Virtual Architectures

Docling is also fantastic for #DigitalHumanities. It plugs in to spaCy which is great for natural language processing (NLP): spacy.io/universe/pro...

Previously I built a custom data processing pipeline using object character recognition (OCR) with Tesseract to extract data from thousands of scanned PDFs...the most closed open data. Details here: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=674 Docling now saves so much time and code in data preparation.

There tends to be a knee jerk response to posts mentioning GenAI on Bluesky. That's disappointing because Docling is a double-edged sword...perfect for digital #counter-practice. I use it for liberating data that government agencies have inconveniently hidden in open sight within thousands of PDFs.

Docling: Get your documents ready for generative AI Docling is an open-source Python package that simplifies document processing by parsing diverse formats — including advanced PDF understa...

If you are working on structured data extraction and OCR with tricky documents like PDFs I strongly recommend checking out Docling. Good presentation via the Chaos Computer Club:
media.ccc.de/v/sps25-5645...

Circular deals among AI companies The big AI companies are making deals with each other, promising and distributing hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. It’s difficult to keep track, but Bloomberg has this…

Circular deals among AI companies via @flowingdata.com flowingdata.com/2025/10/13/c...

Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland's property market by spoofing property websites by @virt-arch.bsky.social, Ella Harris, Carla Kayanan, Hannah Mumby. Session as part of Research Week at MU, October 23, 2025, 13:00 to 14:00 www.maynoothuniversity.ie/news-events/...

Data Stories recently held a two-day workshop on #ResearchCreation and the application of arts-based methods. The talks and workshops covered a wide range of approaches. Check out our summary and all of our participants' slides on the Data Stories blog: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=768

Smart! Looks very promising for getting actual work done.

Instructions for how to opt out of LinkedIn using your data to train generative 'AI' may be found here: www.linkedin.com/help/linkedi...

Books: 'Code' by Bernard Geoghegan and 'Language Machines' by Leif Weatherby.

New reads incoming! I'm very much looking forward to diving into 'Code' by Bernard Geoghegan on the crossover between information and French theory followed by Leif Weatherby's 'Language Machines' on generative AI and the concept of 'remainder humanism'. (???)

New report: ‘The property and planning data ecosystem in Ireland: Gaps, silences and issues’

New resource: Directory of longitudinal datasets about property & planning in Ireland (>350 datasets)

mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/20...

Based on workshops held by Data Stories project and CSO

YouTube video by boggo Strudel/TidalCycles Live Coding Metal Djents

Damn I like this workflow! Looks like Strudel/TidalCycles doing Djent via Bespoke Synth: youtu.be/n0rhn9-PRwE

OpenAI’s Waterloo? [with corrections] Post GPT-5, the narrative has flipped — and that could hurt them

Nicely said! - "Science is not a popularity contest; you can’t bully your way to truth. And you can’t make AI better if you drown out the critics and keep pouring good money after bad." via @garymarcus.bsky.social: garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-wa...

Books: 'Emanciapation(s)' by Ernesto Laclau and 'Adversarial Design' by Carl DiSalvo.

Where are my Agonists at! I finally got to read these two from Laclau and DiSalvo cover to cover. Strongly recommend!

LLMs vs. Geolocation: GPT-5 performs worse than other AI models - bellingcat Bellingcat challenged the latest models—Grok, GPT and Gemini—on geolocation tasks, revealing GPT-5 as a clear downgrade.

Two months have passed since we last tested AI models against our geolocation skillsets. Within that time more advanced models like GPT-5 and Google AI mode have launched. So @foeke.bsky.social is back again to put the chatbots to work… www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

Dries Depoorter Belgian creative technologist and artist Dries Depoorter, based in Ghent, creates thought-provoking work about technology, surveillance, ...

Dries Depoorter on creative technologies and surveillance at #WHY2025 via Chaos Computer Club: media.ccc.de/v/why2025-27...

The Open Source Tool That Has Preserved 150,000 Pieces of Online Evidence - bellingcat Bellingcat’s Auto Archiver is a tool aimed at preserving online digital content before it can be modified, deleted or taken down

Nothing is permanent on social media. Users deleting their posts or webpages can lead to the erasure of a trail of evidence that may be crucial to your investigations. But how do you keep that data? We've updated our Auto Archiver tool to make archiving easier... www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

How Does A Blind Model See The Earth? A tiny LLM eval with pretty pictures

"Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the earth from space. [...] But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps." via @outsidetext.bsky.social: outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a...

Errant thought - An LLM is a surprisingly successful dowsing rod which navigates language by pointing to the next token. The rod is a model which points in a vector determined by the combined influence of it's input, it's weights, it's biases and activations. Spooky!

Is AI for the birds? The beauty of backyard birdsong data Birdsong is all around us, but is there a deeper meaning? Can computer analysis help us decipher these hidden patterns in our own backyar...

'Is AI for the birds? The beauty of backyard birdsong data' by Logan Williams at #WHY2025 via @ccc.de: media.ccc.de/v/why2025-24...

Paper abstract for 'Urban digital twins: Digital twins for participatory steering' by Oliver Dawkins and Rob Kitchin.

New paper - 'Urban digital twins: Digital twins for participatory steering' with @robkitchin.bsky.social: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... The paper appears in the latest special issue of New Media & Society on 'Digital Twinning': journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/27/8

Data Stories game ideation

Tiny House board game

Testing game mechanics

Data Stories Commodity Narratives research question and ideation

New from Data Stories - Carla and I recently visited Oxford Brookes to participate in the Tiny House Games workshop with Mel Nowiki and our collaborators Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby. Check out the post and video for more on #ResearchCreation with games: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?page_id=33

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

How to save a PNG to a bird! 😂 Great video from Benn Jordan youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo

YouTube video by Machine Learning Street Talk Intelligence = Doing More with Less (David Krakauer)

This is a great, irreverent interview with David Krakauer on the implications of complexity science for the understanding of emergence in LLMs. Feels spot on! youtu.be/jXa8dHzgV8U

YouTube video by Eli Fieldsteel SuperCollider Live Coded Improvisation - 15 March 2025

I'm loving this live coded performance by Eli Fieldsteel in #SuperCollider I really must find some time to give it a try! youtu.be/09o9IUanLng

Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation? - bellingcat We tasked LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI to geolocate our unpublished holiday snaps. Here's how they did.

Fascinating piece from @bellingcat.com testing LLMs for Geolocation. I was particularly struck by the negative impact of 'reasoning' and 'thinking' functions which often feel like 'self-checking', or sometimes even 'self-defeating', functions: www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

The Journal Investigates: Where are all the data centres and why should you care?

investigates.thejournal.ie/data-centres

Juliette Davret presenting the Data Stories paper 'Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data'.

New from Data Stories: Read about the recent paper presentation of 'Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data' by @juliettedavret.bsky.social on behalf of our team at SAGEO in France: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=734

Verso books sale haul including books by Wark, Laclau, Doctorow and Routhier.

Got a bit excited in the recent @versobooks.bsky.social sale. 📚Sorry, not sorry. Still prefer reading physical copies.

Latest from Data Stories: Read about Danielle and Sam's recent presentations on ‘Creative Methodologies’ with artists and ‘Critical Geographies of Housing’ on eviction data for CIG2025 at Queens University, Belfast: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=727