NEW RESOURCES

State Archives of North Carolina: New Veterans Oral History Collection Online. “The Military Collection at the State Archives of North Carolina is excited to announce the launch of the digital Veterans Oral History Collection through the North Carolina Digital Collections. The interviews, conducted since 2015 as audio interviews, are part of the Military Collection’s North Carolina Veterans Oral History Program, whose goal is to capture and provide access to the memories and experiences of the military servicemen and servicewomen from North Carolina, preserving them for the future scholarship.”

University of San Carlos: Cebuano Studies Center launches Nueva Fuerza Online Archive. “The online archive is the product of the Shared Future Project: Enhancement of the Cebuano Studies Center, sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). The project was an envisioned collaborative project to digitize and provide an open-access collection of one of Cebu’s oldest newspapers. The online archive initially features digitized copies of Bag-ong Kusog from 1921 until 1926.” As I understand it, the newspaper that was Nueva Fuerza eventually became Bag-ong Kusog.

George Washington University: GW Launches New Tip Sheet on Political Twitter Activity . “Researchers at the George Washington University launched on Friday a new weekly recap of political activity on Twitter. The publication, called The ECHO, will quantify which politicians, issues, campaigns and political institutions are garnering the most traction on the social media platform…. The inaugural edition of The ECHO found a dramatic increase in social media activity surrounding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, with 5.3 million related tweets during the Aug. 31-Sept. 6 report period. That represented a 3,638 percent increase from the previous week. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of the program on Sept. 5.”

Phys.org: CU Boulder to create digital archive of 1.7 million Rocky Mountain botanical specimens. “University of Colorado Boulder researchers and collaborating institutions have been awarded $2.9 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a comprehensive digital archive of over 1.7 million plant specimens native to the southern Rocky Mountain region. CU Boulder will serve as the lead institution of an interdisciplinary consortium composed of 38 collaborating partners, which includes universities, botanical gardens, national parks and Native American Nations, who will help compile and cross-reference the specimen data. Specimens from areas of the 10-state region of the Southern Rocky Mountains and High Plains will be located, imaged, entered into a central database and georeferenced.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USC Shoah Foundation: Nearly 1,000 English Transcripts Added to Visual History Archive. “USC Shoah Foundation integrated the first 984 English-language transcripts into the Visual History Archive over the weekend – the first such update since ProQuest began working on transcribing testimonies as part of its partnership with USC Shoah Foundation last year. The English-language transcripts join 898 German-language transcripts produced by Freie Universität in Berlin that are already available in the VHA.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Science Magazine: Social media ‘bots’ tried to influence the U.S. election. Germany may be next. “On 3 September, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her main opponent Martin Schulz faced off in an election debate that many viewers panned as more of a duet than a duel, a far livelier effort was underway on social media. People on Twitter started using the hashtag #verräterduell, which translates as ‘duel of traitors’ and mirrors the claim by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party that both Merkel’s mainstream Christian Democrats and Schulz’s Social Democrats have ‘betrayed’ the country. Yet much of the venom may not have been fueled by angry voters, researchers say. Instead it looks like the work of bots, or fake social media profiles that appear to be connected to human users, but are really driven by algorithms.”

Talking Points Memo: Russian Trolls Promoted Trump While Trashing Black Lives Matter On Twitter. “When a Russian troll farm was fishing for Trump supporters on Twitter, it baited the hook by targeting minority activists and public figures. TPM has reviewed tweets and images from a pro-Trump Twitter account run by the Russian troll farm that likely purchased $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook. Among the account’s favorite targets during the 2016 campaign season were Michelle Obama, undocumented immigrants and antiracist activist movement Black Lives Matter.”

The State News: MSU Museum bear comes to life on social media. MSU in this case is Michigan State University. “Bears have a mind too, and the MSU Museum has brought theirs to life through the world of social media. The museum’s most famous attraction, which stands about 10 ½ feet tall and weighs 14,000 pounds, now has a Twitter account that story tells the life of a bear. Director of MSU Museum Mark Auslander said this is the largest brown bear in any museum in the world and ‘because everybody loves it so much, we thought we should create a Twitter feed.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Arizona State University: ASU partners with public libraries to advance citizen science. “Arizona State University aims to position public libraries as key facilitators of citizen science, a collaborative process between scientists and the general public to spur the collection of data. Through a new grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), researchers from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and ASU Library will develop field-tested, replicable resource toolkits for public libraries to provide to everyday people contributing to real research, from right where they are.”

Quartz: Facebook is spending millions on original shows, but its users prefer the silly viral videos. “New habits don’t form overnight. Facebook is spending lavishly on TV-like originals for its new Watch platform to show publishers what’s possible on the platform. But, so far, users are still gravitating toward the kind of short, viral clips that have been on Facebook for ages.” Guilty. Good afternoon, Internet…

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