NEW RESOURCES

There’s a new tool for searching/browsing humanities content, and it’s called BigDIVA. “BigDIVA, which stands for Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application, offers a visual interface for navigating scholarly, peer-reviewed humanities content, such as historical documents, images of art and artifacts, and any scholarship associated with those things. The system displays results in an infographic format that is organized by category, such as journal articles or online digital collections; and color coding distinguishes those items you have immediate access to from items that a user doesn’t have permission or a subscription to access.” Looks like it’s going to be a subscription service.

There’s a new online resource devoted to information about research organizations (PRESS RELEASE). “Digital Science today launched the Global Research Identifier Database (GRID), a free, easy-to-use online database that opens up information about research organisations around the world to data scientists, developers and innovators within academic and commercial organisations….Built in-house by Digital Science, the online database contains 50,000 manually curated institutional names, along with unique identifiers and geo-location information across 212 countries. The data are derived from openly accessible funder and publication sources such as the NIH reporter, PubMed and the UK Gateway to Research.”

New-to-me: I had no idea Finland had an online archive of World War II photography (the page I’m linking to is the English introduction to the site. It looks like there are about 3000 pictures; the image pages themselves are in Finnish (I think) but Chrome had no problem translating them since they’re just captions. A quick search found five pictures of Simo Häyhä.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Blogging/writing/opining platform Medium has gotten some updates. “I’m proud of where we are, but, as I like to say: There’s always another level. Another level of polish and power in our product. Another level of breadth to our content. Another level of dialogue and discussion. And another level of progress. Today, we are announcing a slew of updates to bring Medium to the next level and in the process make it more powerful, more fun, more democratic, and more essential.”

USEFUL STUFF

David Lee King has a quick writeup about an analytics tool for Instagram.

Google stores your voice searches, but also lets you play them back and delete them if you like. I don’t have any, so I can’t tell you how it looks…

Mashable’s got a guide to using the new Chromecast Audio. Warning: this just-under-two-minutes video had a 30-second commercial (which I could not skip) in front of it.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

As you’ve probably read, Facebook is going to get you go beyond the Like. “Remember the rumors about Facebook planning a ‘dislike’ button? It’s actually much more than that: Facebook Reactions (the official name of the feature) incorporates a multi-faceted button with several different emoji-inspired responses to a post, including anger, sadness, surprise and love.”

More Facebook: apparently it is working on augmented reality. Because oh, why not. “Facebook’s intentions in virtual reality were already clear after buying Oculus, which is already shipping units in partnership with Samsung and is prepping the launch of its flagship headset. Facebook’s Michael Abrash said virtual reality is already ‘past the knee of the curve,’ and has basically arrived. But augmented reality, by its nature, presents a new type of problems, Abrash said — hence it taking a little longer for it to become as feasible as virtual reality.”

Google now owns the alphabet in .com form. “Whois records show that Google is now the owner of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com. Prior to the acquisition, the domain name was privately owned and appears to have been parked.”

Yup, Twitter’s doing layoffs. “Twitter announced on Tuesday that it was laying off up to 336 employees, or 8 percent of its work force, to cut costs while it tries to find ways to attract new users.”

LogMeIn has purchased LastPass. “With an increasing number of data breaches putting users’ personal information at risk, a company that helps online users better manage their account information with various websites and services, as well as help customers run security checks on their accounts, seems like it would have the potential for serious growth. That’s what remote access software maker LogMeIn is hoping, as the company announced this morning that it has acquired the password management software maker LastPass for $110 million in cash.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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