NEW RESOURCES

New to me: did you know there’s a database of dreams? Over 22,000 of ’em. If you’re friends with me on Facebook you know I have extremely weird dreams. This is fascinating to me. “The archive is organized in 73 dream sets. Most of those sets are dreams collected from an individual, but some are from groups who were assigned to keep diaries, such as blind dreamers and Swiss schoolchildren. Over the years, people have heard about The DreamBank and submitted their privately kept journals to be preserved and made available to readers. Domhoff believes in granting anonymity to dreamers, and many of the pseudonyms in The DreamBank are both colorful and descriptive such as ‘Pegasus: the factory worker’ and ‘Toby: a friendly party animal’.”

NUI Galway has launched a digital archive of the Irish Famine. “The Digital Irish Famine Archive, which was launched by the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers, contains three sets of annals from the Grey Nuns: ‘Ancien Journal (Old Journal), Volume I’ and ‘Le Typhus d’1847, Ancien Journal (The Typhus of 1847, Old Journal), Volume II’, both translated from French to English, and the nuns’ first-hand experiences of the Irish migration in ‘Récit de l’épidemie’ (Tale of the epidemic), which is transcribed in French from the original.”

Google is launching a News Lab. “Our mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to help build the future of media. And we’re tackling this in three ways: though ensuring our tools are made available to journalists around the world (and that newsrooms know how to use them); by getting helpful Google data sets in the hands of journalists everywhere; and through programs designed to build on some of the biggest opportunities that exist in the media industry today.”

Findmypast has added new records from the Napoleonic Wars. “Comprising over 71,000 entries from the ADM 103 series, these records form part of the wider ‘Prisoners of War 1715-1945′ collection. They contain not only the details of members of the armed forces, but also of captured civilians and merchant seamen of various nationalities. The new Napoleonic additions record the details of Danish, French, Prussian and American prisoners captured by British Forces during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. They list the prisoner’s name, nationality, rank, service number and the conflict in which they were captured.”

The Canadian Patent Office has put patent prosecution histories online. “In patent parlance, the term ‘prosecution’ refers to the process of guiding a patent application through the patent office to issuance as a patent. Patent prosecution primarily consists of written correspondence between the patent office and a patent applicant (e.g. an inventor or company, typically represented by a patent agent or patent lawyer).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Okay, the Wall Street Journal has a new Instagram account. WSJ Off Duty — apparently WSJ cooks lots of food and goes to fashion shows.

USEFUL STUFF

Good stuff: the Digital Content Strategist at Blanton Museum talks hashtags, specifically standardizing on a museumwide hashtag and strategies for developing exhibit-specific hashtags.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Bing predicted the outcome of the NBA finals. Back in April. “Bing had the Warriors down to beat the Atlanta Hawks in five games, but the Cavaliers earned their shot at the Championship by dismissing the Hawks in four. The Warriors’ side of the bracket proved to be slightly easier to predict, with Bing only failing to foresee the Houston Rockets’ hard-fought victory over the LA Clippers.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Researchers at the University of Toronto want to use Instagram to help you dress more fashionably. “The researchers mined data from chictopia.com, a social website where users share photos of their outfits. Using the site’s 144,169 posts, the team was able to amass highly detailed statistics for each user, their photo and the fashion it features, along with the comments and response it received from the rest of the Chictopia community. This Fashion144k Dataset, as it’s called, revealed certain correlations and patterns between aspects of a post and the interest it generated, which information the smart folks in Toronto then crunched and coded into their intricate (and seriously brilliant) fashionability-predicting algorithm.” Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!