NEW RESOURCES

KTVA: New database lists all Alaskans known missing since 1960. “The Alaska Department of Public Safety has completed a project to list online everyone known to be missing in Alaska from 1960 to Dec. 1, 2019. There are 1,240 names.”

Dance Magazine: You Can Now View More Than 10,000 Photos From Jack Mitchell’s Alvin Ailey Collection Online. “From 1961 to 1994, legendary photographer Jack Mitchell captured thousands of moments with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Now, this treasure trove of dance history is available to the public for viewing via the online archives of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Grammys: Alan Lomax Archives Partner With “Little” Steven Van Zandt’s TeachRock On Teaching Resources. “The legendary body of work collected during the life and career of Alan Lomax is about to reach a whole new generation. The Alan Lomax Archives have announced an exciting content partnership with ‘Little’ Steven Van Zandt’s TeachRock and Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. Under the new partnership, The Association For Cultural Equity in conjunction with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress will provide content to TeachRock to be utilized in creating lesson plans and other teaching resources.”

Rappler: CrowdTangle rolls out new, better search tool for fact checkers. “Content discovery and social monitoring platform CrowdTangle announced on Saturday, December 7, that it is giving fact checkers access to a new search tool, which can find and measure public posts across several social media platforms…. This tool can search for public posts shared across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. It is still in beta and is only currently available to Facebook’s fact-checking partners.”

The Verge: Imgur launches Melee, a dedicated gaming section trying to rival Twitch Clips. “Melee is a new app for gaming content on Imgur. It’s meant to give players the ability to share their favorite gaming clips with other users and potentially bring attention to themselves in the process. Imgur has hundreds of millions of users who frequent the site, and they may differ from the daily Twitch crowd, making it a new venue for streamers who are trying to get recognized. Although the company is also allowing Twitch integrations for players.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NewsChannel5 Nashville: App created as networking tool to connect songwriters. “Noah Cummins, a new artist who graduated from Belmont in 2018, struggled with making connections in the beginning. ‘When I first said, “this is going to be my career, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” it was hard for me to go like, “how I am going to talk to someone, and sell myself in 30 seconds,”‘ said Cummins. Now he’s writing with more experienced artists all thanks to an app called We Should Write Sometime.”

University of California Riverside: Comprehensive digital photography collection and $500k endowment donated to UCR ARTS. “It may be hard to remember a time when images weren’t readily available on the internet. But back in the early 2000s, the online photography collection of photojournalist Jim Steinhart was one of the first and largest to make high resolution images available for licensing and download, offering visitors access to thousands of images amassed over his years traveling the world.”

Los Angeles Times: Developers join call for GitHub to cancel its ICE contract. “Since at least September, employees of GitHub have been pressuring the Microsoft-owned code repository to terminate its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, without success. Now they’re getting reinforcements from a constituency that could have more clout.”

The Atlantic: Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn. “From 2018 to 2019, the average number of unique monthly visitors to Tumblr’s website decreased by 21.2 percent, according to data compiled by the analytics service SimilarWeb. The total volume of visits to the site is in decline, as is the number of visits per unique visitor, as is the amount of time that visitors spend on the site. From 2018 to 2019, the average site visit dropped by nearly a minute, and the average number of pages per visit dropped by more than one and a half.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

British Library: What is left behind? Exploring the Olympic Games legacies through the UK Web Archive. “The Olympic Games happen every four years. This means that every four years a city has to be chosen as a host city. It is easy to think about the impact of hosting such a big event in your own country. Usually governments have to prepare everything for their guests and be aware that the local population is expecting something that will remain as a legacy after the event ends. But what are people actually expecting? What usually happens after the Olympics? Are people happy or unhappy with the legacy left behind with the end of the games? We can try to answer these questions by reading what was published on the internet before, during and after the games in these countries that have hosted the Olympics.”

Tech Xplore: Filtering out social bots can help critical response teams see what’s happening in real time. “Researchers have created an algorithm that distinguishes between misinformation and genuine conversations on Twitter, by detecting messages churned out by social bots. Dr. Mehwish Nasim and colleagues at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide say the algorithm will make it easier for emergency services to detect major events such as civil unrest, natural disasters, and influenza epidemics in real time.”

Microsoft: Microsoft Soundscape helps the blind and low vision explore the world in 3D sound with Bing Maps. “Microsoft Soundscape is an application built by the Enable Group in Microsoft Research. It empowers anyone with a visual impairment to experience a mobile voice-based map that offers the independence to explore the world and the ability to choose how to get from place to another. With a stereo headset, a user can traverse their environment using a map delivered in 3D sound. You can hear where landmarks are around you to orient yourself, build a richer awareness of your surroundings, and have the confidence to discover what’s around the next corner.” Good morning, Internet…

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