Paul Rowe

#NationalGallery, London ... but only the #cats

When you order the bull expansion pack, but they don't have your original colour still in stock.

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild:

1. Wombat
2. Cave Wētā
3. English grass snake
4. Moose
5. Sperm whale

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen multiple times

The Clean
Pavement
Tall Dwarfs
Sonic Youth
Pixies

Neither is great. The stylised icons make them less understandable. Someone is serving hot food to a person in a wheelchair? W/o the icons it's text-heavy & requires a small font size. Some points are easier to see & understand as icons. e.g. the lift. I like having a large 'you are here' marker.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works trapped due to political despair! I beseech you to send ye mighty bank details to share ten percent of this bounty. 💰

Miniature balsa wood castle

I wanted to try making something from a material I hadn't worked with before, so I built a very tiny castle out of balsa wood. Lego figure for scale (or possibly a giant in that universe). 🏰 #miniature

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Teacher sacked in culture wars fracas "We are ready to have our day in court", says a teacher sacked for reading a fun Kiwi book

Example: Bestselling NZ book banned in the US.

[Paraphrased] Don't read the book if you don't like it. Not ban it.

#LIANZA2025

Generative AI - Ethical use of mātauranga.

Mātauranga Māori is taonga.

Highlights (mine):
1. Check with Māori rep from ethics committee
2. Don't use prompt to generate mātauranga Māori
3. Never use or generate tapu data
4. AI use must be acknowledged

#GenAI #DataIsTaonga #LIANZA2025

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

Responsible AI Practical Toolkit Resources to help creative and cultural organisations create Responsible AI policies and practices.

Need to create an AI policy for your organisation for the first time? The Arts Council England has put together an excellent resource kit to help organisations build an AI policy that matches their purpose and culture.
www.artscouncil.org.uk/lets-create/...

What a match! My son and I are now trying to explain to my wife, with mixed results, how a 25 day long contest ending in a drawn series was gripping viewing. #engvsindia

In NZ, wool insulation is the most popular natural insulation material and it doesn't need a separate vapour barrier in many environments. I don't know how common this is as an insulation material in the UK.

Particularly struck by "... a museum needs to do more than just show you old things, or try to transport you to a past era. It should jar you into the realization that you exist in time, and see your present (and ideally, your future) with fresh eyes." @almostarch.bsky.social

People want good AI, not climate-wrecking, prejudice-enforcing, job-destroying AI. But tech, govt isn't listening?
ACE staffer quoted by Oonagh Murphy: 'The worst thing we can do about AI is ignore it; the second is embrace it too gleefully'

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums "This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

something I've learned by covering online archives and libraries is that many valuable, free, online resources are maintained by extremely small teams, maybe one volunteer. Asking them to deal with scrapers that behave like DDoS attacks is unrealistic www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?

Are AI Bots knocking cultural heritage offline?
Our business hosts cultural heritage collection sites for hundreds of organisations and we were one of the respondents submitting feedback and stats for this study: www.glamelab.org/products/are...

Les Darcy Born and raised in East Maitland, New South Wales, Les Darcy became a beloved athlete, achieving international acclaim in the boxing world by his natural talents, elevated through hard work. In his sh...

The Description field on this page shows the output. It's plain text in the CMS, with the Markdown punctuation characters. On this site we then mark it up server-side using CommonMark, an open source Java library that converts Markdown to HTML markup: collections.maitland.nsw.gov.au/topics/2/les...

We didn't introduce custom tags. We used Markdown for a few reasons: it's plain text based, so worked with our existing plain text CMS fields; there was an existing rich editor we could use outside of the CMS ( stackedit.io ); there were already Javascript files to present the content on the web.

Auto-detecting numbers on the web page is hard if there are many accession number formats. I have seen it done in Jira, the issue tracking system, where any issue numbers mentioned in a description are automatically displayed as links in the page view.

We use Markdown tags in some collection management data fields for platform agnostic metadata (emphasis tags, links, item lists etc), so that might work. It does get tricky for the user to enter the right data, so Mia's suggestion is an option if the object numbers are consistent enough to detect.

The perfect bird feeder doesn't exi--

As a recreational caver, I'm always grateful for the land access many landowners give us. We're privileged to see caves rarely visited, often with amazing mineral formations. The gypsum and aragonite crystals we saw this month in a cave in Waitomo, New Zealand were particularly good.

We still don’t know how much energy AI consumes Companies must give us the chance to understand the environmental impact of the tech we use

Using big LLMs for basic queries is 'like turning on stadium floodlights to look for your keys' - this is good on the AI environmental questions.

Hey! I've finally switched to Bluesky and am slowly finding the people I used to follow on Twitter. I saw you through your post looking for worst movies with dinosaurs and I was happy to see Kung Fury get a mention - that's a perennial favourite in our household.

What’s happening now? Tracking the political actions affecting cultural institutions | May 14, 2025

Over the last several months, the attacks on cultural institutions have been relentless. I’ve been tracking political actions affecting museums and other linked institutions on a public document for…

Every time the PM says his Govt is going to make pay equity “more affordable” he is just saying they want to keep underpaying the people whose work has been undervalued due to gender discrimination.

#nzpol

About this Collection | Chronicling America | Digital Collections | Library of Congress Search America's Historic Newspaper Pages through 1963 Please Note: The Library of Congress has transitioned the longstanding Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website to this new digi...

Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last week—the National Digital Newspaper Program—which builds Chronicling America—has been shut down

Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general public—for genealogy, local history—it’s such a loss

A thoughtful and insightful
breakdown of how legal education should respond to AI 🤖