It was a long fight, akin to one long night, all those weeks
in the rocks and that thin atmosphere over there and
I forgot myself. Spit over the balcony. Not really,
but thought about it.

What you didn’t deserve I tried to swallow later
but couldn’t. And the mountains looked like a painting
and because I was in the painting nothing
was really real so I could do anything.

I saw your face but it was the ocean.
Something bobbed on the ocean I could never identify,
not from the sixth floor window, not from that far away.
Even up close, there you were, but one moment we were upright
and the next the waves took everything

and I couldn’t forget anything so it was easier to make coffee.
Obsess about coffee. And imported butter. I am
so sorry. Somewhere there’s a speeding van,
somewhere a wooden table, somewhere
a broken-down orange VW parked at an angle
and at night the streetlights kiss it

but I can’t see it now,
the sea stinks of fish,
its force was so
heavy, I’m sorry

for this and other things.

Teeny tiny private ceremony @ MIT Chapel. Fun.

Discovered on Flowing Data. The kid made it as a competition for a scholarship to film school (and won). Bonus points for pointing out the situation of stateless Burmese refugees.

by Richard Wilbur

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

Thought this might be of interest to some of you nice geeks out there. Reposted from an email.

Google Digital Humanities Research Awards

Google has so far digitized over 12 million books in over 300 languages –
a significant fraction of all books ever published. This collection, much
of which was previously available only in university libraries, has helped
many disciplines in the humanities. Because of this vast increase in
digitized information, new avenues of literary research are now possible.
We also know more could be done to facilitate this research. Sometimes
humanities research consists of amassing and curating a private data set,
and writing or customizing tools specifically for that data set. While
that might be the quickest way to answer a particular research question,
it does little to help other researchers with similar questions. We want
to make it easy for people to share not just results, but the tools and
intermediate data upon which future research can build. Toward these ends,
Google is creating a collaborative research program to explore the digital
humanities using the Google Books corpus. Disciplines of interest include
(but are not limited to):

• Linguistics
• History
• Classics
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Anthropology

Some example projects to give you an idea of what we’re thinking about:

• Building software for tracking changes in language over time
• Building software for tagging and identifying concepts, structure, or entities in text (possibly tailored to a specific domain or language)
• Creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline, with support for annotations and collaborative research
• Developing systems for crowdsourced corrections to book data (e.g., OCR text) and metadata
• Generating marked up freely usable datasets (e.g., part-of-speech tagging for little-known languages)
• The testing of a literary or historical hypothesis through innovative analysis of a book corpus
• Analysis of the generative or creative processes revealed in texts

These are one-time awards for up to US $50,000. Google may choose to renew
the award for another year following review of the research at the
conclusion of the first year. Where appropriate, we expect award
recipients to make their software, utilities, datasets, or similar results
freely available to others to use. We are requesting proposals in this
area from select researchers and faculty members, and we would be
delighted with your participation. We expect to make several awards under
this program, and welcome proposals that include investigators from
multiple organizations. Proposals that share resources or funding with
other efforts are also welcome. Google may offer help in some instances by
providing relevant subsets of the Google Books corpus (subject to
copyright and metadata licensing) or by hosting data for researchers. For
instance, we anticipate being able to provide frequency lists of words
categorized by language, publication date, country, and subject; and a
limited number of scans and plain text from books in the public domain. If
your research requires a specific data set, feel free to contact Jon
Orwant (orwant@google.com) about availability.