NEW RESOURCES

IAAM: The International African American Museum Launches Groundbreaking African American Genealogy Center. “Today, the International African American Museum (IAAM) announced the launch of its Center for Family History – an innovative national genealogy research center dedicated solely to celebrating and researching African American ancestry. The center will engage in genealogy education, original research, community archiving, public outreach, and collections. It will also assist with DNA testing. The Center for Family History is the International African American Museum’s first program launch. It will engage visitors online now … and in one of the most prominent gallery spaces in the museum.” Disclaimer: I’ve been doing some writing for Toni Carrier, one of the people behind this launch. I don’t get extra for promoting the new center, and I’m not being paid directly for promoting it. I do think it’s a fantastic idea and want to help get the word out.

Stanford Library: 2000+ audio cassettes from Allen Ginsberg collection now streaming from SearchWorks. “Ginsberg comes up fairly often in this blog (e.g. Rebecca Wingfield’s recent post about ‘Howl’ going up online), but the release of over 2000+ audio cassette recordings to SearchWorks is truly another cause for celebration. ”

New Atlas: NASA uploads hundreds of historic experimental flight videos to YouTube. “Fans of experimental aircraft from the 20th century are in for a treat. NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center has begun uploading its entire historical archive to YouTube, making hundreds of videos highlighting different test flights and strange planes from the past 70 years easily accessible.”

New York Public Library: Surveyor Geotagging Tool Puts NYPL Photos on the Map. “Today, we’re proud to release Surveyor, our new website for crowdsourced geotagging of NYPL’s photo collections. With Surveyor, we invite everyone who is interested in the history of New York City to try and determine the locations depicted in these mostly unlabelled photos. With your help, we will create a database containing the geographic locations of our photos, and this data will be available for everyone to use and download. We’ll start small, with around 2,500 photos from five collections, but we will add more of the Library’s photo collections later (you can find a list of these collections on Surveyor’s About page).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: The British Museum Publishes The First 3D Scan Of The Rosetta Stone Online. “You no longer have to visit the British Museum in London to see the Rosetta Stone in detail. Last week, the museum published the first 3D scan of the famous slab of hieroglyphics online at Sketchfab, where it’s accompanied by the website’s new sound support feature.”

TechCrunch: Facebook ‘Groups for Pages’ unlocks fan clubs . “With Facebook’s newest feature, a musician could run an on-site fan club, a brand could organize its ambassadors and a newspaper could discuss articles with just its top readers. Today Facebook globally launched Groups for Pages, allowing the 70 million Pages on Facebook to create their own distinct communities and feeds.”

Phys.org: Google Street View finally captures missing Austria. “In 2010, Google had begun to roll out its service in Austria and neighbouring Germany but was ordered to halt operations over alleged privacy breaches. The company admitted that vehicles had accidentally recorded personal data from wireless networks. Although Austria lifted its temporary ban a year later, Street View decided not return to the alpine nation—until now.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Digiday: Facebook always wins: Data shows publishers are buying far more Facebook traffic. “Publishers may have bones to pick with Facebook over declining organic reach and monetization issues. But that hasn’t stopped them from buying a lot more traffic from the platform lately. According to analysis of over 1 million dark posts, or paid posts targeted at a specific audience segment on a platform, shared by more than 400 publishers, the average number of paid monthly impressions from Facebook over the past 18 months has more than doubled, according to Keywee data.”

Business Insider: Marissa Mayer wants to be a CEO again, but she says she isn’t in talks with Uber. “Now that Yahoo is safely in the hands of its new owner, Verizon, its famous CEO Marissa Mayer is looking for her next CEO gig. And she definitely wants another CEO role again and does not want to become a full-time investor, she told Business Insider.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Most Americans reuse passwords, with millennials the worst culprits. “A new survey of over 1,000 US adults reveals that 81 percent of people surveyed admit to using the same password for more than one account. Among millennials where 92 percent say they use the same password across multiple accounts. More worrying still, more than a third (36 percent) report that they use the same password for 25 percent or more of their online accounts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cosmos: Search and deploy: Google may be the next weapon to beat epidemics. “In research published in PLOS Computational Biology, an international team has used a mathematical modelling tool to track dengue-related Google searches to better predict dengue fever activity…. Despite the huge number of individuals at risk each year, governments rely on hospital-based reporting to monitor the disease, a method hampered by poor communication and time constraints. In response to the demand for an effective disease surveillance tool, the researchers drew on a simple premise: the more people affected by dengue, the more Google searches on the topic.”

PLOS: Social sensing of urban land use based on analysis of Twitter users’ mobility patterns. “A number of recent studies showed that digital footprints around built environments, such as geo-located tweets, are promising data sources for characterizing urban land use. However, challenges for achieving this purpose exist due to the volume and unstructured nature of geo-located social media. Previous studies focused on analyzing Twitter data collectively resulting in coarse resolution maps of urban land use. We argue that the complex spatial structure of a large collection of tweets, when viewed through the lens of individual-level human mobility patterns, can be simplified to a series of key locations for each user, which could be used to characterize urban land use at a higher spatial resolution.” Good morning, Internet…

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