NEW RESOURCES

My Reddit filter tipped me to this new database of black metal music lyrics. From the GitHub page: “Database of Black Metal lyrics in .JSON format to be used for computer-assisted lyric analysis projects, collected from https://lyrics.fandom.com with additional metadata from https://www.metal-archives.com/ for my sociological bachelor thesis on Ideology and Black Metal.” There are over 11,000 songs in this collection.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Bringing Stories of Southern Nevada’s Latinx Communities to Life. “The Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada team has collected more than 100 oral histories from the region’s Latinx population. Now those deeply personal stories will be shared with a wider audience as part of a novel approach to oral histories: a student-led podcast. The effort, which debuts in fall, is the result of a recent collaboration between KUNV radio and the University Libraries’ Oral History Research Center. The inaugural season, Latinx Voices Unveiled, features the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada project.”

Carnegie Mellon University: Archives Digitize Decades of Mellon Institute Records. “Carnegie Mellon’s University Libraries have organized and preserved 347 boxes of records from the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, one of the nation’s premier independent research centers, making the records more widely discoverable and available to researchers…. Since its inception in 1913, the Mellon Institute engaged the brightest scientific minds of its time to develop, test, and refine new chemical, biological, and materials science innovations on behalf of its corporate partners. In the process, the institute defined the profession of sponsored research, spun off successful companies such as the Dow Corning and Union Carbide corporations, and developed industry-changing technologies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Facebook’s Libra In Trouble As More Companies Withdraw Their Support. “Last week, it was reported that Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency lost one of the companies that initially supported it. This came in the form of PayPal who decided to back out of the cryptocurrency. However, it seems that Libra could be in serious trouble because it looks like more founding companies are withdrawing their support as well.”

Wall Street Journal: Google Shuts Out Payday Loans With App-Store Ban. “The technology giant recently prohibited apps from offering personal loans with an annual percentage rate of 36% or higher on its Google Play app store. The move inserted the tech giant into a fight over payday loans, which often carry triple-digit interest rates. The shift was implemented in August with an update to Google’s app-development guidelines for the Android operating system, prompting an outcry from payday-lending companies.” This shouldn’t be horribly surprising; Google banned payday lending ads ages ago.

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 8 Useful Twitter Accounts to Follow for Life Hacks. “Twitter offers bite-sized information in an easy-to-read format. Which makes it the perfect platform when you want to learn how to make your life more manageable. Life hacks have been a thing for many years, and people are still uncovering new ways to hack your life. Here are the most useful Twitter accounts for life hacks.”

The Next Web: RIP: How to stop Facebook from stealing your data after you die. “Inevitably, one day you’re going to die. While you may think your online identity will go to the grave with you, that’s not always how it works out. Without setting your account to self-implode or handing your login details to a trusted person, companies like Facebook and Google will carry on storing your data and everything else they’ve got on you.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Rolling Stone: How a Government Agency’s Offbeat Twitter Memes Landed in the Library of Congress. “In September 2016, Joseph Galbo put a baby in a forcefield. It was the second day of Baby Safety Month, and Galbo, the social media specialist for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, had gotten the OK from his director to try out a new way of communicating to the American public the best ways to protect a newborn. The photo he posted had the goofy aesthetic of a slapdash Photoshop job — a smiling baby with a glowing aura nestled in the center of a blue orb — while the CPSC’s logo at the bottom lent the image the added feel of a low-budget PSA.” Gloriously weird.

The Guardian: Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers. “Google has made ‘substantial’ contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis.”

BuzzFeed News: Dozens Of YouTube Videos Are Showing People How To Make Potentially Dangerous Vape Oil. “As health agencies scramble to control a rash of mysterious vaping-related lung injuries, YouTube is playing host to dozens of videos that offer step-by-step instructions on how to make black-market THC vape oil. Some of these videos, which are rife with safety hazards, including the use of potentially harmful chemicals, have been viewed millions of times.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nieman Lab: Focus here, not there: These are the gaps in political misinformation research. “In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of American Behavioral Scientist, Brian Weeks, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga of the University of Vienna outline the ‘critical issues’ that they hope political communications research will focus on in the future. ”

Poynter: What can researchers find among the 32 million URLs Facebook just released to Social Science One? “Social Science One, the non-profit commission launched in 2018 to establish concrete partnerships between academics and data-rich institutions like Facebook, now has 32 million individual links extracted from Mark Zuckerberg’s social media network upon which to conduct research.” Good morning, Internet…

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