NEW RESOURCES

Josh Burdick, who recorded a lot of TV in the 1990s, has uploaded a bunch of it to YouTube. “1987-91 were my high school years and 1991-96 were my college ones, therefore I did quite a bit of recording during this time. Post 1996, it was time to start my career and move into adulthood so my time was much more busy with life and the recordings begin to diminish. Over the past 4 years, I converted the VHS tapes to DVD, ripped them video files, edited & uploaded to YouTube some of the most interesting clips.” There are over 1000 clips here, and he’s created several playlists by year. The selection of topics and clips is enchantingly random.

The Georgia State University Library has launched a new digital archive of pro-life newsletters. “The collection, part of the Archives for Research on Women and Gender, contains newsletters reflecting the anti-abortion and (to a lesser extent) anti-euthanasia beliefs of various American organizations and individuals.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Nonprofit search engine GuideStar is rolling out a new search.

Twitch is launching a new “clips” feature. “When you see something you don’t want to forget, hit the Clip button in the video player, wait just a few seconds, and before you can say ‘Kappa’, you’ll have a video of the action ready to share. You can make as many Clips as you like, so go ahead and hit the button a couple times to make sure you clip the best 30 seconds from the stream. Then just copy the URL or use the links to spread the hype, because once you close the Clip window, your Clip will be gone.”

Google has speeded up the performance of its iOS app. Also: “A few months ago, we announced that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) were coming to the mobile web. Starting today, AMP will be available in the Google app for iOS. So now news articles from a vast array of publishers will load instantly for your reading pleasure. Just look out for the lightning bolt and ‘AMP’ next to articles in the ‘Top Stories’ section of your search results and enjoy blazing-fast news.”

USEFUL STUFF

My buddy Cyndi Ingle (of Cyndi’s List) has put together a PDF of what to do if your Facebook account is spoofed (not hacked, spoofed.) It also walks through how to protect yourself and what to do if a friend’s account is spoofed. This happens way too often to all kinds of people (even my mother-in-law!) Thanks to Cyndi for putting this together.

MakeUseOf: 10 Excellent Dropbox Tools for Creative Geeks Anywhere. Only a few, but they are weird and random and kind of cool.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Times of India is reporting that the government of India will more aggressively monitor social media. “Sources in the home ministry said the draft proposal for the 24×7 social media monitoring facility is being finalised in consultation with the intelligence agencies and ministries like telecom, IT and information & broadcasting. The broad view, an officer familiar with the discussions told TOI, is that not only Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, etc be included under the purview of social media but also phone chat and messaging services like Whatsapp, Trillian, Telegram and We Chat be tracked to block circulation of jihadi and inflammatory content.”

According to rumor, two top Twitter executives have scarpered. “Two top Twitter executives — Jana Messerschmidt, the head of business development, and Nathan Hubbard, head of media and commerce — are planning to leave the company, according to multiple sources familiar with their plans. It’s unclear exactly when the execs will leave, but as a result of the moves Twitter has tapped one person to take over both roles, according to sources.” Spreading its executives too thin is one of Twitter’s problems, IMHO.

Barry Schwartz has an update on the Google Trips app. “A few days ago, Google sent an email to some of their local guides about testing a new beta version of the Google Trips Android app.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Normally I don’t post links in ResearchBuzz until I’ve read them and digested them at least enough to come to some conclusions, but when it comes to Nathan Danskey’s Master’s thesis I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. It’s called Ephemerality and the Archive: Memory in the Age of Digital Remediation and that link leads to a full-text PDF. Using Python, Mr. Danskey has developed tools that, instead of mimicking human intelligence (AI), deconstruct and degrade digital archives in a manner I believe is meant to imitate human memory – let’s call it AU (artificial uncertainty.) Reading this, my initial response is horror and possibly a full understanding of the term anathema – but I’m not sure I’ll ever completely understand what he’s done here. I don’t have the education chops. All I know is I’ve haven’t had such a cold-water dunk of my brain since the first time I read Julian Jaynes – that was over 25 years ago and I STILL haven’t made up my mind about psychological bicameralism!

Nifty! Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messages. “Microblogging platforms such as Twitter provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as earthquakes, typhoons. During the sudden onset of a crisis situation, affected people post useful information on Twitter that can be used for situational awareness and other humanitarian disaster response efforts, if processed timely and effectively. Processing social media information pose multiple challenges such as parsing noisy, brief and informal messages, learning information categories from the incoming stream of messages and classifying them into different classes among others. One of the basic necessities of many of these tasks is the availability of data, in particular human-annotated data. In this paper, we present human-annotated Twitter corpora collected during 19 different crises that took place between 2013 and 2015. To demonstrate the utility of the annotations, we train machine learning classifiers. Moreover, we publish first largest word2vec word embeddings trained on 52 million crisis-related tweets. To deal with tweets language issues, we present human-annotated normalized lexical resources for different lexical variations.” Good morning, Internet…

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