NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: a Database of béton brut. If you don’t know what that is – I didn’t either, I had to look it up – it’s a smooth concrete surfacing in architecture. Wikipedia has a brief article (Also check out this article from Homecrux). The article from Architect I’m linking to has several images from an upcoming publication: “Save the concrete monsters: That’s the unofficial rallying cry of SOS Brutalism, a crowdsourced online database that, since its launch in October 2015, has uploaded more than 1,000 exemplars of béton brut. Now the founders of the platform have bolstered the effort with SOS Brutalism: A Global Survey (Park Books, 2018).”

Wilmington News Journal: State launches new tool for accessing campaign finance data. “The new service, dubbed FACE Ohio, is an application programming interface, or API, for campaign finance data. It provides users with a data feed containing up-to-date campaign contributions and expenditures from the Secretary of State’s website, which can then be analyzed and presented however the user chooses.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is hosting a Twitter chat on January 31. “Museums and libraries hold in trust the information and collections that represent the cultural, artistic, historical, natural, and scientific foundation of our shared heritage. Their programs and services provide access that leads to a more equitable and inclusive society. Please join us for an #IMLS2018 (link is external) Twitter chat about increasing access to information, ideas, and networks through libraries and museums.”

Engadget: Facebook takes on Twitch and YouTube in game streaming push. “Last year Facebook launched a Creator app for video hosts to create more video content for the social network. Now it’s doubling down on the concept, this time for those who make gaming videos. It’s a pretty clear bid to compete with YouTube, Twitch and Mixer for the attention of gaming fans who love watching other people play video games.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ned Potter: A Guide To The Best Free Sites For CC0 Art And Stock Photography. “The sites listed below contain images which have been made Creative Commons Zero (also known as CCO) by their creators, are available to use by anyone, however they like. The images are in the Public Domain and can be reproduced, incorporated into other works, modified, and reused, without needing permission and in most cases without even needing to credit the author.” Not the biggest list ever but nicely annotated.

British Library: A mammoth list of Digitised Manuscripts hyperlinks. “We have been hard at work here at the British Library and we are excited to share with you a brand new list of Digitised Manuscripts hyperlinks. You can currently view on Digitised Manuscripts no less than 1,943 manuscripts and documents made in Europe before 1600, with more being added all the time.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Bloomberg: Twitter Says Russian Bots Retweeted Trump 470,000 Times. “Russian-linked Twitter bots shared Donald Trump’s tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election, Twitter Inc. said in a submission to Congress. The automated accounts retweeted the Republican candidate’s @realDonaldTrump posts almost 470,000 times, accounting for just more than 4 percent of the re-tweets he received from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s account got less than 50,000 retweets by the Russian-linked automated accounts during the same period of time, the company said in documents posted Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

The Free Press: Victoria man creates google map art on his bicycle. “When ‘Cycleangelo’ finishes a piece of art, he has to step back in order to view it. In fact, he has to step so far back, he relies on satellites to view his final product. His brush strokes, some up to 220 kilometres long, are made with his bicycle, a map, and a GPS tracking device.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kaylin Walker: Tidy Text Mining Beer Reviews. “BeerAdvocate.com was scraped for a sample of beer reviews, resulting in a dataset of 31,550 beers and their brewery, beer style, ABV, total numerical ratings, number of text reviews, and a sample of review text. Review text was gathered only for beers with at least 5 text reviews. A minimum of 2000 characters of review text were collected for those beers, with total length ranging from 2000 to 5000 characters.”

The Atlantic: Facebook Only Cares About Facebook. “Facebook’s crushing blow to independent media arrived last fall in Slovakia, Cambodia, Guatemala, and three other nations. The social giant removed stories by these publishers from users’ news feeds, hiding them in a new, hard-to-find stream. These independent publishers reported that they lost as much as 80 percent of their audience during this experiment. Facebook doesn’t care. At least, it usually seems that way.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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