NEW RESOURCES

Emory Center for Digital Scholarship: New online portal honors African American WWI soldiers at historic Atlanta cemetery. “Oakland Cemetery is a microcosm of Atlanta history. Examining the lives of individuals buried at the downtown site provides a window onto the families, institutions, and social forces that have shaped Georgia’s capital since the cemetery opened in 1850. There are some well-known individuals buried at Oakland — author Margaret Mitchell, Mayor Maynard Jackson, golfer Bobby Jones — but most present-day Atlantans probably wouldn’t recognize the vast majority of names of the more than 70,000 people buried there. Seeking new ways to extend its educational outreach, the nonprofit Historic Oakland Foundation has partnered with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) to create a prototype for an interactive online exhibition.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Apple Promises To Fix Latest iPhone Crash Bug Before iOS 11.3. “We picked up on a report earlier today about a new bug in iOS 11.2 that’s making iPhones crash and even disabling access to apps like iMessages and WhatsApp. Bugs have been causing a lot of headaches recently for iOS device users and the latest one just makes matters worse. The good thing is that Apple has promised to release a fix for the latest iPhone crash bug before iOS 11.3, which means that it should be out soon.”

USEFUL STUFF

CogDogBlog: Archiving Tweets: Are You Missing the Moment?. “When storify announced it was biting the dust/pooping the web, amongst the rush to jump to some other hosted platform or use my arcane tool, what I noticed was about 90% of the ways people talked about storify was solely archiving tweets. I always saw Storify as more than a bag of tweets (it was among the 50+ Ways to Tell a Story examples)… but if that is all you are doing, why not just use Twitter Moments?”

Internet Policy Observatory: Researching ICT companies: A field guide for civil society researchers. “In this white paper, we outline some of the challenges we have identified as being particularly acute for policy researchers, as well as strategies for working through (and around) those issues. Advocating for civil society, human rights, and democratic values today often requires understanding the role played by ICT companies in deciding what kinds of speech are allowed (or not) on various platforms, in complying (or not) with government requests to restrict content or for user information, and in lobbying governments to enact (or not) various laws and regulations. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies are expected to respect human rights even as nation-states retain primary responsibility for protecting human rights. As is true of many UN norms, the Guiding Principles lack a formal enforcement mechanism, so other, often soft measures have been employed in order to enact results, or even to simply gain information.” ICT stands for Information, Communications, and Technology companies. You can get more information in this article from Michaelsons.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Emirates News Agency: Haya bint Al Hussein launches Humanitarian Logistics Databank. “The long-awaited solution is an information sharing platform dedicated to emergency preparedness and response. It facilitates the collection and sharing of data in real-time on prepositioned aid and humanitarian assets, helping to make emergency responses more timely and cost-efficient…. The Databank will employ automated tracking of aid movements based on customs data from ports, airports, and other entry points. It will provide the global humanitarian community with information on the exact positioning of critical relief items such as food, medicine and shelter, making them accessible to all cooperating parties. This platform will improve collaboration and will help avoid bottlenecks in ports and airports.” It appears to be very early days for this initiative, the announcement also notes: “In its first phase, the Humanitarian Logistics Databank, will begin gathering data on aid shipments from Dubai in 2018. It will then be replicated in other humanitarian hubs across the world by January 2019.”

Fact Magazine: “The internet is a devastating wasteland”: How social media could be making musicians sick. “Making and sharing music has never been more accessible than it is right now. Even as listeners, we know this: we can get our music on Bandcamp and SoundCloud, no major labels required. But along with the access to technology and the unprecedented ability to share music with people anywhere in the world, the emotional baggage that can come with fame can plague even the smallest independent artist.”

The Star: RCMP to investigate male officers’ Facebook group reportedly sharing sexual content. “The CBC reported a new Facebook group supposedly created by, and limited to, male RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] officers contains sexually suggestive material that has angered female colleagues. One post viewed by the broadcaster showed a painting of a fictional frontier scene of an RCMP officer with a burlesque dancer performing what appears to be oral sex on him.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TBO: Connecticut may limit access to state’s voter database. “Marketing companies and other private entities would no longer be able to buy Connecticut’s state voter list for about $300 and use the data for solicitations and other purposes under new legislation being considered by state lawmakers this session.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Using Twitter to discover how language changes. “Scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London, have studied more than 200 million Twitter messages to try and unravel the mystery of how language evolves and spreads. The aim of the research was to consider if the spread of language is similar to how genes pass from person-to-person. The team investigated whether language transmission, when people have a conversation, happens in a similar way to when genes are transmitted from a parent to a child.”

The Next Web: Turning big data into sound. “A collaboration between two professors – one of music and one of engineering – at Virginia Tech resulted in the creation of a new platform for data analysis that makes it possible to understand data better by turning it into sound. This is a pioneering approach to studying spatially distributed data which instead of placing information into a visual context to show patterns or correlations – meaning, data visualization – uses an aural environment to leverage the natural affordances of the space and the user’s location within the sound field.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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