NEW RESOURCES

From The Newberry: Announcing “Religious Change, 1450 – 1700”. “The Newberry announces the public launch of Religious Change, 1450 – 1700, a multidisciplinary project drawing on the full range of the library’s programs, services, and staff expertise. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, Religious Change will explore how challenges to religious authority ushered in an age of hope, fear, and anxiety that continues to shape religion, politics, culture, and every other facet of human life. We will pursue this theme through an array of public programs and digital resources, as well as an exhibition opening in September. ”

Yow! From the Internet Archive: MIT Press Classics Available Soon at Archive.org. “For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been publishing acclaimed titles in science, technology, art and architecture. Now, thanks to a new partnership between the Internet Archive and MIT Press, readers will be able to borrow these classics online for the first time. With generous support from Arcadia, this partnership represents an important advance in providing free, long-term public access to knowledge.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From GeneaBloggers: GeneaBloggers.Com: The End Is Almost Near!. A roundup of what will be happening at GeneaBloggers and too much for me to quote any one thing.

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Peek at Shortened URLs Without Clicking on Them. “Shortened URLs are everywhere today. While they might be convenient and tidy on social media, it’s often impossible to know what’s behind those links. A few online services make it easy to find out what might be lurking behind a shortened URL.” A few resources, quick article.

Quartz: The complete guide to working out using only free online videos. “YouTube star Kelli Segars, who along with her husband Daniel runs the FitnessBlender franchise, said while working out at the gym is ideal for some people, it’s not for everyone. ‘I used to go kill myself at the gym,’ she told Quartz. ‘Now I do 30 minutes at home, three to five times a week and I get better results. It’s hard for people to grasp, but it really does work better.'” A little outside my remit, but now that I’ve got a new schedule I’m getting up and playing Dance Dance Revolution for 30 minutes every morning, and remembering how wonderful sweaty exercise is.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Independent (Uganda): Rwanda to control presidential candidates’ social media use. “here will be no spur of the moment Twitter rants by Rwanda’s presidential candidates, as the election commission has ruled that it must pre-approve all of their social media updates.”

The Register: How the Facebook money funnel is shaping British elections. “Britons vote for a new government on June 8 and, until recently, election campaigns have been tightly controlled affairs with limits on how much parties can spend per constituency, the requirement to submit detailed accounts and no political advertising on television. But the rules don’t cover online advertising – allowing Facebook to cash in, having used the Conservative Party’s 2015 victory as a case study.”

Online Journalism Blog: Using Instagram to cover an election: lessons from #wmmayor. “During this year’s mayoral elections one of my MA Online Journalism students, Sam Gould, adopted an Instagram-first publishing strategy during the lead up to the vote, and on the day of the count. The results were impressive, taking in profiles, interviews, explainers, and live coverage. But equally interesting for anyone considering a mobile-first approach to elections this year was the workflow, so I thought I’d share some of the key points here.” Read Sam Gould’s original blog post, as well.

ExtraNewsfeed: After Google Map to the help of Archeology, here is Google Search to the help of History. “Japan, mutiny, Australian convicts, amateur historian and google power user? The tools at the hand of everybody are so ubiquitous today that we tend to forget how powerful they are. Just as people were getting used to see amateur archeologists using Google Maps to discover Mayan ruins in the jungle (or not), here is an amateur historian using Google Search to discover how the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago.”

Business Insider: Inside the GIF factory: How Giphy plans to build a real business by animating the internet. “Plenty of tech startups dream of building a new consumer brand that’s used and recognized by hundreds of millions of people every day. Few of them get as close as Giphy, the four-year-old GIF search engine that’s raised $150 million in funding to date at a $600 million valuation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

SiliconANGLE: Startup uses AI to create programs from simple screenshots. “A new neural network being built by a Danish startup called UIzard Technologies IVS has created an application that can transform raw designs of graphical user interfaces into actual source code that can be used to build them.”

Motherboard: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship. “‘Knowledge is power,’ as the old saying goes, so it’s no surprise that Wikipedia—one of the largest repositories of general knowledge ever created—is a frequent target of government censorship around the world. In Turkey, Wikipedia articles about female genitals have been banned; Russia has censored articles about weed; in the UK, articles about German metal bands have been blocked; in China, the entire site has been banned on multiple occasions. Determining how to prevent these acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption.” Good morning, Internet…

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