Author: Mary Mann

Mary Mann is an LIS student at Pratt, focusing on research & instructional services in archives and academic institutions. She works as a reference associate at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and her essays and articles have appeared in Smithsonian and The New York Times.

“Alexa, Tell Me a Joke”: An Analysis of Humor-Based User Interactions with Intelligent Personal Assistants

This study examines humorous interactions with intelligent personal assistants (IPA/IPAs). The respective IPAs include Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri. Many discussions of a wide-ranging review helped to define the goal to classify user utterances, IPA responses, and user ratings of IPA responses.

Documents as Data: Harvesting Knowledge from Textual Resources with DADAlytics

Our presentation will be about the development of DADAlytics, a semantic tool recently created by the Semantic Lab at Pratt (semlab.io) to help librarians, archivists and humanities scholars generate linked data from textual resources and descriptive records. We will discuss opportunities and challenges of adopting linked open data technologies and discuss the development of  DADAlytics. The use of DADAlytics will be contextualized within a real-world scenario provided by the collection of personal diaries of Mary Berenson, part of the Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers (1880-2002) held at the Berenson Library at the Villa I Tatti in Florence (itatti.harvard.edu/berenson-library – see The Mary Berenson Project for additional context).

Academic Library Evolution

“Growing the Academic Library: Past, Present & Future” is an exploration of how academic libraries have changed and grown, organized into three major areas: resources, physical space, and education. This comprehensive literature review provides an understanding of where academic libraries have been as well as where they’re going, the latter including emerging ideas such as patron-driven acquisition and student activist archiving. An overall theme is the symbiotic relationship between the library and the wider university.