about the background on the Brewery Guides data explorer project I worked on earlier this year. hadro.github.io/blog/brewery...

Screenshot of the Brewery Guides data explorer showing the entry for the Brooklyn Budweiser Brewery on Dean St

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Standard cybersecurity training: “and remember, look carefully at emails because hackers might try to fool you” An AI swarm 25 minutes from now: “we have independently derived game theory, created new dead drop tradecraft, and finally found a way to beat the kobayashi maru task we’ve been given”

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I just happened to watch this over lunch right after completing the annual security training videos for work earlier this morning about how to not fall for phishing emails, and I don’t think I can adequately describe the omega-level whiplash and cognitive dissonance I am experiencing

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 05/08/2026

Museum/library/metadata peeps—we're doing an “AI Comes to the Museum” event at our office in NYC August 18—nice folks and snacks, all talking about: The cultural commons, approaching things carefully, projects that work, things to watch out for, subjects of that nature. luma.com/aboard-77hq

luma.com

AI comes to the museum · Luma

Join Aboard for a conversation with Hélène Alonso of WonderWay, Spencer Kiser of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Danny Reynolds of the Museum of Modern Art…

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

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Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t James Carville’s last successful political insight closer in time to JFK’s assassination than it is to today?

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