Le Journal

The Composition Colloquium presents a talk by Will Thompson. TicketingFree, Unticketed

On Wednesday, February 4, the Friends of Princeton University Library welcome journalist Noel Rubinton, author of “Looking for a Story: A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee.” Rubinton will examine the complex process behind his “fascinating marathon of research” into John McPhee’s remarkable seven-decade writing career. What began as a close study of McPhee’s books and New Yorker articles soon broadened to include his lesser-known contributions to others’ works—often written in support of causes he championed—as well as his early efforts in television screenwriting. Guiding Rubinton throughout was a commitment to making McPhee’s work more accessible and better known to readers today and in the future. (Photo courtesy of the speaker) Registration details: Current Friends of PUL members are invited to attend in person. Registration is required. The presentation will also be available by Zoom for non-members. Please select the appropriate registration type below. Due to limited capacity, membership status will be checked after registration.

DiScho Discovery Hour is a weekly session where PUL's Digital Scholarship Specialists explore creative approaches to scholarship using technology. During this hour, anyone in the Princeton community is welcome to engage with our team as a Specialist hosts a session in the Commons Library Curiosity Studio. In this session, we will connect the new capabilities of vision-language models with the task of georectification. What information is contained in an image that tells us when and where it is from? This is a traditionally difficult task for humans and requires experience. New developments in AI promise both possibilities and challenges. Image: Disco Ball by iconfield

Our spring 2026 series, which will begin Wednesday, February 4, will be centered around digital mapping to develop fundamental skills necessary for a variety of digital projects. Participants will attend four workshops where they will learn about version control, data wrangling, coding templates, web publishing, and more as they transform research into spatial data and build their own interactive map. While this is open to all, we expect this will be of particular interest to graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who wish to excel at developing and maintaining digital projects. If you are interested in attending, please complete an application by Wednesday, January 21. If you have any questions, please email discho@princeton.edu. This is the first session in a four-part series. The other workshops in the series will run February 18, March 4, March 18.

Recent models can reason about the visual contents of images. These models can “think aloud” about the meaning and relationships between objects. This capability enables more effective recognition of signs and other visual information, including their contextual information within the image. How might this capability further visual analysis, interpretation, and distant viewing? Image: Elise Racine & Digit / Woven Dialogues / Licensed by CC-BY 4.0