Ben Zweig

Ben Zweig

@medievalben.bsky.social

Art historian, digital projects, infographics, synthesizers, medieval things. Columbia University Libraries and Pratt School of Information. Formerly National Gallery of Art.

430 followers129 following564 posts

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Cosmos worked really well and it was fun to play with some of the vis types like mesh and worm. The dataset itself is fairly straightforward, but I added some more complex logic for searching and filtering that changes the opacity and it gives it a nebula-like look.

As an art historian I don't think this tells you anything insightful (that I'm aware of and some of the data is very wrong), but as a visualization layer it is pretty cool. #dataviz

I've become a fan of the webgl world for doing interesting #digitalhumanities data viz with larger datasets for both look and performance - go-tos like Gephi and Sigma.js tend to struggle with 11K nodes and 14K links like here. Cosmos is probably overkill for a smaller set.

Ben Zweig reposted

Deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure without apparent military value is a war crime. Shouldn't be surprising since America elected a war crimes advocate, who in his first term pardoned convicted war criminals, and in his second made the public champion of those war criminals SecDef.

Jacob Bogage@jacobbogage.bsky.social

🎥 Donald Trump posts a video that appears to show the aftermath of a U.S. attack on civilian infrastructure in Iran.

Ben Zweig reposted

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

One thing that pisses me off so much about this #Greenland insanity I've spent a lot of time working w/ and in Scandinavia. Used to work for the American-Scandinavian Foundation ffs. This backstabbing of friends is so amoral, so disrespectful, it fills me with shame.

Abject total senile idiocy. A complete embarrassment and humiliation. Deserves to writhe and burn in hell for many eternities.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

Breaking news: In a message to Norway’s prime minister, President Donald Trump linked his insistence on taking over Greenland to his grievance over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — adding a new twist to Trump’s stoking of a trade war.

Ben Zweig reposted

Better yet, disestablish all of DHS, and undo the nightmarish idiocies that we created in a panic 25 years ago. Reestablish the INS, get rid of ODNI, fix the damage from the Patriot Act, etc.

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Bill Kristol@billkristolbulwark.bsky.social

“The good news is this means that the next Democratic inhabitant of the White House can demolish the Trump Presidential Palace Ballroom and Casino and restore the East Wing and the rest of the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.” www.thebulwark.com/p/we-will-te...

Disgusting. Everything touched is defiled.

Jonathan Edwards@jonathanreports.bsky.social

Scoop: Trump has started demolishing the White House's East Wing facade to build his ballroom. The president had claimed construction of the $250 million building wouldn’t ‘interfere’ with the existing White House structure. /W @ddiamond.bsky.social wapo.st/4hqBNiU

Ben Zweig reposted

This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.

Ben Zweig reposted

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

"Ph.D. level experts" is the kind of thing that only those who are not around many Ph.Ds would say. It's just another example of silicon valley's creepy obsession (e.g. "high IQ people") with arbitrarily metricizing everything.

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Ben Zweig reposted

A top Donald Trump ally handed me a Trump 2028 hat — these people aren’t joking. If we don’t stop this anti-democracy movement now, the 2028 election may look nothing like what we expect in a free country.

Thanks so much @gworthey.bsky.social for this amazing recap of the panel. I hope it wasn’t too…um…negative?

Glen Layne-Worthey@gworthey.bsky.social

'Rethinking the Ethics of “Open” in the Shadow of AI' :: a eye-poppingly important and panel with @medievalben.bsky.social @mkgold.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social @filipa-calado.bsky.social Ben situates the panel by first proposing "shadow" rather than "age" of AI to defang it a bit #DH2025