Dan Cohen

“It’s a story about a bunch of historians who were knowledgeable about emerging technologies and knew how to code … and who spent a lot of time, some of it wasted time, at a big table chatting.” On the history of Zotero. Which, unsurprisingly, is beautiful.

On the 20th anniversary of Zotero's 1.0 release on October 5, 2006, I wrote a history of the collaboration and years it took to create the popular research tool now used by over 20 million people: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

"Reader Responses, Summer 2026"—Good thoughts, writing, & projects from the readers of Humane Ingenuity, including feedback on reducing the environmental impact of AI, saving the scientific record, and using AI to supplement, rather than replace, human thought newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/read...

New issue of my newsletter: “Scholarship Will Soon Be Much Harder to Save” — It’s not easy to be confident in a body of knowledge that has phantom limbs newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/scho...

“A Major New Grant for a Library-Led Approach to AI and Books“—A 5-yr, $5M grant to HathiTrust, w/ Northeastern University Library & Authors Alliance, for responsible, equitable, & transparent services that leverage AI for the public good & scholarly discovery newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-ma...

A Mellon Foundation award to HathiTrust, in collaboration with @northeasternlib and @authorsalliance.bsky.social, enables responsible, equitable, and transparent AI services for the public good and scholarly exploration of the 19M-item corpus within reach. bit.ly/3SyW9hB

New issue of my newsletter: “How Can We Minimize the Environmental Impact of Our AI Use?” — It’s not easy being green when there’s little research on the energy consumption of specific AI tasks newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/how-...

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity: “The Breath of the Author” — The palpable presence of someone else’s mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

A new essay: “Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship” — Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/peri...

New issue of my newsletter: “The Kids Are All Right” — Advice I will not give, and books I have not written newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New issue of my newsletter: “A Framework for Books and AI in the Public Interest” — How libraries could create a thoughtful and ethical interface between their shelves and artificial intelligence newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-fr...

"It's hard to read The Soul of a New Machine in 2026 without wondering whether all this AI hype is really so new." https://newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-role-of-a-new-machine/

New issue of my newsletter: "The Role of a New Machine" — An old book puts today's new technology in perspective newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New issue of my newsletter: “Vibe Analysis” — Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work Featuring good work by @sarahebull.bsky.social, @jasonheppler.org and @cblevins.bsky.social newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/vibe...

A small, strange museum shows how human intelligence can be more surprising and engaging than artificial general intelligence can ever hope to be newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-mu...

New essay: “A Museum’s Sublime Hallucinations” — Sometimes you need the fake to show you what’s real (a love letter to the Museum of Jurassic Technology) newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-mu...

The second piece in my series on finding the right line between human thought and AI assistance: “Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions?” newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/can-...

New essay: “Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions?” — Not with chatbots as we know them, but perhaps with what comes next newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/can-...

And an occasional reminder that you can subscribe to my newsletter Humane Ingenuity at newsletter.dancohen.org

New issue of my newsletter: “Where Should Scholars Draw the Line on AI?” — Between the poles of Zero AI and AI For Everything lies a vast, poorly mapped middle ground newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/wher...

A special issue of my newsletter for Martin Luther King Jr. Day: “A Hero's Iconography” — A shocking photograph featured a brave man — and visual echoes of the art he loved newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/a-he...

New issue of my newsletter: "Far From Reassuring" — AI companies need to focus on limits, not limitless possibilities, to get the public on board newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/far-...

I have now tested this with Claude 4.5 Opus and it's as good as Gemini 3 Pro, nearly perfect transcriptions. And I've gotten a lot of email that they also work well on non-English-language transcriptions & have heard from some libraries/archives that AI has finally reached a state of usefulness here

New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New issue of my newsletter: "The Index and the Vector" — Converting ambiguity into precision can help a broader audience discover and learn from collections newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

New issue of my newsletter: “The Library’s New Entryway” — An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

@maxread.info re: your latest newsletter on a public-option AI, FYI: the Public Interest Corpus project we're working on: publicinterestcorpus.org more here: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/book... and here: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/huma...

New issue of my newsletter: "The Reboot of Digital Humanities Now" — Discover the latest work from across the field and around the world newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

My essay on the tense relationship between authors and AI, as embodied in a major lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now in the Chronicle of Higher Education: www.chronicle.com/article/what...

I have updated my in-depth analysis of Bartz v Anthropic to reflect this important and overlooked aspect of the proposed settlement: “In what may be a rude surprise for authors, partial or full payments for many books may go to publishers rather than authors.” newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/land...

@gruber.foo I thought you might appreciate this in-depth analysis of the Anthropic settlement—not only what it means for Anthropic and other big AI companies, but for authors and other creators: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/land...

New issue of my newsletter: “Will a Landmark AI Settlement Make Authors Feel Whole?” — The remuneration from Bartz v. Anthropic may not provide what writers really want: respect, recognition, and readers

My take on the landmark $1.5 billion settlement between authors and Anthropic: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/land...

New issue of my newsletter: “The Stones of Newton” — A bell tower with a surprising name is in danger of falling

New issue of my newsletter: “AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled"—A new framework provides a way for cultural heritage institutions to take advantage of the tech with fewer misgivings, and to serve students, scholars, and the public better newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/ai-a...

New issue of my newsletter: “AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled”— A new framework provides a way for cultural heritage institutions to take advantage of the technology with fewer misgivings, and to serve students, scholars, and the public better

“When Information is Networked” — My tribute to Clifford Lynch, who sadly passed away last week. Cliff saw before anyone else how digital technology would enable new forms of research and learning, and completely transform the production and dissemination of knowledge

I took the history section of "Humanity's Last Exam" and got an F. But I learned something important about our current methods of assessing AI

New issue of my newsletter: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/aski...

For those who might be interested in traveling to our archives and special collections at Northeastern University to do research for an extended period, there’s a fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (deadline: Feb 1, so act soon)

I've gotten a lot of responses from instructors struggling with the questions raised here. I probably should have also noted that students most likely to use AI in a way that truly improves their deep learning are the ones least likely to need that extra boost. This was true for MOOCs as well.

New issue of my newsletter: “The Unresolved Tension Between AI and Learning” — If education is accelerated using AI, will we lose some crucial aspects of learning that will prove to be problematic?

"What can book-informed AI do for the creation of library metadata and comprehensive search? How can AI help locate works for careful human reading rather than summarization?" @social.dancohen.org on a new Mellon-funded project about books and AI. newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/book...

The Catalog of Distinctive Type, a visual catalog of distinctive and damaged printing type originating in books published in England from 1660 to 1700

A periodic reminder that you can subscribe to my newsletter Humane Ingenuity on my website

New issue of my newsletter: “Books, AI, and the Public Good: A New Grant” — A Mellon-funded project to develop an ethical, public-interest way to incorporate books into artificial intelligence

New issue of my newsletter: “Synths and Sensibility” — From Beethoven to Kraftwerk, innovative artists have used new technology to make music more human, not less

New issue of my newsletter: “No Happy Medium for Books” — A court ruling curtails the circulation of the written word