thisisaaronland

work / in progress

work / in progress

when in doubt / make it glow in the dark

"Which is really what this blog post is about: It is a proposal for museums and other cultural heritage institutions to generate vector embeddings for the materials in their collections and to publish them on their own websites (or other channels) for other institutions to download and to mix-and-match both with their own datasets, and with other third-party datasets, as they see fit." – https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04/06/shared-embeddings/

“The (nearly forgotten) promise of open data is that SFO Museum can produce third-party vector embeddings if and when we need to but given the time and resources necessary to create them it seems like it would benefit everyone for individual organizations to do that work once and then share the results with their peers.” – https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04/15/oembeddings/

"If we don't even try to address these deficits then we are probably assured a cultural heritage born of mystery-meat block-box systems whose background and biases are as confusing and opaque as their answers. If we are comfortable going to back to a world where the knowledge of the world is only available to the aristocracy and everyone else struggles to get by on rumour and innuendo then I guess our work is done and we can knock off to the pub for a drink now." – https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/04/09/temptation/#tools

work / in progress

"In as much as no one seems to really understand what’s happening inside the guts of any given machine-learning model, and in as much as the cultural heritage sector is still a consumer rather than a producer of these models, having as broad a set of inputs and outputs (collection imagery and their vector embeddings) to use for comparative purposes seems like it would be a good and useful thing for the broader sector." – https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04/06/shared-embeddings/

don’t worry everyone / the late-night newscast in quebec did not lead / with the question of whether or not cole caulfield had scored his fiftieth goal this season / but it was the second story / the third was about patrick roy being fired

work / in progress

what is better than two cats playing roller derby / three cats