NEW RESOURCES

Rewire: Mapping Out Missing and Murdered Native Women: ‘I Would Want My Story to Have Meaning’. “[Annita] Lucchesi, a cartographer and doctoral student at the University of Lethbridge’s Cultural, Social and Political Thought program, recently created and published an online database logging cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and two spirit people. She began gathering information for the database in 2015 from news articles, online databases, lists compiled by Native advocates and community members, family members, social media, federal and state missing persons databases, and law enforcement records gathered through public records requests. She personally vets all information she receives before adding it to the database. Cases date from 1900 to the present; as of April 2018, she has found 2,501 cases of missing and murdered women and two spirit people in the United States and Canada.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Library of Congress: Library of Congress and Bibliothèque Nationale de France Announce Collaboration on International Digital Content. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Laurence Engel, president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), today announced a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the BnF to provide digital content for a new online space for collections relating to shared French-American history. The initiative will also be supported by other U.S. organizations, including the National Archives.”

The Verge: Instagram might be testing a mute button and a bunch of other new features. “We might be getting an Instagram mute button and a bunch of other features, I hope. Twitter user @wongmjane posted about various tests Instagram has conducted or is currently testing. Jane Wong is apparently a computer science student who appears to be looking through the app’s code.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The Definitive Guide to Backing Up Your iPhone or iPad. “What would you do if you lost or broke your iPhone tomorrow? Assuming your iPhone is never coming back, you have two options: restore the backup you made, or start over from scratch. Nobody likes catastrophic data loss, but it happens. Fortunately, you can safeguard against the unthinkable by putting a backup plan into action. Protect your personal data, Camera Roll, contacts, and more with regular iPhone backups. Here’s what you need to know to do that.”

Search Engine Journal: How to Create Twitter Lists & 5 Genius Ideas for Using Them. “Twitter lists are a wonderful feature – one that’s often overlooked by marketers, even though Twitter lists been around since 2009. Lists help you spend your time more effectively on Twitter because you can more easily find, monitor, and interact with the right people. Like any list, Twitter lists are practical and useful. This simple yet efficient feature allows you to easily group the people and brands you want to follow on Twitter. It makes it easier for you to keep up with tweets from people with specific interests and expertise. Here’s how to to create Twitter lists, and five genius ideas for how you can use them.” Written from a marketing perspective, as you might expect, but not bad.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The National Archives (UK): Prize Papers Project launches at Oldenburg Castle. “Imagine being the first person to open a letter written 250 years ago but which never reached its intended recipient. What might you find? What might you learn? This is the part of the daily work of the Prize Papers Project, exploring around 160,000 undelivered letters seized in their mail-bags from ships captured by the British in the wars of the 17th to the 19th centuries. Some of these letters are still unopened.”

BuzzFeed: Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In. “In late February, an Instagram account called Viral Hippo posted a photo of a black square. There was nothing special about the photo, or the square, and certainly not the account that posted it. And yet within 24 hours, it amassed over 1,500 likes from a group that included a verified model followed by 296,000 people, a verified influencer followed by 228,000, a bunch of fitness coaches, some travel accounts, and various small businesses. ‘I really love this photo,’ one commented. The commenter wasn’t a bot; nor were any of the accounts that liked the black square. But their interest in it wasn’t genuine.”

Hindustan Times: India to get national database on disasters by 2020. “India will get a national database on disasters, which includes information on deaths, people affected and economic losses, by 2020. Although scattered data has been available at the state level for many decades now, much of it is not digitised or easily usable in a nationwide database.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: John McAfee-Backed Cryptocurrency’s Thousands of Investors Exposed in Data Breach. “A leaky database discovered online contains a wealth of sensitive data belonging to thousands of investors in Bezop cryptocurrency, including photocopies their driver’s licenses and passports, according to a report from Kromtech Security.”

The Register: Facebook confesses: Buckle up, there’s plenty more privacy lapses where that came from. “Facebook has confirmed what many of us have known for years: Cambridge Analytica was far from the only organization engaging in the wholesale hoarding of netizens’ personal data via the social network. The Silicon Valley giant told America’s financial watchdog, the SEC, on Thursday that it will probably reveal additional data-harvesting operations as it continues probing how outside developers accessed its website and what information they siphoned off in bulk.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Georgia Tech: IC Researchers Highlight Design Implications as Venezuelans Turn to Facebook for Barter, Exchange. “Consider a scenario in which economic turmoil and hyperinflation have made it nearly impossible to purchase many of life’s basic necessities. There are food and medicine shortages, and scammers purchase what is available in bulk in an effort to manage the flow and pricing of supplies at the expense of other citizens. How, then, might honest citizens go about navigating the challenging circumstances to procure the items they need to survive? It’s a familiar environment to Venezuelan citizens who, since an economic crisis gripped the country in 2014, have faced such barriers in their daily lives. Out of necessity, many have turned to online solidarity economies like Facebook groups that are dedicated to a fairer system of barter and exchange.” I had never heard the term “solidarity economy” before. Haverford College enlightened me.

Nieman Lab: How much of what local TV stations post to Facebook is actually local? For many, right around half. “If your only source of news is your local TV news station on Facebook, will your news and information needs around what’s going on in your community be met? The forecast isn’t good.” Good morning, Internet…

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