NEW RESOURCES

World Resources Institute: A Global Database of Power Plants. “The Global Power Plant Database is a comprehensive, open source database of power plants around the world. It centralizes power plant data to make it easier to navigate, compare and draw insights for one’s own analysis. Each power plant is geolocated and entries contain information on plant capacity, generation, ownership, and fuel type. As of April 2018, the database includes around 25,500 power plants from 162 countries. It will be continuously updated as data becomes available.” The database and GitHub links, etc will be available Monday.

Freie Universität Berlin: New Online Witnesses Video Archive: “Memories of the Occupation in Greece”. “A new digital archive with memories of eyewitnesses of the occupation of Greece by National Socialist Germany from1941 to 1944 will be presented on Monday, April 23, 2018, at 3 p.m…. The archive contains 90 biographical video interviews referring to the time of the occupation from 1941 to 1944 as well as the living conditions during the years leading up to the occupation and the diverse effects of the occupation on people’s daily lives. In addition, the archive contains transcripts, photos, documents, and other accompanying material.”

CBC News: Deadly force. “The cell phone video, which is of poor quality and shot at a distance, shows a man crawling forward on his hands and knees towards a couple of police officers. Suddenly, gunshots reverberate through the street, as eight bullets hit Paul Boyd, killing the 39-year-old instantly. Captured by a bystander, this 2007 incident was one of 461 fatal police encounters in Canada since 2000 — and a new CBC analysis shows that the number is on the rise. In the absence of a national accounting of such encounters between Canadian citizens and law enforcement, a team of CBC researchers spent six months assembling the first country-wide database of every person who died or was killed during a police intervention.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg Law: Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top ‘media influencers.'”

Inforum: Digital library celebrates 50,000 scanned Teddy Roosevelt documents. “Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center celebrated an important milestone in their mission to transcribe the writings of Theodore Roosevelt on Wednesday, April 4, with Governor Doug Burgum making an appearance to celebrate the scanning of their 50,000th document.”

USEFUL STUFF

This is terrific! From UNC: Libraries Launch “Archivist in a Backpack”. “When Josephine McRobbie, an archivist at the University Libraries, prepared for a recent trip to San Antonio, she did not stock up on typical travel supplies. Instead, she commandeered a large room in Wilson Library, covering the conference tables with audio recorders, notebooks, portable scanners and 30 backpacks and roll-aboard suitcases. McRobbie is the community archivist in the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) at the Wilson Special Collections Library. On packing day, she and several colleagues were preparing to debut their prototype project, dubbed ‘Archivist in a Backpack.'”

Dot Esports: Guide: How to find live esports and gaming content on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube. “A wide variety of competitors have risen up to challenge Twitch’s spot as the home of competitive gaming online. While other sites have attempted in the past, there are now two sites with large enough audiences to be considered serious challenges to the Amazon-owned Twitch. These names are, more specifically, YouTube and Facebook. But in contrast to Twitch, which has had more than five years to develop its platform and usability, YouTube and Facebook are effectively just starting out in the live streaming industry. To help you easily navigate these platforms, we’ve put together this guide for an easy streaming experience wherever you’re watching.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: Facebook fact-checking partners gripe about their role. “Facebook’s fact-checking partners tasked with fighting fake news aren’t happy with their bosses at the social media giant. Top brass at several news outlets hired to help clean up Facebook’s misinformation problem in the wake of the 2016 presidential election say Facebook hasn’t been transparent about the effectiveness of their efforts and has ignored requests to improve the process, according to a report published Wednesday by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.”

University of Pennsylvania: Prospecting Playbills. “A 1790 playbill advertising two comedies performed in the English town of Hull, The Belle’s Strategem and Harlequin Foundling, has 40 lines of text to describe the performance, including: “To conclude with a DANCE of FAIRIES in THE TEMPLE OF LIBERTY.” Playbills for 18th- and 19th-century dramatic performances such as this one are not only engaging, but filled with valuable information for researchers. How to capture and catalogue all of those varied, and often quirky, details for meaningful analysis? Neither a method nor a database exists. Until now.” That’s a heck of an opening for this article, but I’d love to learn the differences between this project and the British Library’s Playbill project, which was announced last September. Not that I think there should be only one or anything like that, I just want to know how this one is so different.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: This Tool Can Help Identify Leakers Who Copy and Paste Secret Info. “Some applications and websites don’t render and display so called ‘zero-width characters.’ A developer created a tool to hide these invisible characters in plain sight, and then use them to identify who copied and pasted the original text.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford: Tobacco products promoted on Facebook despite policies. “Tobacco products are marketed and sold through unpaid content on Facebook — in some cases, without regard for the age of potential buyers — despite policies from the social media company that restrict or prohibit the promotion of such items, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have found.”

Medium: What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.. “Citations are the foundation of Wikipedia’s reliability: they trace the connection between content added by our community of volunteer contributors and its sources. For readers, citations provide a mechanism to validate and check for themselves that what Wikipedia says is sound and trustworthy: they act as a gateway towards a broader ecosystem of reliable knowledge. In an effort to spearhead more research on where Wikipedia gets its facts from, and to celebrate Open Citations Month, we asked ourselves: what are the most cited sources across all of Wikipedia’s language editions?” Good morning, Internet…

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