NEW RESOURCES

Chron: Advocate, Dayton News archive project nearing completion. “A two-year-long project to digitize the Cleveland Advocate’s archives is gradually coming online with records being added to the Portal of Texas History website… The Advocate’s archives, previously available only in microfilm and newsprint, include the Cleveland Advocate’s sister publications – Dayton News and Eastex Advocate, and two other defunct newspapers – Illustrated Paperboy and Cleveland Journal.”

MIT: Digital archive showcases work from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. “In 1967, the newly established MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), founded by professor György Kepes and conceived as a fellowship program for artists, welcomed its first three fellows. Pioneering work at the intersection of art, science, and technology quickly got underway, and in the following decades, more than 200 fellows arrived to participate in this globally influential program, along with researchers and graduate students. Now, as part of a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of CAVS, a new interactive digital archive is offering public access to experimental work created by the fellows, including world-renowned artists such as Otto Piene, Aldo Tambellini, Yvonne Rainer, Nam June Paik, Muriel Cooper, and Stan VanDerBeek.”

CNN: Librarians digitally archive rare White House images. “In a nondescript office building steps away from the White House, a small team of librarians at the White House Historical Association is working on a massive puzzle. As of this week, the group has now spent two years chipping away at digitizing approximately 25,000 previously uncatalogued slides of photographs documenting years of White House history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google makes its AR search tool Lens available for your phone, too. “Google Lens isn’t an app. Instead, it’s a capability Google is building into other apps — so far on Google Photos and the Google Assistant, its digital helper akin to Amazon’s Alexa. In Google Photos, Lens uses machine learning and image recognition to identify the object in the photo and serve up information about it. With the Assistant, Lens can give you that same sort of information just by pointing your phone at an object — no photo required. ”

The Next Web: Gmail now has analytics, and it’s awesome. “While there’s an intuitive search feature (that can be modified with search operators) to help you find your long-lost messages, there’s no real way to gauge how you’re using Gmail – even simple things like how many emails you sent and received yesterday are difficult to figure out. That is, until now.”

TechCrunch: Twitch’s first live game show ‘Stream On’ debuts March 8. “Twitch’s new reality show featuring up-and-coming streamers will premiere on March 8, the company announced this morning, along with the list of the 14 personalities selected to participate. The video stars will be competing over an 11-week period for the chance to win $60,000, paid out as $5,000-per-month installments, meant to help fund their streaming careers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Video Tips: 12 Ideas for More Engagement. “The first and foremost thing when it comes to creating engaging Facebook videos is exactly that: be engaging. We don’t have much time to capture anyone’s attention these days. You have, on average, about 2-3 seconds to engage someone. So what do you do? Here are 12 tried-and-true ideas that should result in greater engagement for your Facebook videos.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BetaNews: YouTube pulls InfoWars video from the Alex Jones Channel over Parkland shooting allegations. “Alex Jones’ conspiracy-theory-heavy InfoWars has been censured by YouTube for violating its policies. A video entitled ‘David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines In TV Interview’ — in which it was alleged that students appearing on TV talking about the Parkland, Florida shooting were ‘crisis actors’ — was removed from the Alex Jones Channel for breaching YouTube’s rules about harassment.”

USA Today: 7 days from fringe to mainstream: How a conspiracy theory ricocheted around the web. “Just days after a deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school, conspiracy theorists were able to spin and then spread a demonstrably false tale on social media so that it dominated Internet searches and ‘trending’ tabs. The story — that some of the survivors of the high school massacre were actually so-called crisis actors — became so virulent that the teens had to share photos from their high school year-book to prove they were, in fact, the students whose classmates were killed. How did it go so far, so fast?” Good timeline.

Digital Trends: Plastic surgeon: Patients are asking to look like their Snapchat-filtered selfies. “Photoshopped magazine faces of celebrities have long been the inspiration for patients seeking out plastic surgery, but now one New York surgeon says patients are now asking to look like the Snapchat-filtered version of themselves. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Dr. Matthew Shulman said that while patients have always often brought in images, they are now using Snapchat filters as examples of how they want their skin, eyes or lips to look.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Government Executive: EPA and National Archives Sued Over Scott Pruitt’s Record-Keeping Habits. “The unorthodox operating habits of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have prompted a lawsuit from two nonprofits charging his agency and the National Archives and Records Administration with failing to enforce the Federal Records Act.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Science Blog: Private Browsing Gets More Private . “This week, at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University presented a paper describing a new system, dubbed Veil, that makes private browsing more private. Veil would provide added protections to people using shared computers in offices, hotel business centers, or university computing centers, and it can be used in conjunction with existing private-browsing systems and with anonymity networks such as Tor, which was designed to protect the identity of web users living under repressive regimes.” Good morning, Internet…

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