Book Patrol

Machine Poetry with Feeling

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Researchers at the University of Colorado (UC)- Colorado Springs and Drury University have recently developed a unique language generation system that they claim can produce creative poetry verses infused with emotion. The project focused "more on the content, emotion and creativity of the text, as opposed to the structure or rhythm found in prior poetry generation studies." Combing through large text repositories like Project Gutenberg the researchers looked for words included in EmoLex, an emotion-lexicon dataset developed by the National Research Council of Canada. They also fed the machine  "a combination of dream data and poetry to create what is...

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Illustrations by James Firnhaber

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James Firnhaber is a young and rising freelance illustrator living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Philly Magazine. Firnhaber influences include his love of mythology, magical realism and traditional animation. Here is a sampling of his book-themed work. Enjoy! Alice in Wonderland - created for a reading campaign     untitled - illustration based on the novel The Book Thief, 2018   untitled - completed for school assignment   Star Speaker, 2016   Curative AI Based on an article about Google Photos’ AI and it’s ability to curate emotionally moving slideshows, 2019...

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DIY: Build your own book arch

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Scott Hill, the proprietor of Sandman Books in South Florida,  has shared his secrets on how to make your very own book arch. It begins with a familiar bookseller quandary - what to do with all those books one acquires "that are simply at the end of their lives". Hill decided to do something fun and went to work building a book arch. He built his first one in 2013 and when his shop moved in 2019 he was back at it. The arch has become a bit of tourist destination and next month the first wedding vows will be...

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A night school for working kids in Pakistan

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Founded by Mohammad Rohayl Varind in 2016 Slum School (Slum cleverly stands for Students Learning Under the Moon) is Pakistan's first solar powered night school. There are 23 million kids that do not go to school in Pakistan, many of whom work during the day! Varind's goal is to educate the underprivileged in hopes of one day winning the war against poverty, illiteracy & terrorism. The entire experience is solar powered with classes starting after sunset. Varind teaches the kids English, Urdu, math, and science with a little ethics and etiquette mixed in. Slum School does not purport to take...

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Reading Jane Eyre: All 594 translations in 57 languages

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The project is called Prismatic Jane Eyre and is the brain child of University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds. In collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars they dove deep into the publishing history of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. Why Jane Eyre? Says Reynolds: The more I thought about and re-read Jane Eyre, the more it came to seem the perfect book for the kind of exploration I wanted to make. It was full of contradictions that were likely to play out differently in different places, times and tongues.  It was a powerfully...

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