New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive

The New York Times: 

NYPL Labs, started in 2011, has been known for experimental projects aimed at spurring users’ own tweaks and remixes. One scholar used its What’s on the Menu? project, which enlisted library users to transcribe its collection of 45,000 New York City restaurant menus, to create a new “data curation” of the collection. An engineer at Google has created a Google Cardboard application for its Stereogranimator, a program designed to mimic the proto-3-D effects of old-fashioned stereogram viewers.

Items from the digital collections have also found their way into projects like Urban Scratch-Off, a “map hack” that lets users scratch an aerial photograph of New York, lottery-ticket style, to reveal aerial shots of the city in 1924, and Mapping Cholera, which tracks an 1832 epidemic using geodata harvested from maps belonging to the library.

The new release will “reduce friction and make it even easier for people to get their hands on out-of-copyright material” owned by the library, Mr. Vershbow said.

Paola Antonelli: Rejection Is a Sign You’re Onto Something New

For more than 21 years, Paola Antonelli has been a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Her career has been devoted to putting together provocative exhibits that spark new ways of thinking, and that often draws criticism. 

In this talk, Antonelli shares why failure and rejection are two feelings creative people should not only become familiar with, but should learn to embrace. “[Our work] can be weapons to really help people understand how to be better citizens,” she said. “But only if we will be allowed to do exhibitions that shock, disgust, and sometimes, even fail.”

David Bowie On Feeling Safe On What You Are Working On

“The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

David Bowie

The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable

The year's most notable directors join for The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable. The directors include Quentin Tarantino ('The Hateful Eight'), Tom Hooper ('The Danish Girl'), Alejandro G. Inarritu ('The Revenant'), Ridley Scott ('The Martian'), Danny Boyle ('Steve Jobs') and David O. Russell ('Joy').

How Arts and Culture Add to City Economies

From The Atlantic City Lab: 

A new study published in Economic Development Quarterly finds that the arts do in fact add to urban economies overall. To get at this, the authors—the noted urban real estate specialist Arthur Nelson and several colleagues—employ a unique data set on professional performing arts organizations (which I have lightheartedly referred to as the “SOBs” of the symphony, opera, and ballet) with annual budgets of over $2 million.

Using this data, the study looks at the change in knowledge-class workers (defined similarly to the creative class) between 2000 and 2010 for some 350 U.S. metro areas. Its statistical analysis controls for a wide variety of other factors that might be thought to affect the growth in knowledge or creative class employment, including overall employment change, population, density, housing values, the share of college grads, race, the share of the population that is foreign-born, and natural amenities like climate and terrain, among others.

The study finds substantial evidence that performing arts organizations add to both the growth of the knowledge class and to urban economies broadly. Those with just one type of performing arts center saw a 1.1 percent increase in knowledge-class employment between 2000 and 2010; those with two types of performing arts centers saw a 1.5 percent increase; and those with all three types saw a 2.2 percent increase. The study notes that, while this may seem like modest growth, the numbers add up. Over this ten-year period, the 118 metros with at least one performing arts organization generated a whopping $60 billion in annual income and more than half a million additional knowledge-class jobs, or over 12 percent of all knowledge-class jobs created over that time frame.