Tag: ChatGPT

Blind Visionscapes: Making an AI Model with Handmade Datasets at SFPC

I went into Handmade Datasets wanting to build an image-description generator and wound up trying to train a machine to hallucinate blind visionscapes. Handmade Datasets My increasing reliance on AI for my ongoing photography project made me curious to know more. I guest-lectured at the School for Poetic Computation years ago, and I’d been thinking that if I were to… Read more

First Month as an NYPL Cullman Fellow * Photo/Description Journal

From my first mornings entering the New York Public Library as the 2025-26 Jean Strouse Fellow in the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, I knew it would be a very happy year! Perhaps it was the five months away in so many new situations—MacDowell, Yaddo, San Francisco—learning to bumble about with Moses, that made it possible for me to… Read more

Valentin Haüy’s Essai (1786) * On the Education of Blind Children * NYPL Rare books * Image + Description

I wrote about Valentin Haüy and his founding of the first school for blind children in 1785 in There Plant Eyes. My dear friend David Lowe, who is a photo specialist in the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the New York Public Library, read my book (Thanks, David!), and because he did, when he saw Valentin Haüy’s… Read more