NEW RESOURCES

University of Maryland: UMD Student Newspapers Database Launched. “The University Archives is proud to announce the public launch of the new UMD Student Newspapers database… which provides keyword and date access to issues of The Diamondback and its seven predecessor newspapers from 1910 to October 1971. Users can search names and topics across all the issues, as well as focusing in on a particular day, month, or year of publication or publication title. Content can also be isolated in an individual issue and saved as a jpg file, using the clipping tool provided on the website.”

The Spaces: Will the new ‘Shazam for art’ app change the gallery experience forever?. “New app Smartify aims to be the ‘Shazam of the art world’, giving users instant information about thousands of artworks on show in public galleries across the world. The smartphone and tablet app uses image recognition technology to scan and identify artworks, earning comparison to the famous music app, founded in 1999. Smartify also provides audio interviews with artists, as well as hidden stories about the pieces and curatorial information, acting as a free hand-held tour guide for curious gallery-goers.” 30 institutions participating so far. Sounds awesome!

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Snapchat’s next AR trick is giant art installations . “Snap is bringing a touch of art world glitz to Snapchat. Keen observers will have noticed a newly launched countdown on its art.snapchat.com URL. Well, the internet has already cracked its code. And no, you’re not about to get a Snapchat drone (at least not yet). The domain is apparently tied to a new augmented reality art project featuring Jeff Koons and, possibly, more artists down the line.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Create and Use Instagram Collections. “Do you save Instagram posts? Looking for a way to organize your saved posts? In this article, you’ll learn how to create private Instagram collections to organize saved posts you want to refer to later.”

Lifehacker: Replace News Notifications With Nuzzel. “If you get breaking-news notifications on your phone, you’ll often find you disagree with CNN, the New York Times, or Apple about what constitutes news. Instead, you can turn use news aggregation app Nuzzel, which can notify you when a certain number of your Twitter friends link to the same URL, no matter the source.” Interesting comments about using this to find which of the people you follow on Twitter are sharing false information or hoaxes.

PC World: The best free Microsoft Office alternatives of 2017. “Microsoft Office is the king of office productivity suites, but it doesn’t inspire warm, fuzzy feelings in all users. Parsing the ever-expanding list of features—many of which you’ll never use—can feel like stepping into a cockpit without a pilot’s license. The ribbon interface, introduced a decade ago, has many fans, but others pine for the static menus of the early aughts. And then there’s Office’s hefty price tag. Fortunately, alternatives abound, ranging from web apps to freemium and open source desktop installations, many of which are compatible with Microsoft Office docs.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters. “Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.”

Chronicle of Higher Education: Using Digital Archives to Teach Data Set Creation and Visualization Design. “Although less common perhaps, archives can enhance introductory humanities and first-year composition courses aimed at non-liberal arts majors. This semester I designed assignments centered on Visual Haggard (VH), a digital archive that I edit intended to centralize and improve access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard. These multimodal assignments encouraged undergraduates to practice critical thinking, writing and communication, and visual and digital design—all course goals for first-year composition seminars at Georgia Tech. At the same time, students actively collaborated with me on the project by composing public-facing descriptive metadata tags demonstrating close reading as well as well-designed charts and graphs visualizing this data.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Germany’s new hate speech law goes live: So who’s in its sights?. “Germany’s controversial online hate-speech law has come into effect, and the government apparently has a multitude of popular web services in its sights. The Enforcement on Social Networks (NetzDG) law threatens services with fines of up to €50m ($59m) if they don’t quickly take down posts containing hate speech and misinformation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

National Academies: Report Offers Guidance to Federal Government on Creating a New Statistics Entity to Combine Data From Multiple Sources While Protecting Privacy. ” A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers detailed recommendations to guide federal statistical agencies in creating a new entity that would enable them to combine data from multiple sources in order to provide more relevant, timely, and detailed statistics – for example, on the unemployment rate or the rate of violent crime. The report reviews options for structuring the new entity, identifies approaches for protecting individuals’ privacy while linking multiple sources of information, and identifies areas where staff training is needed.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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