NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: 1,000 Years of Literary Tradition in Rare Persian-Language Manuscripts Now Online at Library of Congress. “In celebration of the Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz, the Library of Congress has digitized and made available online for the first time the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection, which sheds light on scientific, religious, philosophical and literary topics that are highly valued in the Persian speaking lands.”

Catalyst NZ: Christchurch Memories Preserved with New Red Zone App. “Catalyst – South Island, is proud to have partnered with the University of Canterbury Arts Digital Lab to develop the ‘Red Zone Stories’ application. This application will crowdsource and preserve the memories of the neighbourhood that were lost after the February 2011 quake.”

British Library: Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta digitisation project completed. “Over 30,000 digital images of Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta are now fully accessible online through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website. The project, generously supported by Mr S P Lohia, has digitised 75 Javanese manuscripts held in the British Library from the collections of John Crawfurd and Colin Mackenzie, who both served in Java under Thomas Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor from 1811 to 1816. The manuscripts had been identified by historians Peter Carey and Merle Ricklefs as having been taken from the Kraton (palace) of Yogyakarta following a British attack in June 1812, when Crawfurd was Resident of Yogyakarta and Mackenzie was Chief Engineer of the British army in Java.” They are beautiful.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Riverfront Times: She Interviewed 144 St. Louis Holocaust Survivors. Now Her Work Is Online. “In 1979, Vida ‘Sister’ Prince saw an article in the paper showcasing the recently opened St. Louis Holocaust Center. After calling the director and offering to volunteer, Prince found that the center was looking for people to accompany Holocaust survivors as they shared their story in local schools. Although Prince was Jewish, she had no familial connection to the Holocaust. She had never even met a Holocaust survivor before. Still, she jumped at the opportunity to travel across St. Louis with these survivors. It was during these sessions that Prince decided she wanted to do more. She wanted to help these survivors preserve their stories. So, she broke out the cassette tapes and started recording. ”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 10 Best Web Scraping Tools to Extract Online Data. “Web Scraping tools are specifically developed for extracting information from websites. They are also known as web harvesting tools or web data extraction tools. These tools are useful for anyone trying to collect some form of data from the Internet. Web Scraping is the new data entry technique that don’t require repetitive typing or copy-pasting.”

Lifehacker: How to Translate Languages With Google Sheets. “There are more efficient ways of keeping track of important foreign language vocabulary than a hand-held dictionary. If you’re learning a new language or making basic translations, try using the Google Translate formula in Google Sheets for an easy access list of what you know—or want to know.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Slate: You Can Never Go Home to GeoCities Again. “Quantitively, the explosion of the web is obvious, with the number of internet users growing from just 5 percent globally in 1999 to more than half of the world today. But qualitatively, the story is much messier: Alongside its rapid adoption around the globe, we’ve also seen countless platforms collect millions of users in short periods of time, only to be abandoned within months or years, pushed aside by something new and shiny promising an even better way to connect to the world around us.”

BBC Future: Why there’s so little left of the early internet. “The Million Dollar Homepage shows that the decay of this early period of the internet is almost invisible. In the offline world, the closing of, say, a local newspaper is often widely reported. But online sites die, often without fanfare, and the first inkling you may have that they are no longer there is when you click on a link to be met with a blank page.”

Motherboard: YouTube Decides to Leave Neo-Nazi Propaganda Online. “In the aftermath of a neo-Nazi terrorist killing 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, tech companies spanning web hosts to social media giants have banned or shut down militant far-right content online. But even in the face of those horrific terror attacks, YouTube continues to be a bastion of white nationalist militancy. Over the last few days, Motherboard has viewed white nationalist and neo-Nazi propaganda videos on the website that have either been undetected by YouTube, have been allowed to stay up by the platform, or have been newly uploaded.”

Ars Technica: No fooling: Reddit’s r/games goes silent for one day to call out hate, bigotry. “The Internet may have already begun exploding due to April Fools’ Day pranks, but one site’s April 1st gesture is decidedly not a joke: the temporary closure of Reddit’s ‘r/games’ channel. An 8pm ET post on Sunday confirmed a united front by r/games’ moderation team to shed light on the ‘condescending, dismissive, vindictive and pessimistic attitudes we see in our day-to-day activity.’ Instead of being able to create new topics or post comments, the community’s 1.6 million subscribers will be left reading a locked moderator post that describes an average day’s discourse on the site—along with the mod team’s hopes for change.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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