James Konrad Tauber

@jtauber.com

7665 Followers 2838 Following

Using computers to better understand languages, texts, and music. Web, Python (PSF Fellow), AI/ML, DH, Corpus Linguistics, Narratology, Bayes, Philology, Ancient Greek, Music Theory, Tolkien, Retro Computing, Space. PhD candidate @dhssfau.bsky.social

Konrad Hans Tauber 22.12.1948 – 03.07.2026 over a photo of a man in his mid-twenties holding a baby (me)
A book partially opened midway through on the blank page.
Blue book cover reading CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS 103 Modes of Discourse The Local Structure of Texts CARLOTA S. SMITH
Ismail standing in front of a projection of a slide reading Research communication potential and challenges
James Tauber Australian software developer and entrepreneur > 791 strength · Top 3% < GPT-5.5 says < 1/12 > Software developer and entrepreneur known for Pinax, Django community work, and contributions to Python and open-source projects.
Sign at airport Προς πύλες To gates Κυλιόμενες Σκάλες (άνοδος) Escalator upwards But with the lambdas looking more like mirrored h
Closeup of the bottom of a receipt reading “unixTime”
Me wearing a dark blue hoodie with the FAU logo
Me T-posing between BOS and ON
Six suitcases and a laptop bag on a luggage cart in a hotel lobby. The words GOODBYE BURLINGTON have been added.
Cheap folding table with a veneer.
User who is Tolkien? talkie-1930 Tolkien is a musical composer and pianist, now resident in London. He was born at Taunton, in 1812, and studied under Charles Lucas, of that place, and afterwards in Paris, under Reicha. He composed an oratorio, entitled "Daniel," which was performed at Exeter Hall, in 1836; and, in 1840, produced an opera, called "Somersct House," at the same place. Among his other works are pianoforte sonatas, and a great variety of songs. He has also published "Instructions for the Piano-forte," and a "Grammar of Counterpoint."
Screenshot of my Mac System 1.0 emulator with a dialog box reading: Sorry... A serious system error has occurred. You may choose to restart the system or attemptto resume the current application. ID = 08 with incomplete buttons
A window reading "Welcome to Macintosh." on a checkerboard desktop resembling the original Mac.
Pokémon Yellow Version title screen (with pikachu!) running in Dromaios emulator with CPU and I/O registers in a panel to the right.
Karateka intro scene running in Dromaios
Two people with 3D glasses, one looking at their hand. In front of a warp background. Resembling an album cover.
A family in front of a large satellite dish.
rendering of the moon with features labelled. In the top left is a date and time, distance to moon and speed. Along the bottom is a timeline slider, Rewind / Play, 5000x, and toggles for Auto Zoom, Even Light, Labels
Screenshot of my Apple II emulator showing a crudely drawn beach scene and the words: YOU ARE ON A BEACH WITH A MARVELOUS AND INTRIGUING VIEW OF THE OCEAN. YOU SEE A HUT TO THE NORTH.
Screenshot of: Brøderbund Software PRESENTS THE PRINT SHOP (TM) BY DAVID BALSAM & MARTIN KAHN COPYRIGHT 1984 PXIELLITE SOFTWARE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
screenshot of Ultima IV opening screen running in my emulator
]CATALOG DISK VOLUME 254 *A 006 HELLO *I 018 ANIMALS *T 003 APPLE PROMS *I 006 APPLESOFT *I 026 APPLEVISION *I 017 BIORHYTHM *B 010 BOOT13 *A 006 BRIAN'S THEME *B 003 CHAIN *I 009 COLOR DEMO *A 009 COLOR DEMOSOFT *I 009 COPY *B 003 COPY.OBJ0 *A 009 COPYA *A 010 EXEC DEMO *B 020 FID *B 050 FPBASIC *B 050 INTBASIC
screenshot showing various panels: - a screen showing the DOS Version 3.3 System Master disk booted up to a prompt - a CPU panel showing registers and flags - a disassembly of the current memory - a hex dump of the zero page, main memory, and stack - various I/O indicators and information on the disk drive
Three book cases filled with Tolkien books including an entire book case with editions of the History of Middle-earth
Screenshot of a website. The heading reads "Atmospheric Homer" Then the text continues Phase 2 PDS Viewer — Illiad Book 1, Lines 1–20 PDS: did:plc:homer-atproto-local (http://localhost:8000) And then a series of boxes marked "Line 1", "Line 2", etc The first line reads μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά Πληῖάδεω Ἀχιλῆος and the ἄειδε is highlighted and there is a popup giving the lemma and morphological information
Jennie King and I in front of our first slide for “Exploring Our Horizons: Working with NASA Data” at SFU
Trending 1. US-Iran Relations 2. Pokémon 3. Browt 4. Pokémon 5. Letterboxd
Community meme: I can excuse fully autonomous weapons But I draw the line at unreliable fully autonomous weapons
two table rows, the first stated is completed, the second is running
Kenny Baker and Anthony Daniels as R2D2 and C3P0 only half in costume.
Two bluesky posts in a row: one from Gasper Begus about give a talk and one from Nina Begus giving a different talk!
UI reading "The post you're replying to was marked as being written in Greek by its author. Would you like to reply in Greek?"
Gandalf in Moria meme with words: I HAVE NO MEMORY OF DECEMBER 18TH
README A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines W. Patrick McCray
MICHAEL D.C. DROUT THE TOWER AND THE RUIN J.R.R. TOLKIEN'S CREATION
Contents Glossary Introduction Part I: The Fictional Game 1. Fictional Recentering 2. Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction 3. Reconstructing the Textual Universe: The Principle of Minimal Departure 4. Voices and Worlds 5. The Fiction Automaton Part Il: The Plotting of the Plot 6. The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes 7. The Dynamics of Plot: Goals, Actions, Plans, and Private Narratives 8. Virtuality and Tellability 9. Stacks, Frames, and Boundaries, or Narrative as Computer Language 10. The Formal Representation of Plot 11. The Heuristics of Automatic Story Generation Conclusion Notes References Index
MARIE-LAURE RYAN POSSIBLE WORLDS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND NARRATIVE THEORY
Billy Madison screencap with words: What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incohorent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man Margaret Boden BASIC BOOKS, INC.
screenshot of Bluesky's Trending with "Cloudflare Outage"
Comic strip Frame 1: NG-2 on the launch pad. Speech bubble from the payload: "Let's light this candle" Frame 2: Rocket assending. "Woohoo! We're on our way!" Frame 3: Second stage above the earth. Payload exposed showing two probes. One says "Mars here we come!" Frame 4: Second stage in space. Second probe says "Apparently we have to stop at L2 first." Frame 5: The two probes alone in space. "We're at L2! Now what?" "I guess we wait. Shouldn't be long!" Frame 6: Headed "One Year Later..." Same probes. The first just saying "..."
Book cover NINA BEGUŠ ARTIFICIAL HUMANITIES A FICTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE IN AI
There is a table of colour-coded values titled Text Types. As the cursor hovers over each row, the other rows dim. There is also a visualization of the text zones and when a row in the table is hovered over, the text zones of different colours fade to grey.
screenshot of iPhone app showing a plot of HbA1c levels over the first half of the year dropping from 11.8 on Feb 3 to 5.6 in Jun 9.
log-log scatter plot, mostly following a straight line until the tail end
Shell prompt reading: uv python install 3.14
Green highway marker reading: BASIC: THE FIRST USER-FRIENDLY COMPUTER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE In 1964, Dartmouth College math professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created one of the first user-friendly computer programming languages, called Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC made computer programming accessible to college students and, with the later popularity of personal computers, to users everywhere. It became the standard way that people all over the world learned to program computers, and variants of BASIC are still in use today. 2019
Me in sunglasses standing in front of a plaque that reads: IEEE MILESTONE The BASIC Programming Language, 1964 Beginer's Alpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) was Created in this building. During the mid-1970 and 1980s, BASIC was the principal programming lamguage used on early microcomputers. Is simplicity and wide acceptance made it useful in fields beyond science and mathematics, and enabled more people to harness the power of computation. February 2021 IEEE
A terminal window with distorted, unreadable characters
for page_file in sorted(PAGES_DIR.glob("*.md")): pipeline = path(page_file) | load | markdown(frontmatter=True) | collect_tags ryland.render_pipeline("page.html", f"{page_file.stem}/index.html", pipeline)
Pattern, Construction, System A Unified Approach to Grammar and Lexis
Me holding a book whose cover reads This Is for Everyone The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee
Bespectacled man in jeans and t-shirt holding up a 5 and 0 and standing in front of a sign reading “Welcome to North Dakota. 50th State. Best for Last Club. Fargo, ND”. T-shirt has the same design as the sign.
The book “THE COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH a corpus-based approach EDITED BY Roger Garside Geoffrey Leech Geoffrey Sampson”
A chart titled Rate of Vocabulary Introduction in Thucydides Books 1–3 There are two logarithmic curves. One is red and a little bumpy. The legend says it's "actual text order". The other is fuzzy and grey and the legend reads "shuffled (100 runs), There is also overlaid a bar chart and the legend reads "rate of introduction (per 200 tokens)"
A large letter A with an outline that is thicker on the left side leading to a more 3D effect.