Dan Cohen

Dan Cohen
Vice Provost, Dean, and Professor at Northeastern University
	When We Look Back on 2020, What Will We See?
It is far too early to understand what happened in this historic year of 2020, but not too soon to grasp what we will write that history from: data—really big data, gathered from our devices and ourselves. Sometimes a new technology provides an important lens through which a historical event is recorded, viewed, and remembered. […]
	More than THAT
“Less talk, more grok.” That was one of our early mottos at THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, which started at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. It was a riff on “Less talk, more rock,” the motto of WAAF, the hard rock station in Worcester, Massachusetts. And […]
	Humane Ingenuity: My New Newsletter
With the start of this academic year, I’m launching a new newsletter to explore technology that helps rather than hurts human understanding, and human understanding that helps us create better technology. It’s called Humane Ingenuity, and you can subscribe here. (It’s free, just drop your email address into that link.) Subscribers to this blog know […]
	Engagement Is the Enemy of Serendipity
Whenever I’m grumpy about an update to a technology I use, I try to perform a self-audit examining why I’m unhappy about this change. It’s a helpful exercise since we are all by nature resistant to even minor alterations to the technologies we use every day (which is why website redesign is now a synonym […]
	On the Response to My Atlantic Essay on the Decline in the Use of Print Books in Universities
I was not expecting—but was gratified to see—an enormous response to my latest piece in The Atlantic, “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper,” on the seemingly inexorable decline in the circulation of print books on campus. I’m not sure that I’ve ever written anything that has generated as much feedback, commentary, and […]
	What’s New Season 2 Wrap-up
With the end of the academic year at Northeastern University, the library wraps up our What’s New podcast, an interview series with researchers who help us understand, in plainspoken ways, some of the latest discoveries and ideas about our world. This year’s slate of podcasts, like last year’s, was extraordinarily diverse, ranging from the threat […]
	When a Presidential Library Is Digital
I’ve got a new piece over at The Atlantic on Barack Obama’s prospective presidential library, which will be digital rather than physical. This has caused some consternation. We need to realize, however, that the Obama library is already largely digital: The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten […]
	Robin Sloan’s Fusion of Technology and Humanity
When Roy Rosenzweig and I wrote Digital History 15 years ago, we spent a lot of time thinking about the overall tone and approach of the book. It seemed to us that there were, on the one hand, a lot of our colleagues in professional history who were adamantly opposed to the use of digital […]
	Presidential Libraries and the Digitization of Our Lives
Buried in the recent debates (New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Public Historian) about the nature, objectives, and location of the Obama Presidential Center is the inexorable move toward a world in which virtually all of the documentation about our lives is digital. To make this decades-long shift—now almost complete—clear, I made the following infographic […]
	Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking
Generosity and thoughtfulness are not in abundance right now, and so Kathleen Fitzpatrick‘s important new book, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, is wholeheartedly welcome. The generosity Kathleen seeks relates to lost virtues, such as listening to others and deconstructing barriers between groups. As such, Generous Thinking can be helpfully read alongside […]