afternoonbuzz

Surfing, Data Mining, Web Archiving, More: Tuesday Afternoon Buzz, March 31st, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

The BBC has launched the News Timeliner. “The Timeliner uses collections of inter-connected short-form videos to give context to current news stories and aims to trigger memories and journeys into key moments in the past. The current version explores the history of British Politics and Elections through a series of timelines for audiences to experience in the build up to the general election.”

Harry Mayo donated his collection of 1300 surfing photos (mainly from the 1930s-1940s) to UC-Santa Cruz, and now they’re available online.

Harvard is digitizing its collection of early English manor rolls. “The manor roll collection consists of 170 court-rolls, account-rolls, and other documents from various manors, ranging in date from 1282 to 1770. The largest concentration comes from the manor of Moulton in Cheshire. Other manors represented are Odiham Hundred, Hampshire; Herstmonceaux, Sussex; Chartley, Staffordshire; and Onehouse, Suffolk. A limited number of materials in this collection are single-sheet charters and one item is a map of the manor of Shelly, Suffolk.”

The Washington Post has created a searchable database of the White House visitor logs. “The data can be messy: You may find weird glitches and we can’t verify that the data is complete. We’ll also note that the White House logs often include middle initials. Searches in our tool use the entire name provided by the White House, so ‘John A Smith’ and ‘John Smith’ are different people — and a search for “John Smith” won’t turn up the John with the middle initial. After all, we don’t know if John A. Smith is the same as John Smith, so we want to keep them separate.”

USEFUL STUFF

Interested in Data Mining? Pedro from Data On Focus let me know about his list of 27 free data mining books. Good stuff.

Google Translate has a new Chrome extension. “Simply highlight the text that you want to translate, and then click the Translate icon that appears. You can also right click and choose ‘Google Translate’. If you click the icon in the upper right of your browser window, with no text highlighted, you can translate the entire web page.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Amazon is now offering unlimited cloud drive storage. “Unlimited Cloud Storage will let users get either unlimited photo storage or ‘unlimited everything’ — covering all kinds of media from videos and music through to PDF documents — respectively for $11.99 or $59.99 per year.” Couple of things: 1) One of the commenters points out there’s a file size limit of 2GB. 2) Amazon wants you to store all your files with it, yet consumers still do not have the option of two factor login. Considering the ongoing security issues the Internet faces, it seems increasingly tin-eared to offer services like this without commensurate security.

Google Keep now has labels. Still not trusting enough to move away from Evernote.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

YouTube is apparently experimenting with ultra-high-def video playback.

New York University Libraries are teaming up wtih the Internet Archive. “New York University Libraries is leading a collaboration with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program and San Francisco-based Archive-It, a service of the Internet Archive (IA) to ensure that the websites of musical composers can be collected, preserved, and made accessible today and in the future, with sound and visual quality at a level significantly higher than current web archiving standards. The project, Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers, is funded with a grant of $480,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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