NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Laughing Squid: 80s.NYC, An Online Collection of Street View Photos Taken in All Five Boroughs During the 1980s. “Programmer Brandon Liu and researcher Jeremy Lechtzin have created 80s.NYC, a really wonderful online collection of photos that show what all five boroughs of New York City looked like during the 1980s. The photos were taken as part of a bureaucratic process to ensure taxes were assessed properly. Liu and Letctzin organized these photos into an easily readable map that’s fun to explore.”

Internet Archive: TV news chyron data provide ways to explore breaking news reports & bias . “Today the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive announces a new way to plumb our TV news collections to see how news stories are reported: data feeds for the news that appears as chyrons on the lower thirds of TV screens. Our Third Eye project scans the lower thirds of TV screens, using OCR, or optical character recognition, to turn these fleeting missives into downloadable data ripe for analysis. At launch, Third Eye tracks BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and contains more than four million chyrons captured in just over two weeks.”

Google Blog: Something’s coming … “West Side Story” on Google Arts & Culture. “In partnership with Carnegie Hall, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York and the National Museum of American Jewish History, Google Arts & Culture is launching a new collection honoring ‘West Side Story.’ Bringing together artifacts and mementos from the making of the musical and movie, behind-the-scenes photographs, and a peek into the modern-day representation of the musical, this collection explores the history, artistic value and social relevance of ‘West Side Story.’ ”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PR Newswire: From Enron to Wells Fargo: Expanded Violation Tracker Now Covers 18 Years of Corporate Crime & Misconduct (PRESS RELEASE). “An expansion of Violation Tracker, the first public database of corporate crime and misconduct in the United States, now makes it possible to access details of cases ranging from the big business scandals of the early 2000s during the Bush administration through those of the Trump administration to date…. The expansion nearly doubles the size of Violation Tracker to 300,000 entries, which together account for more than $394 billion in fines and settlements. As a measure of how corporate crime is concentrated within big business, 95 percent of those penalty values were assessed against only 2,800 large parent companies whose subsidiaries are linked together in the database. Approximately 200,000 smaller businesses account for the remaining five percent of the dollar total.”

Digital Science: World’s First Open Syllabus Project To Expand Into New Languages After Being Awarded By Global Innovation Grant, From Digital Science. “The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is building the world’s first large-scale online database of university course syllabi as a platform for new bibliometric, research, teaching, and administrative tools. The project’s beta Syllabus Explorer launched in 2016 with an archive of over 1 million syllabi and the ability to rank texts by appearance and co-occurrence on syllabi (i.e. what’s taught together). The Syllabus Explorer also debuted a new prototype publication metric—teaching score—derived from the frequency with which works are assigned. OSP is based at The American Assembly, a public policy institute at Columbia University, and its next version will greatly expand the size of the collection, the quality of metadata, and the range of tools available for filtering and analyzing curricular data. Syllabus Explorer 2.0 will launch this fall (2017).”

Digital Trends: Pinterest Sections Will Soon Allow Users To Organize Boards Into Sub-boards. “Pinterest is a home for organizing all of your online finds — but the platform could soon be getting even more organized for those Pins — which now number over 100 billion. During the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Monday, September 18, Pinterest CEO and Co-Founder Ben Silbermann said that a new feature called ‘Sections’ is currently in beta testing, with a public rollout expected within the next few weeks.”

Twitter: New Data, New Insights: Twitter’s Latest #Transparency Report. “With our 11th biannual Twitter Transparency Report, Twitter has expanded on work announced in our last #TTR to share more information about government Terms of Service requests we receive and how we handle such requests. In March of 2017, we introduced a new section covering government TOS reports, but it was limited to government requests to remove content under our prohibition of the promotion of terrorism. Today, we have expanded this section to cover a broader array of categories under the Twitter Rules, adding: abusive behavior, copyright, and trademark.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Use Facebook Audience Optimization for Better Organic Exposure. “Want to increase your Facebook news feed exposure? Looking for a solution that doesn’t involve ads? In this article, you’ll discover how to improve your organic visibility via Facebook’s Audience Optimization feature.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

EcoWatch: ‘No Results Found’: Thousands of Climate Science Links Purged From USGS Online Database. “Yet another U.S. agency has deleted climate change information from its website. This time, the U.S. Geological Survey’s ‘Science Explorer’ website—a tax-payer funded online database for the public to browse USGS science programs and activities—has been purged of thousands of formerly searchable climate science links.”

SFGate: StoryCorps’ Thanksgiving Listen asks kids to record elders. “StoryCorps is hoping people give their social media apps a break for a few minutes this Thanksgiving and instead use one designed for listening. The nonprofit oral history project has announced the 2017 edition of its Great Thanksgiving Listen, which calls for high school students to record a conversation with an elder over the holiday weekend using the StoryCorps app.”

Malta Today: Inked in history . “Rel-Ink promises to explore tattoos and their significance in the day to day life of elderly Maltese males, aged 75 and over, who worked as labourers, seafarers and the like, at a time when the maritime sector was the mainstay in Malta’s colonial economy – which means, from the 1900s all the way up to the Second World War. It will feature in-depth personal oral history accounts, straight from the mouths of tattooed participants as well as documentation and images of their tattoo designs, with the main motivation being to cast a light on Maltese tattoo artists and their handiwork…. But that’s not all! The project aims to build a digital archive, which will be made available as an open-source platform via partner the Department of Library Information and Archives Study at the University of Malta, ensuring that all information will be made available online, for all to see and admire.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: Historical data: Hidden in the past. “In 2012, Ruth Thurstan turned to an unconventional source to study fishing: old newspapers. She wanted to know when people had started catching substantial numbers of snapper (Pagrus auratus), a fish species abundant off Australia’s coast, and how much effort was needed at the time to catch them. But available detailed data stretched back only to the late 1980s. Thurstan, a marine historical ecologist now at Deakin University in Warrnambool, Australia, noticed that today’s fishers of snapper often recount their experiences in magazine articles and blog posts. She wondered where fishers from the past would have published such descriptions.” Good morning, Internet…

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